GHOST DANCE: PICTURE OF A MADMAN – written and performed by Erica Knight and directed by John Ahlin. In February of 1916, Ralph Albert Blakelock’s haunting landscape, “Brook by Moonlight”, was sold at auction for $20,000, a record price for a painting by a living American artist. The sale made him famous, newspapers called him America’s greatest artist, and thousands flocked to exhibits of his work. Yet at the time of his triumph Blakelock had spent 15 years confined in a psychiatric hospital in Middletown, New York and his wife and children were living in poverty in a ramshackle cabin in Leeds. While Blakelock’s early works were heavily influenced by Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School painters, the onset of schizophrenia pushed his paintings into ever more controversial and radical areas. This remarkable solo show, created and performed by Blakelock’s own great-great granddaughter, explores the life, times, and madness of one of America’s most celebrated and exploited painters whose brooding, hallucinogenic landscapes anticipated Abstract Expressionism by more than half a century.
Bios
ERICA KNIGHT, both playwright and performer in Ghost Dance, is an actress, teaching artist, and writer based in New York City. She has performed for the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket, The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Centenary Stage Company, and the Metropolitan Playhouse, as well as having produced and appeared in The Summoning by Charlotte Ahlin, and Lee Blessing’s Independence. On Television, Erica has appeared on Gossip Girl, and One Life to Live. As a teacher, she has joyfully worked with students of all ages in theatre and creative writing programs such as Written Out Loud, Broadway Bound Kids, and the Atlantic Theater Company. Erica was a semi-finalist for Primary Stages Echo’s Writers Group and has been nominated for an Innovative Theatre Award for her work.
More information about the show
Less than two miles from Bridge Street Theatre, as the crow flies, one of the saddest romances of American Art played out. In Leeds, New York, in the year 1916, in a ramshackle cabin down along the banks of Catskill Creek, virtually within view of two of the great Hudson River School artists’ mountain-top aerie abodes, the destitute wife of one of America’s greatest painters, forlornly waits for her husband. This is the story of the man who can’t return to her…a man whose genius and ambition enabled him to master his profession, but now languishes in a far-off asylum for mental disorders, his former art scarcely a recollection.
Ghost Dance is the rediscovery of one of America’s greatest artists, Ralph Albert Blakelock, lost to time, injustice…and madness, brought into the light by his greatgreat granddaughter. In this world premiere play, Erica Knight, as playwright and actress…and family member, takes us on a harrowing and humorous journey through Time, to the edge of madness…and back. For 80 gripping minutes 1 actress plays 11 roles, over 111 years.
“Papa said it was a curse.
That Blakelock was cursed.
Papa said I had him in my blood…and that I have it, too.
That I was just like him.”
Called “One of the greatest artists America has produced” by the New York Times, Ralph Albert Blakelock’s history, with all its tragic secrets, are slowly uncovered. Erica had been truly kept in the dark about her great-great grandfather, by her family, afraid that the ‘madness’ really is a family curse. With the help of her rambunctious after-school art program class, Erica journeys forth, taking the audience along, making one remarkable discovery after another, until Ralph Albert Blakelock’s unique voice is finally heard and his singular vision is seen once again. Catskill, New York, home office of the great Hudon River School of painting, should genuinely appreciate this exploration of how Art speaks to us…but more, the impediments and obstacles an artist has to endure and overcome, simply to be heard…and all importantly, what is it the artist has to say.