The Mill Project
THE MILL PROJECT: an original new play exploring women's bodies in labor and resistance in the age of industrialization.
We endeavour to be submissive, cheerful and contented with the lot marked out for us.
- H.F., the Lowell Offering, 1845.
- H.F., the Lowell Offering, 1845.
Yes, it is bread we fight for but we fight for roses, too. - James Oppenheimer, Bread & Roses, 1911
The Mill Project deconstructs the historical record, re-membering & embodying women's experience of labor in the textile mills of nineteenth century New England through a performance-collage drawing on letters, newspapers, pamphlets and etiquette books. Woven in a tapestry of primary source text with original music and movement, the play puts the mill girls of factory towns like Leeds and Lowell into relationship with the experience of American women today. The Mill Project invites the audience to place themselves in history while imagining our shared future.
The Mill Project was conceived by TheatreTruck cofounders Brianna Sloane and Elizabeth Pangburn and created by Sloane and Pangburn with Emily MacLeod, Emma Ayres, Christine Stevens, Jayme Winell, Robyn Sutton- Fernández, Maya Lapping Rivera and Julia Read.
The Mill Project was conceived by TheatreTruck cofounders Brianna Sloane and Elizabeth Pangburn and created by Sloane and Pangburn with Emily MacLeod, Emma Ayres, Christine Stevens, Jayme Winell, Robyn Sutton- Fernández, Maya Lapping Rivera and Julia Read.
This program was supported in part by a grant from the Northampton Arts Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency, and with support from the Leeds Civic Association and the Bement School.
