Plan for Monologues II: patriarchal traditions and the New Age, 2018

Monologues II revolves in part around the history of alternative feminine religious practices, and in particular the practice of bodily healing with its fraught relationship to the nineteenth-century ‘Gentleman Doctor’. I was therefore excited to find that the Knights of Pythias - the fraternal order for whom the Western Front Building was originally built - was among other things a prototypical health insurance provider. Application for membership was mediated by a doctor’s exam. With full membership being predicated on the absence of a pre-existing condition. It was presumably these full members (men only, of course) who not only had their doctor’s bills paid, but access to the inner sanctum - now Western Front’s performance space - where the occult rituals were performed.