A Curious Invitation present London Month of the Dead
CABARETS OF DEATH - Playing with Death and the Afterlife in Popular Amusements
A Live, Illustrated Zoom Talk with historian Joanna Ebenstein
Tuesday 13th October 2020 at 7:00 pm

From 1892 until 1954, three cabaret-restaurants in Paris’ Montmartre district enraptured tourists with their grotesque portrayals of death in the afterworlds of Hell, Heaven, and Nothingness. Each had specialized cuisines and morbid visual displays with flashes of nudity and shocking optical illusions. These cabarets were considered the most curious and widely featured amusements in the city. Entrepreneurs even hawked graphic postcards of their ironic spectacles and otherworldly interiors.

This illustrated talk will tell the story of the death themed cabarets of Paris, revealing their history within the context of other death themed amusements — from phantasmagoria shows to Grand Guiginol to Coney Island’s disaster spectacles—in the age of rationality and beyond.

This talk will be followed with an in-conversation between Joanna Ebenstein and Stephen Coates investigating her work with Morbid Anatomy and her new book, Anatomica.

Tickets £4 early bird available for a limited time only including a 20% donation to NHS Charities Together. Please click here to purchase.

Joanna Ebenstein
Joanna Ebenstein is the editor of the posthumous publication of Mel Gordon’s “Cabarets of Death: Death, Dance and Dining in Early Twentieth-Century Paris”. She is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, photographer and graphic designer. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series, and was co-founder (with Tracy Hurley Martin) and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. Her other books include Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy,Death: A Graveside Companion, The Anatomical Venus and The Morbid Anatomy Anthology (with Colin Dickey). You can see more of her work at www.joannaebenstein.org.

PLEASE NOTE - This talk will take place virtually via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 5:00 pm BST on the day of the lecture. A link to the conference will be sent to the email used at checkout at 6:00 pm BST on the day of the event. Please email suzette@acuriousinvitation.com in the event your link fails to arrive. Please note this talk will be recorded and can be sent free of charge to ticket holders by request.