The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage last month announced that it has awarded $10.2 million to 39 Philadelphia-area cultural organizations and artists. Two of the grantees — filmmaker Stewart Thorndike and The Bearded Ladies Cabaret — represent the LGBTQ+ community. Thorndike and John Jarboe of Bearded Ladies recently spoke to PGN about their careers and how the Pew fellowship and grant, respectively, will help them continue creating art.
Stewart Thorndike
Stewart Thorndike, one of 12 fellows awarded an unrestricted $85,000 grant, is a queer horror director with two feature films to her name. Both “Lyle” (2014) and “Bad Things” (2023) deal with themes of motherhood, female rage and queer identity.
“I make movies that are female-driven and terror-filled in some ways. It’s usually more unnerving than frightening or in that jump-scare kind of way,” she explained, adding that she also doesn’t do sadism or gore.
Both of her feature films have been described as queer versions of famous horror films — “Rosemary’s Baby” for “Lyle” and “The Shining” for “Bad Things.”
“I never start out thinking that I’m repurposing a film. But I think they must, just like, live in my bloodstream, and they kind of seep out, or I’m kind of trying to argue with the source material in some way or reflect something,” Thorndike said.
“So sometimes [I’m] holding a magnifying glass up to something like the hag in ‘The Shining,’ and thinking about how the whole story changes, if it’s from a women’s point of view,” she added. “Although it really always starts from something very personal, and it’s only as I start writing [when] I realize I’ve been kind of haunted or possessed by these films.”
Her latest, yet to be released movie, “Frigid,” is a psychological thriller that involves a group of older women going to a retreat where things start to go wrong.
“It’s a celebration of how I see older women, which is hot and cool and powerful,” Thorndike said. “And instead of always seeing older women as these quirky sidekicks, smoking pot for the first time, or portrayed in gruesome ways — you know, like the idea of the hag — there’s often a trope of showing older women’s naked bodies as something repulsive, like a goblin or a scary monster. And we see that in movies time and time again. [I’m] sort of reclaiming that.”
Thorndike has been drawn to the horror genre since she was younger, when she watched shows like “The Twilight Zone” and other melodramas.
She explained that troubles in her childhood made the sight of happy families feel isolating, so darker shows where grownups struggled made her feel less alone in her experiences.
Her favorite part of horror is seeing “where terror resides in the everyday,” she said.
Thorndike continued, “That’s what really scares me. You take the normal and the safe spaces, and you kind of bring fear into those corners — much like what it’s like to be a woman in this world, or anybody who isn’t the most power-dominant kind of group.”
For her own movies, Thorndike likes to see how the themes she has used grow and change. In “Lyle,” the main character is a grieving mother and in “Bad Things,” the main character has a strained relationship with her mother.
She also likes to explore paranoia and confusion.
“That kind of feeling tempers a lot of what interests me. Are we safe in Starbucks, or are we safe in the daylight, or are we safe in the family unit?” Thorndike said. “I just like to challenge and redefine and provoke all the norms that are forced on us — maybe because I’m a queer woman, maybe because we all see all the horrors going down around us, from racism in America to how countries are born and built, to the genocide in Gaza right now, to just how we treat animals. It’s all around us.”
Following her nomination for the Pew Fellowship, Thorndike went through an intricate application process. After almost a year, she received the news that she’d gotten it.
She says that the Fellowship will allow her to work on her film and some other projects.
“It’s like this explosion of time for your art to get this fellowship,” Thorndike said. “It’s very hard to make the kind of movies I make and survive to work and have a job at the same time. So this really is like a period in my life where I can just be an artist and work on my film and focus on getting my projects made.”
The Bearded Ladies Cabaret
John Jarboe is the founder and artistic director of Bearded Ladies Cabaret, which received a $230,400 grant. She founded the group in 2010 after moving to Philadelphia the previous year. She had been asked to create a cabaret by the Media Theatre. Not sure what a cabaret was, she said yes to doing the project before gathering some queer friends to create what would become Back In the Army. The show used music from urban Berlin to create a story about what it meant to be gay or queer in the Army during World War II.
This project evolved into the Bearded Ladies Cabaret. After Back in the Army, the group began a partnership with the Wilma Theater to put on “cabaplays” which are as Jarboe puts it, the lovechild of a cabaret and a play. They also did Bastille Day performances at the Eastern State Penitentiary for seven years.
The Pew grant will help Jarboe and the Bearded Ladies create “Shavings,” an installation and performance focused on the question, “is artistic sustainability a myth?”
“I think about this moment where one of my mentors was sitting with me at a diner in New York and was describing how his theater company was closed and he didn’t think anyone was going to remember all the work that he had done for the past 20 something years,” Jarboe said. “That was really sad to me, and it made me think about the kind of, like false planning for sustainability that so many artists and arts organizations are forced into by these rigid, backward-funding structures and what’s different between that and what would be a meaningful version of estate planning for the arts.”
Jarboe wonders if the installation gives audiences, supporters, stakeholders and funders a better understanding of what it takes to make art.
“Could us doing this work change the dialogue around how arts are supported in the city and valued?” Jarboe ponders.
She acknowledges that although there are some good private funding opportunities in Philadelphia (noting that even still there are sometimes barriers), the real issue is funding from the city itself. Jarboe noted that a lot of hotel tax in New York City goes toward art, since it draws tourists in.
“In Philly, arts is [also] a huge draw,” she said. “We are culture creators, and we offer so much value to the city, and I don’t think that the city celebrates us or uses us wisely as a tool. And I think that a part of this is that people don’t understand what it takes to make things happen in an artistic sense in our city.”
For Jarboe and the Bearded Ladies, the Pew grant will help them create the installation and pay the artist that will perform in it.
The installation will be up for 15 weeks, one week for every year the Bearded Ladies have been around. With the recents closing of arts institutions like University of the Arts, Jarboe hopes the installation will celebrate what these closed institutions gave to the city.
For Jarboe, the most important aspect of art is connection.
“It’s better to introduce someone to someone new than it is for you to meet a new person,” she said. “It’s more impactful for you to make an introduction and to use your power of connection. And I think the connections that emerge from our spaces, either among people or among people and ideas, are what really is impactful to me.”
“The work is just an excuse to get people to think together, to be together, to belong to, to let something out,” she added. “I really hope that that the Shavings project makes people acknowledge the value of art in Philadelphia more deeply, I hope that it changes the way that people experience future artistic projects but at the very least, I just want it to be a really, really lovely and moving time, and I want to celebrate and honor the work that I and a bunch of queer artists have been doing for the past 15 years in the City of Philadelphia.”
For a full list of Pew Center for Arts & Heritage 2024 grantees, visit pewcenterarts.org.