Live Arts Festival: 2012

Time for our annual pilgrimage to the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe. We'd planned to go over the Labor Day weekend but that's not an option this year — the festival opens on the 7th. So we'll spend Catherine's birthday seeing shows this year—one of them, right as birthday begins!

Friday, September 7
Nicole Canuso Dance—we saw her company perform in collaboration with a musical group at HERE a few years ago and really enjoyed her inventive choreography. This piece performs at the American Philosophical Society and was commissioned by them. A great way to kick off the weekend.

Charlotte Ford: Bang—From the description, this will be a series of monologues and vignettes about gender and sexuality in which the actors play multiple characters: one of them will recite from "The Canterbury Tales in the original Old English, yet has mad tap skills." How can this miss? This collaboration with Lee Etzold and Sarah Sanford sounds fantastic; I'm really looking forward to it.

Saturday, September 8
New Paradise Laboratories: 27—I admire the abilities of Whit MacLaughlin and the actors he brings to his projects: New Paradise Laboratories work is always intelligent, engaging, disciplined physical performances that I don't see often enough. Apparently, this one is about immature slacker zombies: you don't see that often enough, either. I'm there.

SnakeEatTail: WAMB—Sometimes, a description in the festival guide just grabs you. "WAMB is an interdisciplinary performance and art installation that combines aerial acrobatics with live narration and original music." I don't see how it can miss.

Bruce Walsh: Chomsky vs. Buckley, 1969—Catherine and I caught his show, Northern Liberty, in 2005 and were impressed: we didn't think it was 100% successful, but the stuff that worked for us was truly excellent. This time, we're going to his apartment for the Noam Chomsky/William F. Buckley debate; intellectual, to be sure but before you start rolling your eyes, bear in mind: they're serving hors d'oeuvres....

Applied Mechanics: Some Other Mettle—We've never seen this company before, the show starts at midnight and the description in the festival guide is intriguing but a little vague. However, when we went to their website, we really liked what we saw there. Okay, sure: why not?

Sunday, September 9

Pig Iron Theater Company: Zero Cost House—It's almost not a Live Arts Festival for us without a Pig Iron show: they're one of our favorite companies working today. And I saw Toshiki Okada’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech in the Under the Radar festival this past January: a strange little triptych of playlets that was oddly engaging (unfortunately, even though Catherine didn't get to see that show, it's not playing in the Live Arts Festival when we're there—I think she'd like it even more than I did). I can't even imagine the production these very different groups will create.... but I'm looking forward to seeing it!

Sylvain Émard Danse: Le Grand Continental—Catherine got to see our friend, Katy, in a version of this at the Seaport this summer but I missed it. I won't get to see Katy, but it's free and I think it will fun to see here.

Shows that we'll miss but wish we could see: Untitled Feminist Show by Young Jean Lee (Catherine saw it this spring here in NYC and really liked it); Red-Eye to Havre de Grace (we saw Geoff Sobelle in the original production in 2005 and it was fantastic); This Town is a Mystery by Headlong Dance (we always enjoy their productions and this one sounds especially intriguing but it seemed to us that we'd really need a car to make it work.... and the ability to make a covered dish) and Elevator Repair Service's Arguendo (I'm sure we'll see it in NYC but it would have been fun to see it here, too). I'm sure there are others, too, but those are the big stand outs.

Our Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe Weekend

At some point during our Labor Day weekend in Philadelphia, Catherine and I tried to remember when we first came to the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe. As best we can remember, it was in 2000 when the performance that blew us away was Mark Lord’s promenade performance through the Old City, Across. For me, that piece is indicative of all of our best experiences with this festival: it was epic, imaginative and remarkably daring. I haven’t loved everything I’ve ever seen here but I’ve never been completely disappointed, either, especially with the curated Live Arts events. And almost every festival has at least one production that particularly has inspired and invigorated me, artistically.

This year, all nine of the shows we saw are remarkably strong and several of them are absolutely fantastic. Four in particular are among the best work I’ve seen this year: Method Gun, Twelfth Night, Elephant Room and WHaLE OPTICS. All four productions feature outstanding performances and are imaginatively directed and designed. They are all challenging works: physically demanding of the actors and intellectually stimulating for the audience. With the exception of the Pig Iron show, they all employed modern technology to some degree but their most effective elements are actually fairly low- or old-tech: an overhead projector, the fly system of a theater, traditional sleight of hand, repurposing fabric to create the continent of Antarctica (complete with the Transantarctic mountain range). These productions that remind you of what live performance offers that television and film can't: the incredible energy and emotional impact of being present in the moment with artists at work. Of these, no piece embodies it better than the Rude Mechs' Method Gun (pictured, right): what might easily have been a simple satire about a theatrical guru transforms in the end into an astonishing illustration of the power of actors onstage and the potential danger into which they continually put themselves.

