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Archive: September, 2012
FirstGlance Film Fest just released the lineup of flicks that will be shown at the 15th annual Philadelphia festival, taking place Nov. 9-11 at the Franklin Institute. Congrats and good luck to the Philly-connected offerings, which are bolded in the full list of films below.
Click here for the full list of 2012 Philadelphia FirstGlance offerings. »
Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!
SHOW: Private Places
GROUP: idiosynCrazy Productions
GENRE: Dance
ATTENDED: Sat., Sept. 15, 8 p.m.
CLOSES: Thu., Sept. 20
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Philly-based choreographer Jumatatu Poe debuts this exciting, visceral work that mixes explosiveness and confinement, the effect of exterior on the interior, service and performance, materials and identity. Private Places plays with the stylized movement of the service industry and the high-powered approach of J-Sette, a dance culture developed in black gay clubs with roots in drill team and majorette events of Southern historically black universities. The two share spatial formations that are tight and meticulous, activity that is repeated for accuracy, and routines performed under the surveillance of a captain.
WE THINK: About midway through Private Places, one dancer asks another, “Why would they do something like that?” “I have no idea,” comes the reply. You may find yourself feeling the same way about this show, where performers run through an array of non sequitur situations that include their attempting to organize the audience, zipping a guy up in a suitcase, doing synchronized club moves, and grunting while getting into a scrum and then they get naked; all pretty much for reasons unknown. It’s a conceptual cacophony of ideas that don’t add up. That may well be the point— we all have urges we can’t explain. But this comes off like a primal therapy session. It strains too hard to be deep. Well, the title is accurate; the places this one goes are better kept private.
Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!
SHOW: 3 Mad Rituals
GROUP: Philly Improv Theater (PHIT)
GENRE: Improv Comedy
ATTENDED: Sat., Sept. 15, 10:30 p.m.
CLOSES: Sat., Sept. 22
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: PHIT House Team King Friday (Chicago Improv Festival, Del Close Marathon) delivers back-to-back-to-back improv sets that blend to create a single, hilarious, one-of-a-kind show based on a song lyric suggested by you! A perennial Fringe favorite, this year’s performances will be a must-have ticket.
WE THINK: What do popsicles, sneakers and Wonder Woman all have in common? Absolutely nothing. But PHIT took these three audience-suggested words as the basis for three, 20 minutes acts (hence the titular “mad rituals”) and created an hour of non-stop laughs. With recurring characters and settings, including the relationship between a woman and her 10-year old husband, a tortuous educator and his student teacher, and a religious couple who couldn't help but continually use The Lord's name in vain, Team King delivered with a gang of jokes ranging from the philosophy behind splinters to Jesus’ clothing line. The third and final act was the team’s improvised vision of a movie that hasn’t been made yet—Wonder Woman. If any director were to actually make a flick about the Amazonian superheroine, one can only hope that it involves as much wittiness, humor and slow-mo, sweat dripping breast action as the one Team King imagined off the top of their heads. What’s the best part about PHIT and their 3 Mad Rituals? You’re guaranteed for a different experience every time, though the same high quality of improv gold is always guaranteed.
—Max Pulcini
Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!
SHOW: Cambridge Footlights
GROUP: Cambridge Footlights
GENRE: Sketch comedy
ATTENDED: Sun., Sept. 16
CLOSES: Tue., Sept. 18
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: The internationally-famous Cambridge Footlights are bringing their Edinburgh Fringe show across the pond! The Footlights's brand new hour of sketches, surrealism and satire is always a must-have ticket–don't miss your chance to see the "most renowned sketch troupe of them all."
WE THINK: Continuing a long tradition we’re only barely aware of here in the states, these young Brits put on one of the funniest, tightest most inventive sketch comedy shows I’ve ever scene. The absurdist sketches, many of which tugged on the same sci-fi thread, were ably performed by enthusiastic actors who know how to go big without all that theatrical bluster, and knew how to do subtle without worrying that we won’t know when to laugh. So much fun (and there’s only one show left — tonight).
