Philadelphia Inquirer:

John Jarboe ‘ate’ her twin in the womb. She can’t stop thinking about it.

The “John Jarboe: The Rose Garden” is a poignant, absurd, and visually enthralling exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

John Jarboe at her poignant, absurd, and visually enthralling exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.Charles Fox / Staff Photographer

John Jarboe, the charismatic founder and artistic director of Philly’s Bearded Ladies Cabaret, has been mulling over a conversation she had with her aunt for years now.

“You know, John, you had a twin in the womb,” Jarboe’s aunt told her. “You ate her. That’s why you are the way you are,” she said, referring to Jarboe’s trans identity.

In the years since, Jarboe has alchemized that surreal declaration into a multimedia exploration of gender, grief, and queer-becoming, first in a play that premiered at the Fringe Festival last year which is currently touring in Washington, D.C. And now in a poignant, absurd, and visually enthralling exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

“John Jarboe: The Rose Garden,” which opened in May and continues through September, is a tactile journey through Jarboe’s imaginative preoccupations. Along with a team at the museum, Jarboe collaborated with video and sound designer Christopher Ash and lighting designer Kate McGee for an impressive series of video installations that create a disarmingly fun, enlightening experience. Because of its interactive elements, only six visitors can walk through at a time.

“It’s very weird for me to have people line up to go on a journey that I avoided so hard,” Jarboe said. “I’m very proud of Chris and Kate and myself, and the team at the Fabric Workshop, for saying yes to a lot, and allowing it to be this lush.”

Jarboe said she hoped the show would feel like a “cabinet of curiosities,” collections of fascinating, exotic objects in 16th-century Europe that served as precursors to the modern museum.

“Growing up queer in the Midwest, there are a lot of questions to chew on. I thought I dealt with them all: Is this nature? Is this nurture? Was this the childhood ballet?” Jarboe asks in one of the exhibit’s opening video installations. “But you never really feel like you’re gonna ask: Was this cannibalism?”

Rose, the would-be name of Jarboe’s vanished twin, is both everywhere and nowhere in the show. An “artist’s bio” so long that it spills onto the floor explains: “Rose was not born in 1986 in Michigan … Normally that would end a career, but for Rose this was just the beginning!!”

Fetuses — on offer in vegan chocolate form, displayed in teacups that visitors use to activate technical aspects of the show, and printed on Sound of Music-inspired clothing and decor — are a recurring motif throughout. Jarboe wanted visitors to be prompted to eat a fetus, like she apparently once did.

“I’m not trying to anthropomorphize a fetus. I’m trying to be campy and silly and laugh at it — but also really invest in the metaphor,” Jarboe said.

In one room, visitors sit on toilets and pick up phones to hear audio from a video projected onto shower curtains, evoking the classic horror film Psycho. (“For some reason, film looks so good on a shower curtain. It holds my attention more because of the weirdness of it,” said Jarboe.)

Another room, the all-white “Mother’s Closet,” is a site of both exploration and anxiety, as a video appears in a vanity mirror, then explodes onto the surrounding walls. An original song, composed by Daniel de Jesús with Jarboe’s lyrics, repeats the alarmingly twisted adage, “I will not disobey Mom.” Jarboe infuses the show with devastating truths about growing up in a conservative household without ever losing the sense of euphoria she feels from having survived it.

Elsewhere, an “evidence wall” features deeply personal items that Jarboe has kept from childhood, strung together on faux umbilical cords that begin with her parents’ quite conventional baby book. Ziploc-bags, as if from a crime scene, hold detailed labels: “silk blouse worn to Michigan Ren Faire age 14 / worn with black eyeliner / suspect claimed to try to ‘fit in,’” one reads.

Finding the videos becomes a scavenger hunt, with some screens hidden in drawers and others only visible through peepholes in shoeboxes with renamed brands (Trans instead of Vans; JCPansy for JCPenney). An old photograph of Jarboe’s mother shows her pregnant belly cut out to reveal a rose-headed person sipping tea.

Despite the role her family of origin plays in the exhibit, Jarboe said she does not expect her parents to come see it.

“I mean, if they sneak in, it’s of their own accord,” she said. “They’re not asking questions.”

Jarboe envisions the final room in the exhibit — “The Green Room” — as a community space, where people can spend time even without visiting the show. Market Blooms at Reading Terminal Market donates fresh flowers every week and Philly AIDS Thrift donated clothing for a “Take a Gender/Leave a Gender” station, for anyone thinking “wow, I’m feeling something and I really need a hat,” she explained.

Following her Fringe performance and the exhibit’s opening, Jarboe described three fan groups she heard from in particular: “queerdos,” moms and guardians, and people who have vanishing twin stories.

One nonbinary visitor told her that it was “really affirming to their gender journey,” she said. “That is the proof of concept that I’m hoping for.”