Other highlights this year:

• Mary Tuomanen and Genevieve Perrier, who give delightful (and vocally strong) performances in A Paper Garden. It's a charming, cleverly-constructed little production in a lovely garden. I especially admired their cross-gender casting choice—it's a tricky thing to make work and Ms. Tuomanen and director Aaron Cromie succeeded very well.
• James Sugg in Twelfth Night (pictured, left). Fantastic: I don't need to see anyone else play Sir Toby Belch for a long time. As far as I'm concerned, we can put this play on a shelf and leave it there a while.
• Rosie Langabeer's music for Twelfth Night: it creates the  perfect mood for Pig Iron's show. Plus, since she and her musicians perform it all live and take on several roles, they are a big part of the metatheatrical success of the production.
• David Disbrown and Christina Zani in Headlong Dance Theater's Red Rovers. It's a clever piece but uneven structurally: it works because both performers are engaging and do a great job with the occasionally unusual choreography.
• The pumping station space where Zon-Mai (pictured, right) is presented. The installation, videos and choreography in the piece are all excellent but it was hard to walk into that space and not imagine how it will look once it becomes the new festival headquarters.
• Brian Osborne's channeling of Carl Sagan in WHaLE OPTICS. Not an impersonation, really: just the distilling of the essence of him into his own character. Most memorable.

• Trey Lyford's carefully-crafted performance in Elephant Room. The whole piece is over the top from the beginning but it also has several exceptional moments where the three magicians demonstrate their skills as actors (and all three are very skilled). We're a little prejudiced, of course, but Catherine and I thought Trey's revelatory speech was absolutely beautiful.

By going the first weekend, there are shows that weren't playing yet that we would have liked to see. In particular, Improbable Theatre's The Devil and Mister Punch, New Paradise Laboratory's Extremely Public Displays of Privacy (although we have been seeing the preliminary parts of it on their website) and John Jasperse's Canyon (we have the option to see it at BAM, fortunately) and Play by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Shantala Shivalingappa. But that's always the problem with having only one weekend for this festival—you kind of have to be a resident of Philadelphia to really get everything it has to offer.

Photos (top to bottom): Kathi Kacinski (Method Gun), Jason Frank Rothenberg (Twelfth Night), Awatef Chengal (Zon-Mai).

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival: Day 3

A full day yesterday and not a bad show in the bunch—I'm almost afraid that the other shoe might drop today. That seems highly unlikely, however, given the two productions we've saved for our last day.

Sunday, September 4

WHaLE OPTICS: Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, 1pm. An enormous production (and long—almost 3 hours) but when your set is the ocean and your piece is about a composer collecting whale songs from around the world, it would be a lot harder to create in a little black box (but if he wanted to do it that way, I think director Thaddeus Phillips is just the guy to make that tiny production work). I expect magic and I don’t think I’ll be disappointed.

Elephant Room: Dennis Diamond, Louie Magic and Daryl Hannah, 6pm. We saw a workshop of this show at HERE arts center a few years ago—at that point, it was little more than sketches of the characters and their magic tricks, really. Now it’s finished and I can't wait to see where they've gone—it should be the perfect way for us to end the festival this year!

Hope to get down all of my thoughts on everything we saw on the train back home tonight.... assuming SEPTA has the tracks cleared outside of Trenton from the post-Irene flooding. If they haven't, we're taking Amtrak and that's only a 90-minute ride: not enough time to finish before we hit Penn Station.

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 Garden: Aaron 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.

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival 2011

We're back in Philadelphia for the Live Arts Festival. This year, we're here for the first weekend of the festival: today through Sunday, September 4. As we did in 2009, we've crammed as many shows as we possibly can into our three days; we originally bought tickets for 10 shows but the last one we were planning to see on Sunday has since been canceled and we haven't decided if we're going to try to replace it or just head back to NYC a little earlier. I think we've chosen a pretty nice mix of theater, performance, dance and installation and I'm really looking forward to the weekend.

TONIGHT: Friday, September 2:

Twelfth Night: Pig Iron Theatre, 7pm. I don't think we've ever missed Pig Iron in the Live Arts Festival—the performances are always amazing and the production is usually one of our favorites. While I wasn't wild about their take on Measure for Measure in 2007, I have high expectations for this show... and, frankly, only Pig Iron could get me to break my moratorium on productions of Twelfth Night!

