Saturday, September 3, 2011

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival: Day 2

I'm looking forward to writing about the shows we saw last night but there's no time: we have four to see today. I'll just say for now that they were both every bit as excellent as I expected.

Saturday, September 3: 
A Paper GardenAaron Cromie, Mary Tuomanen, and Genevieve Perrier, 1pm. It appears to be a site-specific performance in a garden. And it's only 33 minutes long. We're there.


Zon-Mai: A performed installation, 2pm. This is an enormous multimedia installation by choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkauoi and filmmaker Gilles Delmas in which they have recorded dancers from around the world performing in their own homes. It’s being presented in a former pumping station near the new Race Street Pier park (which is also the space that will be the future home of the Live Arts Festival).


Red Rovers: Headlong Dance Theater and Chris Doyle, 4pm. Another artistic hybrid of dance and installation, this one was inspired by the Mars rovers, silent films and vintage Donkey Kong. Wouldn’t miss it for this or any other world!

Max Frisch’s The Arsonist (The Firebugs): The Idopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, 7:30pm. If I’m reading this right, it’s a play performed as a silent movie based on a 1958 animated film. It might be brilliant, it might just be a good idea… Only one way to find out….

And then: we have 35 minutes to cover 14 blocks. We should be able to walk it… assuming that the 7:30 show starts on time and is 80 minutes long, as it is advertised. Otherwise, we’re taking a cab…

The Speed of Surprise: The Groundswell Players, 9:30pm. The main attraction of this play for us is that it is directed by Charlotte Ford—an artist whose work we’ve long been interested in seeing but always seem to miss (the problem with having to do the entire festival in one weekend—not everything we want to see is playing). The description of this piece begins, "Four intergalactic assassins zoom through the void." If the rest of the evening lives up to that sentence, I think we'll have a good time.

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