Hannah Smith Allen : Acting Out
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A Solo Sabbatical Exhibition by Professor Hannah Smith Allen
Acting Out: Gender, Performance, and Aging
Public Reception:
December 12, 4:00 p.m.- 6:00 p.m.
Recent work by:
Hannah Smith Allen
“Acting Out” brings together works from two on-going projects that I worked on during my sabbatical leave from Adelphi University: Becoming Circus and Hedwig & The Angry Inch.
About the Projects
In 2024, The American Stage Theater Company (St. Petersburg, Florida) invited me to create the projection program for their production of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and The Angry Inch. The collages featured in this exhibition were incorporated into a 6-minute animation that accompanied the live performance of “The Origin of Love,” a song from Hedwig based on the original Plato myth. The story of Hedwig traces the life of a queer, German immigrant who came to the U.S. in the 1980s in search of a better life. Throughout the play, Hedwig grapples with growing old, living between genders, finding love, and preserving their own creativity.
“Becoming Circus” is a multi-channel video installation and series of still images. The project explores my relationship to the circus that my family ran over 100 years ago. In this artwork, I challenge the limberness of my middle-age body and examine my own queerness in relation to circus lore.
In the early 1900s, my grandfather’s family ran a circus that traveled by train throughout the American Midwest and South. When my grandfather was a teenager, he left home to join his brothers in the circus. But after one summer on the rails, they sent him back to finish school. I would never call myself or my family circus people. We are not nimble, and we are not nomadic. Nevertheless, I began to teach myself circus skills and video record my efforts. Additionally, inspired by early 19th-century “spirit photography,” I started to photograph myself embodying different circus personas.
The project to date records the struggle in finding the past inside the present, discovering the imaginative potential in the everyday, and tapping into one’s own desire to continue to transform and become — even in midlife — when everything can feel fixed.
For any questions, please contact Jon Duff, Curator, jduff@adelphi.edu