The Method Gun: Rude Mechanicals, 10pm. Another company whose work we've enjoyed many times in the past—their Lipstick Traces is still among the best shows I've seen. This purports to be another "non-fiction" work based on the disappearance of a 1960s era acting guru and her dangerous Approach method of acting. I don't care whether a word of it is true or not—I missed it when it was here in NYC and I get to see it now!

I had intended to put forward our entire agenda but after a miserable trip down on the train (the first less than stellar time in over a dozen years of taking the regional rails down here—and all Hurricane Irene-related), I ran out of time. Will post the rest of the weekend tomorrow or later tonight and my impressions of the shows when I get back to NYC (unless I get a wild hair....).

Puttin' on a Show in Philly

If you're a self-starting producer (or a director or writer or actor who can get yourself hooked up with a unique individual like that) and can spend some time in Philadelphia this September, you're in luck: the Philadelphia Fringe is taking applications. This is the non-adjudicated part of my favorite arts festival:

In the tradition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, we ask that you challenge yourself to be an artistic pioneer by taking your work to new levels of artistic innovation and presentation.

If you want into the Live Arts Festival, you gotta get on festival director Nick Stuccio's radar... which means you've gotta have a track record. And what better way to get that record started than with a production in the Philadelphia Fringe?

To apply, all you need is a $95 application fee (a modest sum, really), a venue (the Philadelphia Theatre Alliance has a handy list here, complete with contact information), and a project that you're just dying to mount (dance, theater, music, performance, visual art or any hybrid thereof). Once you're in, it's just about fund raising the money for your production costs. And your personnel expenses. And their transportation. And their room and board. And marketing your show.

Like my dad always says: if it was easy, everybody'd be doing it.

What We'd Be Seeing in Philadelphia...

...if Catherine and I were going to the Live Arts Festival this year. Unfortunately, it's not looking good for us right now. Nevertheless, I've decided go ahead and pick out the shows that we'd probably attend if we went down the first weekend—September 3-5. It may seem a little like a pointless and ultimately frustrating task but this year's festival looks especially good and I really enjoy the planning of this trip. And, of course, if our financial situation changes, we'll actually have a plan ready to implement.

Friday, September 3
7:00 pm: Cankerblossom by Pig Iron Theatre Company
10:00 pm: Freedom Club by New Paradise Laboratories and The Riot Group
This, for Catherine and me, is the quintessential Philadelphia theater night: two of our favorite companies that we first discovered in the Live Arts Festival almost a decade ago and that we rarely get to see outside of Philly (we've been to a couple of Pig Iron shows here in NYC). A great way to start the festival!

Saturday, September 4
4:00 pm: Sanctuary by Brian Sanders/JUNK. We really liked last year's Urban Scuba, which was performed in an abandoned swimming pool; this time around, the stage is a 14 x 120 foot wall... how could we possibly miss that?

Then we have a dilemma:
7:00 pm: Chicken by Charlotte Ford is directed by our friend, Geoff Sobelle (he and Charlotte also appeared in Pig Iron's excellent Welcome to Yuba City in 2009). I have no doubt that it's going to be a fantastic performance. However...
7:00 pm: Peter Weiss' ...Marat/Sade..." by EgoPo is being performed at The Rotunda—one of the most interesting spaces in Philadelphia and a great location for this play—and I've heard many wonderful things about the company. Plus, while I've never seen the play, Catherine was in a transformative production in Dallas shortly before she moved to New York so I know she'd love to see how this one is done.

But wait: there are two more conflicts!
9:00 pm: TAKES by Nichole Canuso Dance Company. I've never seen the company but the description of this dance/video installation/film production—it's viewable from 360º and the audience is invited to wander about during the performance—makes me really want to see it.
10:00 pm: Portmanteau by Applied Mechanics. While the description of the piece doesn't really excite me (it sounds a little improvisatory, which can be either excellent or deadly... more often, I find it's deadly), the novelty of a show that's in a different space for every performance is intriguing. If it just started 30 minutes later, I'd probably take a chance on it; as it is, I'd probably lean toward TAKES instead.

Sunday, September 5
11:00 am: AFOOT!:Northern Liberties by Brothers Cromie. There's a lot of opportunity in the walking tour production... and a lot of opportunity for disaster (if it's tightly scripted and rehearsed, it can be amazing; if it's too improvised it can just be a mess). I'd give this one a try...
12:00-2:30 pm: TAKES Daytime Installation. This one is negotiable for me: it would probably depend on whether or not we liked the show the night before.
3:00 pm: Samuel Beckett's First Love performed by Gare St Lazare Players/Conor Lovett. I don't know that I need to explain much about this one: it just sounds like a fantastic production and performance.

