For a weekend in April, the library at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania will be transformed through the imagination of performance artist Sebastienne Mundheim.

Mundheim and her team will travel through time, using the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for inspiration. Seated in the historic Reading Room, the audience will encounter dancers dressed in armor, roaring sound in a quiet library, a landscape of paper architecture, and stories of those who changed history. There will be performances at 4, 6, and 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 13, Sunday, April 14, and Monday, April 15.

The performance’s full title is ArkHIVE: The black cog in the green grid…my own dead…a 40-minute survival story. The performance is part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA), a month-long city-wide festival produced by the Kimmel Center. HSP is one of more than 50 organizations participating in the festival, which asks the question: “If you had a time machine…?” HSP commissioned Mundheim, an interdisciplinary artist with White Box Theatre, to explore this question as it relates to the HSP archive, using puppetry, sculpture, dance, and light. Mundheim’s performance will highlight specific moments contained in the archive that have contemporary relevance.

Tickets to ArkHIVE are $20 for general admission. Tickets are discounted for HSP members and students.

To learn more about PIFA 2013, visit pifa.org.

Media is invited to attend the event. To reserve your seat, please contact the Society’s Director of Programs and Communications, Lauri Cielo, at 215-732-6200 ext. 233 or lcielo@hsp.org.

Photo by Evelyn Taylor for the Kimmel Center