“At Buffalo: Performing the Archive: Buffalo and the Pan-American Exposition of 1901”

Dr. Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin (U Georgia-Athens) and members of the “At Buffalo” team (http://www.atbuffalomusical.com/)

The events are also free and open to the public thanks to the generosity of: the Humanities Institute, Techne, the Undergraduate Academies, the Gender Institute, the Julian Park Chair, the HI Performance RW, and the Departments of English, History, Romance Languages & Literatures, Transnational Studies, and Theatre & Dance.

The visit will involve conversations around the research and production of “At Buffalo,” a musical based on the history of race and exhibition in and around the Buffalo Pan-Am Exposition of 1901. A link to the “At Buffalo” website is here:  http://www.atbuffalomusical.com/. A summary of the musical is also at the bottom of this message.

Official publicity with all details will come soon, and will also be available via this link:  http://humanitiesinstitute.buffalo.edu/events/

Please send questions to cflaugh@buffalo.edu.

ABOUT “AT BUFFALO” THE MUSICAL:

It’s 1901. Lynch mobs swarm the South. Emma Goldman’s anarchist movement hits the streets. W.E.B Du Bois’ NAACP is on the horizon. All set the stage for the spectacular World’s Fair at Buffalo, New York. AT BUFFALO takes you on a haunting and evocative musical journey through the turbulent discoveries and performances of race in post-Civil War America. We track real historical characters through the tumult of the fair: Mary Talbert, an educated black woman from Buffalo active in the progressive movement; Tannie and Henrietta, a husband and wife vaudeville duo at odds over performing “coon acts”; Oomba, an African chief’s son who comes to America to perform in an ethnological exhibit; Laughing Ben, a 96-year-old former slave whose laughing act ruled the entire fair; and Jim Parker, an unassuming black waiter who is thrust into the spotlight when a working-class Polish immigrant, Leon Czolgosz, enacts what was perhaps the most spectacular exhibition at Buffalo—the assassination of U.S. President William McKinley. These seven characters’ lives collide in unexpected ways as each is confronted with the brutal realities of the fair. At stake is nothing less than whether or not they will survive.