View gallerywords: Michael Blancato | photos: Nora Quinn
The members of Bloc Party haven’t toured together in almost four years, but you wouldn’t know it based on Saturday’s show at The Troc. In fact, their set (see below) felt like a blast to Silent Alarm past, as the Londoners powered through 18 of their most anthemic songs, ditching keyboards for guitars in all but two of them. The result was a visceral journey through the band’s heavier hits with a few softer songs sprinkled in for good measure.
The bulk of Bloc Party’s set was comprised of material from Bloc Party’s newest album Four, but fans enthusiastically sang along to older jams “Hunting for Witches,” “Banquet,” and “One More Chance.” Even singer Kele Okereke’s short rendition of Rihanna’s “We Found Love” was met with uproarious applause that turned to rhythmic claps as the band transitioned into the dancey electronica of “Flux.” But these were exceptional moments – distorted guitar chords often accompanied Kele’s soaring choruses.
One consequence of EDM dominating the airwaves in recent years is a yearning for more guitar-based music, a return to times when bands rocked rather than bounced. Bloc Party rocked on Saturday night, stopping to acknowledge the electronic sounds of Intimacy only occasionally. This show was a reminder of what made Bloc Party an indie rock juggernaut years ago: thundering riffs, electrifying solos, and explosive drums. It’s good to have the old band back.
- So He Begins to Lie
- Octopus
- Hunting for Witches
- Positive Tension
- Kettling
- Song for Clay (Disappear Here)
- Banquet
- Coliseum
- Day Four
- One More Chance
- The Prayer
- We’re Not Good People
Encore
- Truth
- Ares
- This Modern Love
Second Encore
- Flux
- The Healing
- Helicopter
Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!
SHOW: Einstein/Tagore: Seashore of Endless Worlds
GROUP: Mangalam Dance and Shiva3
GENRE: Theater/Dance
ATTENDED: Sun., Sept. 16
CLOSES: Sun., Sept. 22
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: When Nobel-winning Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore met Einstein in 1930 they discussed science, religion and consciousness. Inspired by this encounter, [choreographer Bidisha] Dasgupta's work blends modern dance, Bharatanatyam Indian classical and Tagore's Rabindra Nritya dance style to explore our ties to the cosmos.
WE THINK: Taking place in the intimate front room of Twelve Gates Arts gallery in Old City, producer/choreographer/director/dancer Bidisha Dasgupta and fellow dancers Leslie Elkins and Jodi Obeid star in this diamond-in-the-Fringe-rough show inspired by the well-documented religion-versus-science discussions between Einstein and Tagore. Though there is some dialog — the dance routines are interspersed with quick, straight-from-the-script readings by Elkins and Obeid — the dancing is why you should put this on your Fringe itinerary. Dasgupta, decked out in gorgeous, traditional Indian garb, is a force, engaging every ounce of her being in routines that run the gamut from energetic and attention-demanding ("Mangalam: Honoring the Elements") to rip-your-heart-out passionate ("Trance"). Elkins and Obeid, both with backgrounds in contemporary dance, join in on a few numbers, too, most notably the final performance to Bikram Ghosh's refreshingly funky "Rhythm Speaks." It doesn't have the high-flying acrobatics you might find in some of the more-hyped Live Arts dance shows, but this little must-see will take you on a mesmerizing cultural journey you'll want to take again and again.
Every two weeks, Critical Mass will feature one Philly love note in its collaboration with blogger Emma Fried-Cassorla of phillylovenotes.com.