Sadly, there are several performances that we'd still be missing. Lucinda Childs' Dance is only the second weekend, as is Nature Theater of Oklahoma's take on Romeo and Juliet, which Catherine and I missed here in NYC. Elevator Repair Service's The Sun Also Rises (The Select) based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway is only the final weekend but that will be coming to New York Theatre Workshop some time in the future, so I'll have another shot at that one; I'll also have more opportunities to see Stew and the Negro Problem with Heidi Rodewald. Judith/Dresses/Joe by Parade Ground Unit is an intriguing idea that I'd probably see if was playing the first weekend; I think I'm probably as drawn to Depravity Productions' Fugue State by the fact that it's in The Rotunda as by its description but I might give it a try if I got better information; and Insectinside by Grounded Aerial also looks like great fun.

Here's a map for the shows above:

View Philly Fringe 2010 in a larger map

Now if only we can just save up our pennies over the next month.... Time will tell...

Philadelphia Live Arts 2010: Coming Attractions

The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival has announced the centerpiece of this year's festival: Dance by Lucinda Childs with music by Philip Glass and film by Sol LeWitt. Coincidentally, Catherine and I just saw the film by itself last year at the Whitney. This is big coup for the festival—they've had big name artists before but these are huge names! I'm really hoping we'll get to go this September: I've never seen Lucinda Childs' choreography performed live and I'd really like to see how all of these elements will integrate onstage this September. Plus, everyone knows how much Catherine and I love our Philly getaways!

Photo by Stephanie Berger.

Philadelphia Live Arts: Day 1

You have to worry when the first two of nine shows you're going to see in a festival are both spectacular: disappointment surely awaits you somewhere down line. I'm happy to say, though, that both The Gonzales Cantata and Welcome to Yuba City are extraordinary—and extraordinarily different—productions. I can't imagine a better way to begin our weekend.

Melissa Dunphy's The Gonzales Cantata is an amazing and amusing mash-up of classical music and C-SPAN delivered with an absolutely perfect deadpan: if someone didn't understand the joke coming in, there's a good chance they'd be mystified by these musicians' impeccable performances. The joke, of course, is that all of the libretto here has been taken from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' testimony before Congress about the firings of U.S. Attorneys in 2007. In the reality of the hearings, all of the participants were male except Diane Feinstein (D, CA); Dunphy has reversed the genders and given all the plumb male roles to sopranos—the standouts being Jessica Lennick as Patrick Leahy (D, VT) and a brilliant performance, vocally and as an actor, by Mary Thorne as the beleaguered and befuddled Gonzales. Musically, Dunphy has taken the work quite seriously which is what really makes it hilarious: it's beautiful, soaring music in which Gonzales sings, "I don't recall" 72 times in one two-minute aria (as he actually did in a single session before the Senate committee). It's only natural to compare this piece to Handel—without question the master of the oratorio—but Dunphy's music is not parody: it references the baroque but seems to me to be as strongly connected to contemporary classical music. The work is scored for string octet, harpsichord and a chorus, all of whom perform spectacularly, and it sounds amazing in The Rotunda (although I was grateful for the projected libretto so that I could follow along with the bouncing ball, as it were). There are only two more performances and there are still seats available: if you're a music lover with a wicked sense of humor (or if you just have a wicked sense of humor) and you're in Philadelphia this weekend, you must go see this piece.

Pig Iron Theater's Welcome to Yuba City, by contrast, makes no pretext of being high art: the dozens of bizarre characters who inhabit a roadside cafe in this quintessential western town appear in a series of vignettes that are closer to the classic Merrie Melodies cartoons than even to What's Opera, Doc? That's not to say that it isn't absolutely artful: the grace, skill and precision of this wildly physical production is truly remarkable. But what this group of very talented artists have created is a Whitman's Sampler of performances: perfect, bite-sized little confections to briefly savor before moving on to another. The cavernous space in which they've installed this piece is as perfect a matching of production to environment as I can imagine: you can't really capture the mythos of the contemporary west without distance, openness, space; the Festival Hub space is incredibly vast and director Quinn Bauriedel and choreographer Christina Zani have both used it to its full advantage. In fact, it's the enormity of the space that makes the athletic performances of the cast even more astonishing: the workout they're all getting just from running around backstage, rushing from one side of the building to another, making one of their many costume changes on top of what we're actually seeing them do onstage is staggering. And they're all hilariously funny. There's a little more time to see this one—it runs through the end of the festival—but I promise you it's going to sell out; buy your tickets now because you've really got to see it to believe it.

