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Arts
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: The Big Bang!
GENRE: Dance
GROUP: Philadanco
ATTENDED: Fri., April 19, 8 p.m., Kimmel Center
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: In this riveting program created just for PIFA, Philadanco celebrates The Big Bang, 13 billions years ago!
WE THINK: Philadanco pulled out the stops for this show, which begins, and ends, with a bang. The bill of fare presents a potpourri of 'Danco's dance styles, in four works that highlight the company's superb technique and demonstrating how its choreography has evolved over the years. It begins with an energetic early work of classic Philadanco style — long, graceful leg and arm extensions coupled with deep, athletic leg work — and ends with a contemplative contemporary dance featuring a bevy of elegant yet physically challenging duets. At the show I saw, throughout the program, people clapped and whupped during the individual pieces; they just couldn’t wait till the work ended to acknowledge an especially impressive feat. And who could blame 'em: this stellar corps delivers heartfelt body and soul for this exhilarating program.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Dan Deacon is in your iPhone.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: SENDMSG
GENRE: Music/multimedia
GROUP: Dan Deacon
ATTENDED: April 12, 8:30 p.m., Kimmel Center
CLOSED: April 12
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Internet Hall of Fame inductee Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971, forever changing the landscape of communication technology. Musing on that critical moment 40 years ago, [Dan] Deacon has crafted a one-of-a-kind musical experience, with his signature combination of music and tech.
WE THINK: Despite the connections that can be drawn between the potent energy of the first sent e-mail and Dan Deacon’s own raucously energetic live shows (think rave meets punk), Ray Tomlison’s crowning achievement was mentioned all but about once during Deacon’s performance last Friday. The rest of the night played out like any one of Deacon’s other shows, with the exception of it’s criminally short duration of roughly an hour and fifteen minutes.
Deacon spent the night playing MC/DJ/bizarro boot camp corporal, organizing various dance-based games to cuts from his entire catalogue throughout the set. A notable one of these games involved making the audience build a “dance tunnel” that wound out of (and back into) the theatre. The real star of the night, however, was the Wham City Lights smartphone app. When working correctly, all the audience had to do was lift the phone in the air, tilt it to Deacon’s specifications, and the dark-lit theatre turned into a pulsating light show worthy of any festival rave. Deacon’s shows are their own form of electric church, and in this repurposed space, everybody felt the love.
–Sameer Rao
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Dance like you've got yellow fever.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Where Heaven's Dew Divides
GENRE: Dance
GROUP: Germaine Ingram Project
ATTENDED: April 18, 7:30 p.m., Innovation Studio at the Kimmel Center
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Percussive dancer/choreographer and vocal improviser Germaine Ingram, modern dancer/choreographer Leah Stein and a company of dance and music artists channel key moments and personalities from the history and memory of Philadelphia’s religious life of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
WE THINK: Shows that draw inspiration from social injustice can come off like a lecture performed in a theatrical way. There is so much intent to make a point it's soapbox art. Fortunately, Where Heaven's Dew Divides opts for a more open-ended approach.
That's a neat feat considering the piece gleans inspiration from George Washington's house slaves, African-American religious leaders of the late 1700s, the role of women in the black church movement and Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic.
All those inspirations are evident in the work, yet the piece is abstract enough that it's not like you're getting hit over the head with all that backstory. Rather, Where Heaven's Dew Divides is a rhythmic ode to the capacity for human expression in dance, music and song. A percussive tap dance is like a conversation between three people. Yet, the whole thing is uplifting. The collective spirit of this first-rate cast flat-out moves you. That's the beauty of well-done art.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: A Zen Buddhist Drumline.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Vainglorious: The Epic Feats of Notable Persons in Europe After the Revolution
GENRE: Theater/Exhibition
GROUP: Applied Mechanics
ATTENDED: Sat., April 13, 7 p.m., Christ Church Neighborhood House
CLOSES: April 13
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Factions clash and empires rise and fall…Twenty-six of the shiniest rising stars in the Philadelphia scene join forces to create a dazzling new depiction of a potent historical moment: the great sweep of the Napoleonic Empire in the wake of the French Revolution.
WE THINK: What’s history? Well it ain’t neat. Thus the dramaturges of Applied Mechanics arm you with a flow chart of events, divide the 26-person cast into teams (team Napoleon, team Germaine de Staël, etc.), zone a small gym and its two balconies into parts of the world, and turn you loose to roam, interact, even get some wine and linzertorte if you’re in the right place at the right time. But the play punishes you for your curiosity or fidelity: The more you walk around and see, the less you see. The less you walk around and see, the less you see.
What’s history? Symbols. Thus the tormented spirit of the age, Beethoven, lives in isolated anguish, hardly touching any of the other important personages until one of his concerts turns into a vision of him resentfully conducting Napoleon and Josephine’s coronation. Thus team Talleyrand is composed of five actors playing the same character, a division of self that is not Freudian but political. The Talleyrands appear everywhere, first serving Napoleon, then stripping him of medals and bicorne and finally carving his Europe into pieces.