LOVE NOTE RECIPIENT: Duchamp's Étant donnés (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, French: Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
I AM: Scientist, artist, sometimes writer about science and art, distractable weirdo, slowsee-er
MY LOVE NOTE:
Dear Duchamp's Étant donnés,
Probably what I love about this piece is its hidden badassery. Duchamp, obviously was a complete 
badass, and he gave up the art world (somehow convincing everyone he had devoted his life to chess), to work on Étant donnés. He worked on it in semi-secret, maintaining the chess charade, for decades, (1946-66), and it wasn't unveiled until after his death.
So it is a secret piece and he made it for itself, and never had to confront a critical reception to it, though he did make it to be on display at the PMA. And obviously, looking at it — you realize that it's the work of someone completely obsessed. There is something weirdly tangible about that kind of stalker-y intense love produced in making something while obsessed by it and this piece, which I called "fucking-crazy-secret-naked-dead-waterfall" when I first saw it — and Étant donnés totally has it.
I stumbled on it in 2005. I knew about it, but somehow didn't realize it was at the PMA till my mom (my mom! of all people!) took me into this secret back room in the Duchamp section (thanks to Anne d'Harnoncourt the museum has one of the best Duchamp collections in the world) and pointed me to this mysterious door with strange peepholes ... and ... well, just total weirdness. One person at a time has to peep through the door, and of course you are instantly trapped in this bonkers voyeuristic scene. OK, so there's the mysterious Laura Palmer-y nude (there is a rip near her belly, btw. Check it out, poor thing), but the whole tableau is so weirdly composed and unbent at the same time: the landscape, the perfect, glitttery waterfall, the upraised lantern. It's so still, but it just seems like it's going to degenerate into chaos at any minute. The whole scene is full of untold stories. I don't know what to say. It's strange and brilliant and secret and it was made for here. This thing is a fucking treasure! I love you, Étant donnés.
Love, Alison Dell
P.S. The world should know that the PMA's upcoming "Dancing Around the Bride," celebrating Duchamp's influence on John Cage, Merce Cunnungham, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauchenberg, is going to be pretty great. It opens October 30.
Have a favorite spot you'd like to write a love note to? Send it to the author at phillylovenotes@gmail.com.
Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!
SHOW: Zero Cost House
GROUP: Pig Iron Theatre Company
GENRE: Theater
ATTENDED: Thu., Sept. 13, 7 p.m.
CLOSES: Sat., Sept 22
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Bring Toshiki Okada’s sly, personal, and idiosyncratic writing together with Pig Iron’s raucous performance spirit, and you have Zero Cost House, a time- and space-bending autobiographical production about drastic relocations, rereading Walden, remaking government, and the freedom and heaviness of that moment when what’s impossible becomes concrete.
WE THINK: I went in with high expectations — my experiences with Pig Iron haven't just been good, they've been "holy crap, that was the best production of Shakespeare I have ever seen" (as in last year's Twelfth Night) or something equally hand-flappy every single time. But Zero Cost House, an autobiographical sort of thing developed with Pig Iron by Japanese experimental playwright Toshiki Okada, isn't nearly as accessible as their previous source material. There's an interesting theme of recurrence with slight change, with moments and themes cycling back into the play in slightly different forms. For example: Both idealist, 23-year-old Okada and middle-aged, successful Okada are characters. Young Okada loves Thoreau's Walden and talks about it a lot in the first act; in the third act, Thoreau's ideas of cities as inherently toxic places come back in the form of Current Okada's paranoia about radiation poisoning if he stays in Tokyo after the Fukushima disaster. This sort of callback occurs in everything from music cues to throwaway lines to characters to big themes.
Further on this idea of cycles, each of the five actors slowly goes on a round-robin circuit through several characters over the play's three acts (every actor has a turn as Current Okada, for example). These shifts don't necessarily line up with a costume change or even the actor leaving the stage, which is interesting, and not confusing to follow, exactly. But I was a little disappointed that director Dan Rothenberg didn't give the audience a little more help following along by getting the ensemble's actors to be a little more consistent on each character's body language and speech mannerisms, as those are often the only thing the audience has to go on.
