Event

SLIDESHOW at JUNK

Created and performed by Josh McIlvain. Presented by SmokeyScout Productions.

"The punchy-colored slides and humorous yet heartfelt prose McIlvain recites is as uncanny and nostalgic as some of our own family scrapbooks. This piece invites the audience to be mesmerized and taken on a journey about transition, tragedy and connection." Philadelphia City Paper

"Ingenious travel down memory lane!" Stage Magazine

From the 1950s through the 1980s, the slideshow was a staple of the American household. SLIDESHOW drops audiences back into the time of Kodachrome colors, weaving a fictional family history around strangers' real slides of long ago vacations. A funny, disturbing, and deeply felt work about the disconnection between the lives of children and those of their parents, SLIDESHOW recreates a lost ritual and delves into the aspirations of 20th-century American life.

SLIDESHOW is a solo performance that takes the form of an old fashioned slideshow. Audiences enter a living roomlike space, with a standing screen and a carousel slide projector. They sit in a semicircle facing the screen. The lights go out and the slideshow begins. The narratorsitting within the audience, on the floor, standing by the screen, or fidgeting to focus the projectortells the story of his family's life through pictures and memories.

About the Boy Scout Room at JUNK
Climb up three flights of stairs in the Shiloh Baptist Church, through abandoned sanctuaries and old social halls, and come to a wooden room with a high pitched roof that was once a meeting place for Boy Scouts.