“John Jarboe: The Rose Garden” runs through Sept. 29 at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1214 Arch St., Phila., Pa. 215-561-8888 or fabricworkshopandmuseum.org.

The New York Times

Bastille Day With a Philadelphia Twist

By DAVE MAYERS (July 14, 2014)

Twenty years ago, Terry Berch McNally and a few fellow Philadelphia restaurant owners ran down to the stone walls of the nearby abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary. “Let’s storm the Bastille,” Ms. McNally said, Champagne and French bread in hand. Then it dawned on her. “Oh my gosh,” she said, “this sounds like an event. We could do this.”

Two decades later, Philadelphia’s take on France’s Bastille Day draws thousands to the prison walls in a wildly inaccurate recreation of the event that set off the French Revolution.

Every year since, Ms. McNally has played Marie Antoinette, the French queen who famously said, “Let them eat cake,” before losing her head to the revolutionaries. The performances change from year to year, addressing topical issues like the underfunded Philadelphia schools and the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision.

The Bearded Ladies cabaret company has spearheaded most of the performance for the last three years. When the Bearded Ladies were first asked to turn the celebration into a full-on theatrical event, Mr. Jarboe asked, “What would a revolution look like in Philadelphia?”

“Cleary there would be a talking baguette,” he said.

The New York Times

Opera Philadelphia to Take On Andy Warhol

By ALLAN KOZINN (April 24, 2014)

Opera Philadelphia, the company that earlier this year announced its plan to stage Daniel Schnyder’s opera about the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker in 2015, is pushing further into the world of popular culture in its search for unusual subjects. The company’s plans for 2015 also include “ANDY: A Popera,” a work about Andy Warhol with music by Heath Allen, a Philadelphia composer and pianist.

The company, which described the pieces as a “cabaret-opera hybrid,” is collaborating on the project with the Bearded Ladies, an experimental cabaret troupe. Mr. Allen is the group’s resident composer, and writes in a style closer to jazz than opera. A spokesman for the company said that as the work gets closer to completion, Mr. Heath will work with a composer with more operatic experience. That composer has not yet been selected.

Audiences will have a chance to see this work-in-progress as it develops. On May 2, some Mr. Allen’s music will be included in a concert at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at which the Bearded Ladies, singers from the opera company’s chorus and a rock band will present selections from the piece. 

The Bearded Ladies are also planning to perform selections at pop-up concerts around the city in May, to be announced on Twitter by both the group and Opera Philadelphia.  An hourlong concert version of the opera will be presented at the Wilma Theater, in Philadelphia in July. From there, the team will transform its materials into a completed work, suited to the opera stage. The date of the premiere has not yet been set, but the process is expected to take about a year.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Bearded Ladies' 'Marlene and the Machine': On being human

By Jim Rutter (December 07, 2012)

Each day, Internet users upload nearly half a billion photos to Facebook, add 60-plus hours of video per minute to YouTube, and post several hundred million messages on Twitter.

I thought of this penchant for compulsive oversharing while watching the Bearded Ladies' intense, illuminating Marlene and the Machine, a cabaret that probes the boundaries between the chaos of uncontrolled emotion and the veneer of manufactured control.

And who better to explore these themes than that icon of carefully constructed character, Marlene Dietrich (John Jarboe)? Together with performers Liz Filios, Kate Raines, and Kristen Bailey, Jarboe presents a seminar on "Affect Management," a 90-minute tutorial on manipulating others by mastering your own emotions.

As Filios and Raines enact grotesque choreography and exaggerated pantomime, the quartet weaves in songs from composer Friedrich Hollaender that Dietrich turned famous and more contemporary selections about isolation, narcissism, and manipulation by Paul McCartney, Regina Spektor, and Fiona Apple, not to mention a mocking rendition of lyrics penned by Fred Rogers (yes, Mr. Rogers).

Jarboe's lanky frame totters on platform heels, lunging into the audience, frightening and entrancing with a dangerous charisma. Rebecca Kanach dressed the cast in tattered gauze dresses, fraying lederhosen, and vinyl head wraps that blur the lines of gender. Bailey's stunning turn startles with a fascinating androgyny.

The group's German expressionist approach (think Fritz Lang) and comic theatricality lend distance from the darker themes, though Jarboe's teasing indicates the true targets. While machines can control their responses, "it's hard being human," he laments, dealing constantly with emotions, "the magic tricks of the body." Lighthearted touches (and forced audience involvement) extract probing questions from the lyrics - "If we didn't have faces, would we still want to live?" - that touch on our daily interface with machines.

By the time you read this review, I already will have Facebooked, tweeted, and tumblred this piece, expressing faceless thoughts to unknown recipients. And as I type, I'm haunted by the show's final image: Jarboe's hand, outstretched in an unrelenting yearning to reach, to grasp, to connect.