From the late 17th century to the dawn of the 20th, the magic lantern transformed storytelling into an enlivened visual experience. By the late-Victorian era, the magic lantern was an important and ubiquitous visual medium. Eventually eclipsed by the coming of the movies, the wonders of this once-familiar entertainment are rarely experienced by the modern audiences.

Magic lantern performers Dawn Elliott and Joel Schlemowitz have been bringing this fascinating medium back to life, presenting award-winning magic lantern shows using period-era glass slides, magic lantern projectors, music and narration.

The program encompasses a variety of magic lantern entertainments: “Belle Belton’s Bicycle Adventure,” the anthropomorphic antics of “The Educated Cats” (reminiscent of the illustrations of Louis Wain), a magic lantern circus, and a variety of astonishing moving image mechanical slides: lever slides, slip-slides, gearwork slides, chromatropes.