Instead, for example, Dito Van Reigersberg, as the first Current Okada, establishes the character as having some nervous hand movements and a slight stammer; as the character passes between actors, these come back to various degrees, but it definitely doesn't feel like the character is a discrete spirit, hopping from body to body. Young Okada, also passed around a few times, has hardly anything physical to distinguish himself as a character other than "usually sitting at a desk and writing." The audience is left sometimes trying figuring out who each actor solely by the context of what he or she is saying, which can start feeling like you're being forced to play a shell game. With that and the mystery of why people onstage occasionally get stuck in loops of movement, and playing "spot the recurrent idea," it's less like being sucked into the friendly world of Twelfth Night or Cankerblossom and more like trying to figure out a puzzle for a couple hours.
This didn't drive me as nuts as it did some. I can't say I've never been irritated when some acclaimed Live Arts production turns out to be embarrassingly pretentious and self-congratulatory (my shorthand among friends for this type of bummer is "a Ten-Minute Abraham Lincoln Hand Job," from a 2008 show that remains the only live-theater performance I've ever walked out of at intermission). But usually, the anger comes from a feeling of being tricked — like, "This play pretended like it had something of substance to say, and I feel foolish for trusting it now that it turns out to be all smoke and mirrors and empty shock." However, I very much didn't get the impression there was nothing going on underneath Zero Cost House — I just think there's so many variables involved that it might not all be getting across in one two-hour sitting.
(Incidentally, the weird promo photos with the small Asian child and the people in giant animal mascot heads have nothing to do with the production, other than an apparent play-within-a-play starring suburban bunnies, in full bunny suits, that is being acted out as Young Okada writes it. From what I've heard, Pig Iron only got the final script for Zero Cost House a couple weeks before it opened, which makes a lot of sense with those photos and a lot of other things about the production, too.)
Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!
SHOW: The End of Hope, the End of Desire
GROUP: Tiny Dynamite & Extreme Measures
GENRE: Theater
ATTENDED: Fri. Sept 14, 10 p.m.
CLOSES: Fri., Sept 21
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Two strangers meet up for a night of "anything goes" and are surprised to see where it takes them. Mice, god, fame, and Tony Blair are only a few of the things that come up in this hilarious comedy from Belfast playwright David Ireland about people trying to connect.
WE THINK: Fresh from describing the anal-sex proclivities of a beau in Raw Stitch, Corinna Burns runs down the block to Sansom Street’s church/theater, puts on a mouse mask, gets an Irish accent, jumps under the covers and confronts equally Irish Jared Michael Delaney on the topics of the sex they just had, the differences between Channel 4 and ITV, the need to hide and unwitting fame. With its bare-bones setting and quiet conversational largesse, End of Hope aims low but scores wildly high with a quietly absurd and delightful post-coital chat.
—A.D. Amorosi
Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!
SHOW: Raw Stitch
GROUP: Jaqueline Goldfinger
GENRE: Theater/monologues
ATTENDED: Fri., Sept. 14, 7 p.m.
CLOSES: Sat., Sept. 22
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: A pub play for the enthusiastically inebriated and sexually active. Nine spanking new monologues including Miss Coitus Interruptus, Double Slut Gene, and Hector Has Herpes (a Sing-A-Long STD PSA). A PBR, condoms, and dental dams included with the price of admission.
WE THINK: Eight Philly actresses (Amanda Schoonover, Miriam White, Corrina Burns, Bailey Shaw, Jennifer MacMillan, Hannah Van Sciver, Sarah Schol, Megan Slater) walk into a bar. There they meet Jacqueline Goldfinger’s texts and Anna Marquardt’s original songs for a night of poetic, character-driven ribaldry. Scratch that — these women hit up Quig’s Pub to talk frank and funny sexuality of the saltiest kind (sometimes literally, as in a bit about sucking in loads of sperm for its sodium chloride).
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