What’s history? Word and deed. Thus physicality takes on as much import as the English and French dialogue, and battles become dances with snap bangs being thrown, sex is a panting, ass-slapping ritual, and invasions are air-pony Monty Python gallops. With the coordination of director/ringmaster Rebecca Wright and designer Maria Shaplin, such critical moments come to the fore without usurping the sprawl of the play.
What’s drama? The art of the showdown. And for one moment near the end, all the sound and fury of this perpetual motion machine stops, concentrates itself as if it were trying to engineer nothing but this instant all along, and we get Mary Tuomanen’s absorbing Napoleon – just seconds ago within my arm’s length on Elba, desolate and repeating “Josephine, Josephine, Josephine” – restored from exile and confronted by his old troops who are being exhorted to “fire!” The entire hall goes quiet and he utters a line which might as well stand in for the myth of celebrity from that time till now, “You know me.”
What’s history? A Vainglorious tragic-comedy, a flawed inspired play.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Gastronomy lessons from the Founding Fathers.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: A Taste of History
GENRE: Talk/lecture
GROUP: Chef Walter Staib
ATTENDED: Sat., April 13, 8 p.m., Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: On the 270th Anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, Chef Walter Staib brings to life his Emmy-award winning show A Taste of History with an evening celebrating the food and history of our founding fathers.
WE THINK: From the outset, the appearance of a harpist dressed in colonial gear should have been a portent of the dire things to come: City Tavern chef and PBS host Walter Staib's soooo slow-roasted, live, period-dressed chat with birthday boy “Thomas Jefferson,” his foodie pals “Betsy Ross,” “George and Martha Washington,” “Ben Franklin,” and “John and Abigail Adams.”
Actually, the idea was interesting, and the culinary information and recipes culled from Staib’s television program of the same name was solid. His work at City Tavern is solid. Yet, putting him on stage with wigged cornball reenactors — and a microphone headset that made him appear like Tony Robbins in chef whites — did no one any favors. On video, Staib is great. On stage, he seemed hesitant. The whole production got even more stilted every time they relied on video clips from A Taste of History. Not that I expected Staib to bring a whole sturgeon on stage and stuff it, but it would’ve smelled better that this show.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Actresses singing on bikes to demonstrate their delight in reproductive freedom.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Animal Animal Mammal Mine
GENRE: Dance/theater
GROUP: Penn Dixie Productions
ATTENDED: Sun., April 14, 8 p.m., Underground Arts
CLOSES: April 20
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: A devised theater piece that grows out of extensive interviews with women who have inherited the technology of the 60s. It weaves these characters together with dance, projections, and the breathtaking hybrid sculptures of Martha Posner.
WE THINK: Writer-director Anisa George concocts a fascinating adventure, based on conversations with women about reproduction that were expansive enough to explore concerns about climate change and the nature of life itself. As with other works of this style (think Pig Iron Theatre Company, New Paradise Laboratories, Applied Mechanics, and anything staged by Mark Lord), we're embraced by a dizzying variety of fascinating images, action, and sounds — most of them showing low-tech innovation, like Martha Posner's wearable sculptures — from an on-stage glacier and menacing animal activists to the giddy thrills of actresses singing while circling the audience on bicycles and discovering their capacity for flight.
Set designer Amy Rubin uses Underground Arts' basement space well, surrounding us and a deep, sea-blue playing area with eerie bare trees. Often funny while also surprisingly moving, Animal Animal Mammal Mine makes the question of bringing children into an ailing world real and personal, and balances that worry and cynicism with a hopeful message about life's resilience.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: An elephant on trial. No, like, literally, in a courtroom.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: The Trial of Murderous Mary
GENRE: Theater
GROUP: Aaron Cromie & Gwen Rooker
ATTENDED: Fri., April 12, 8 p.m., Kimmel Center
CLOSES: April 20
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: The Sparks Family Circus comes to [a small coal-mining boomtown in the Appalachians], led by Ringmaster Charlie Sparks and featuring his beloved five-ton elephant, Mighty Mary, “the largest living land animal on Earth." ... The sad, bloody fiasco that follows threatens to derail the circus permanently.
WE THINK: Cromie is circus owner and ringmaster Charlie Sparks, while Rooker, Dave Johnson, Sarah Gliko and Erin Carney play multiple roles and instruments in this powerful play with music. They charm us with earnestness as performers in a circus that traveled the country dazzling small-town crowds until their elephant handler retires, replaced by an inexperienced fumbler who causes Mary to panic in a parade.