Labor Day Weekend in Philly

It's time for Catherine and I to make our (somewhat) annual trek down to Philadelphia for the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe. This year, we've opted to attend the opening weekend so we can also enjoy a little of the First Friday gallery crawl. In the past, we've tended to go down for the second of the three weekends so that our trip coincides more with Catherine's birthday on the 9th but we thought we'd take advantage of the long holiday weekend for a change.

Philly is one of our favorite getaways: it's inexpensive to get there (just over $30 round-trip if you take NJ Transit to SEPTA), the Live Arts festival is extremely well-curated and well-organized, and there are several Philadelphia-based companies and artists whose work we especially enjoy. Finding an affordable place to stay is a challenge, especially since we won't have a car and have to stay somewhere in the Center City; fortunately, Club Quarters offered an exceptional room rate (cheaper even than the festival's package deals) and is conveniently located for us.

We always schedule a lot of shows... and I really mean a lot of shows: seven performances in a weekend was our record high in 2007. Being the coffee overachievers that we are, Catherine and I have tickets for nine—count 'em, 9—productions in just over 48 hours. It's entirely possible that we may have hit the limit of what can reasonably be done in a single weekend. Saturday night is the one that's giving me the most consternation: we left ourselves a mere 15 minutes to get between two productions: Google maps says we can walk it in 8 minutes... assuming the first one starts on time... and really is only 43 minutes long... and we don't need to use the bathroom between the two shows.

Still, Catherine and I are excited about our 2009 Live Arts/Philly Fringe festival:

Friday, 9/4
7pm The Gonzales Cantata
9pm Welcome to Yuba City (in photo)

The Gonzales Cantata is, for us, the bigger risk of these two: Pig Iron almost always hits a bull's eye these days (the only recent exception being their 2007 take on Measure for Measure—set in a morgue and performed almost entirely in the nude—which was, without question, the bravest production I've seen in years but not entirely successful). Two things persuaded us to take a chance on Melissa Dunphy's music piece: first, we've only been to The Rotunda (a former Christian Science sanctuary) once—for a Headlong Dance piece in '07—and I'm curious to find out how well it works for a primarily aural work; and second, a libretto based on Alberto Gonzales' testimony before Congress? If it's done right, that's gotta be slam-dunk funny!

Saturday, 9/5
2pm Urban Scuba
4pm TIDE
7pm daDAda
8pm FATEBOOK: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time (in photo)

New Paradise Laboratories is the only of these companies we've seen before; we've been fans since we saw their 2003 Rose Selavy Takes a Lover in Philadelphia. The two afternoon shows are both modern dance and just sounded interesting to us. As for Anthology Project's piece: c'mon! It's Dada... of course we're going!

Sunday, 9/6
1pm STORE
3pm How Theater Failed America
7pm DIGITAL EFFECTS (in photo)

Catherine pressed to see Mike Daisey's monologue; while I'm interested in his work, he performs regularly in NYC so I was willing to give him a miss this time, but I'm glad we're going. We've both been wanting to see Kate Watson-Wallace's work for a few years, especially last year's Car (sadly, we didn't make it down to the festival last year). Steve Cuiffo is an actor/magician we've seen onstage frequently, most recently in a piece he's developing with Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford; the joke of the title is that there's no technology involved: it's a solo show of him doing card tricks at the Painted Bride, one of our favorite venues in the Old City.


View Philly Fringe 2009 in a larger map

Above is the map I plotted for the festival; on my screen, two of our destinations are too far west to appear on the map in the default view, so you may have to zoom out one click).

The really scary thing is that we seriously considered going to see a tenth piece at 9pm on Sunday but finally decided that catching an 11:30pm train that got us back into Manhattan at 2:50am Monday morning was probably not a very good idea. You gotta know your limits....

All in All, I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia...

Every September, Catherine and I look forward to taking the train down to Philadelphia for the Live Arts Festival + Philly Fringe. For us, it's an easy, inexpensive and extremely rewarding trip: we usually see 5-7 plays over two days and even the least successful productions are still very good.

This year, we won't be making it and we're very disappointed. I'm especially sorry that we won't be seeing Geoff Soebelle and Charlotte Ford's Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl—Geoff is a fantastic performer whom we've known for years and we really liked Charlotte's work last year in Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental's Flamingo/Winnebago. We'd also been looking forward to the new LCI show, THE MeLTING BRiDgE and Verdensteatret's louder. Fortunately, this last show is coming to P.S. 122 later this month, so we don't miss it completely and perhaps some of the others will make their way up here, too.