History
Initially, Spiral Q was a shadow puppet theater that staged performances throughout the community. Local activist groups came to Hart to make puppets, props and effigies for demonstrations and educational campaigns. Spiral Q's identity springs from this early work in Philadelphia's HIV/AIDS activist and queer communities, particularly with AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP). In 1997 and 1998 Hart organized the week-long Full-On Puppet Festival in Philadelphia. showcasing puppeteers from around the country. Spiral Q also organized an annual Day of the Dead parade on South Street up through 1999. Both the festival and the parade were set aside so that the organization could focus on community activism.
Workshops with a local children's garden led to another model of community performance with children and adults carrying giant puppets that they created in parades and pageants. In 2000 Spiral Q started an annual city-wide parade and pageant called Peoplehood. Each October the parade starts at the Paul Robeson House and ends in Clark Park. In addition to neighborhood parades and pageants such as Peoplehood, Philadelphians can get involved with Spiral Q through its Justice Works Program and Education Initiatives.
Since 2000, the theater has been located in the East Mantua section of West Philadelphia. Hart left the company he founded in 2003 to pursue other interests.
Read more about this topic: Spiral Q Puppet Theater
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)