Whipped into a frenzy by rumors and lies spread by opportunistic journalists, the town wants Mary to pay for killing her incompetent master. The mob's ignorance and ugliness are portrayed using the same well-crafted methods that amused us earlier: clever songs, vivid caricatures, and shadow puppets. One might wish for more about Mary — both her majestic size and her apparently gentle disposition — but her fate requires no embellishment: The raw facts of her trial (yes, they prosecuted an animal in court) and her cruel fate are emotionally forceful enough.
"Murderous Mary" tells a story that feels contemporary, though it occurred a century ago. Media exaggeration, mob panic, and cruelty to animals are far from extinct.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Before/after photos of Berlin.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Sounds & Rhythm of Resistance
GENRE: Dance/Music
GROUP: Taller Puertorriqueño
ATTENDED: Fri., April 12, 6 p.m., Barnes Foundation
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Taller Puertorriqueño travels back in time to celebrate Puerto Rico’s Emancipation Day; the day when slaves from African origin were set free on the island in 1873.
WE THINK: Taller Puertorriqueño long ago established itself as the hub of Philly-based Puerto Rican art and activism. For its joyous interpretation of Emancipation Day in Puerto Rico (March 22, 1873), the barrio gallery brought out its finest musicians and practitioners of Bomba dance for a densely percussive call-and-response performance.
The musical/vocal ensemble and its dancers welcomed audience participation, which was essential to the groove and the communal sensation of liberation. The sensuous, clave-heavy sound demanded interaction, especially when additional colorfully dressed dancers became part of the fray.
The only problem I had with the performance (as well as my own level of participation) wasn’t the fault of the Taller Puertorriqueño ensemble: It was the space. The Barnes’ largish community room that serves members and its friends on Friday nights was too big and airy to accommodate the sweaty intimacy of the band, its sound, the dancers and their glorious intent.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Seriously, a small town put an elephant in a courtroom and tried her for murder.
We always get a ton of stuff that doesn't make it into the official agenda for one reason or another. Or sometimes it does! Anyway, this is some of the stuff that CP staffers are attempting to get to this weekend their own selves. You have no excuse for boredom.
FRIDAY 4/12
- John Train's got a new non-concept album. See them play stuff from it during happy hour tonight @ Fergie's.
- If you haven't heard Divers yet, get your ass to The Fire tonight.
- The Making Time lineup tonight is pretty sweet: Delorean, Autre Ne Veut, Doldrums and Jacques Greene.
SATURDAY 4/13
- The Manayunk StrEAT Festival isn't a typo — it's a hilly place where you can eat food.
- The good people at Single Girl, Married Girl Records are celebrating a Winter Zine Relese @ Space 1026.
- Passyunk Square's Second Saturday will be it's largest yet with music and all that good stuff, but we're going for Pollyodd's free strawberrycello cream samples and heaps of complimentary food.
- Daisy Fried (judge of this year's poetry contest!) and Brian Teare (who judged it a couple years ago) and both reading as part of an afternoon double-bill juggernaut @ Penn Book Center.
- The School of Rock curriculum starts off with the Ramones for beginners (they do really only use those three chords) and culminates in Zappa. Therefore, when The Ramones are on the bill of a School of Rock show, as they are at Johnny Brenda's tonight, you can generally expect to find really tiny kids doing their best Joey impression; the effect is really just fantastic.
- Because there weren't enough festivals this month, Subaru is putting on a cherry blossom fest. There's a 5k race for the athletic types, tea ceremonies and martial arts demos for Japan enthusiasts and a Prettiest Pet in Pink contest for the crazy cat ladies.
- Snuff, gore, guts – when we think lazy Sunday we think back-to-back horror movie screenings (Cinedelphia Film Festival).
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Berlin: Landscape of Memory
GENRE: Lecture/Exhibition
GROUP: James B. Abbott
ATTENDED: Thu., April 11, 5 p.m., Center for Emerging Visual Artists
CLOSES: April 26
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: A challenging, in-depth exploration of an important moment in time [the fall of the Wall] and the resulting changes in landscape and Berlin neighborhoods 24 years later.
WE THINK: Culled from a body of work spanning more than 20 years, James B. Abbott's photography exhibition shows Berlin during a period of major transformation, but in a subtle way. Tucked away in an elegant space overlooking Rittenhouse Square, the modest-sized landscapes, while devoid of expressive faces, manage to carry an emotional heft usually reserved for portraits.
As would be expected, sections of the exhibition depict how Berlin has changed in a before/after fashion: a beach club filled with canoodling couples sits in the former no mans land, a McDonalds has sprouted next to Checkpoint Charlie and the area behind the Reichstag, once neglected, now gleams with modernity. Yet the exhibition does not always afford such convenient comparisons. One wall commemorates those shot while trying to flee East Germany, making time and place irrelevant, while another mixes disparate images as if to show that Berlin has not changed that much: after all these years, the city still has a raw, unfinished quality to it as its monuments loom and its graffitied edifices remain undisturbed.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Buffoonery on the soccer field.
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