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Arts
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 Hoarder’s Child
GROUP: Blue Scarf Collective
GENRE: Theater
ATTENDED: Fri., Sept. 14, 1 p.m.
CLOSES: Sat., Sept. 15
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: A one woman play about things we consume and stories we tell ourselves: a child lives alone amid left behind stuff. Acting out an interruption to her routine, she reveals a violent past and the horrors inhabiting her space. Her yearning for contact takes us on a journey of humor, pathos, and hope.
WE THINK: In The Hoarder’s Child, Joanna Sycz plays a girl of indeterminate age as she wakes up one morning amid the detritus accumulated by her dead mother, surveys her filthy conditions, and splits her attention between memories of the woman who raised her and snatches of overheard conversations between the new owners now standing outside her door. In her notes, playwright Heather Jones draws parallels between obsessive-compulsive hoarding behavior and our society’s general tendency to overconsume. It’s a connection worth exploring, but one that goes completely unaddressed in Jones’ play. In fact, running closer to 35 minutes than the advertised 45-minute running time, The Hoarder’s Child barely addresses anything other than the stunted development of a person who inherited everything and nothing — and even that rings false.
—M.J. Fine
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: RUB
GROUP: Gunnar Montana and Jazmin Zieroff
GENRE: Movement/dance
ATTENDED: Thu., Sept. 13, midnight
CLOSES: Sept. 22
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Get hot, heavy, and hard for art. Performance erotica glazed with grunge, booze, and cigarette butts. Sit back and indulge while “experienced" rule breakers steam up the windows and tear down your morals. Be prepared.
WE THINK: The vintage-feeling, smoked-stained Latvian Society turns out to be the perfect venue for RUB, Fringe’s racy modern dance spectacle of writhing, oiled-up bodies.
Featuring four dancers and comprised of a series of thematic shorts, the show is at once dark and humorous, seductive and thought provoking. It is creatively exotic without being pornographic (except when mockingly so) and leaves the audience with a different kind of appreciation for the body as a vehicle of art. Where some of the quick costume changes and industrial props made transitions a bit choppy, the talented dancers and spot-on set design, lighting and soundtrack well made up for any of those hitches.
—Courtney Sexton
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: Creditors
GROUP: Philadelphia Artists' Collective
GENRE: Theater
ATTENDED: Thu., Sept. 13, 8 p.m.
CLOSES: Sun., Sept. 23
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Past and present collide in Strindberg's Creditors, an intimate performance at the historical Franklin Inn. This searing drama examines the costs of love, jealousy, and the weight of our pasts. Presented by the PAC (Changes of Heart), and starring Krista Apple, Damon Bonetti, and Dan Hodge.
WE THINK: PAC specializes in inspired revivals of lesser-known, seldom-seen classics, and their riveting intimate production of Creditors is as emotionally violent as their vast and bloody Duchess of Malfi two years ago. The Franklin Inn Club's cozy library, seating fifty just inches from the action, hosts a stylish, sexy thriller about suave Gustav (Bonetti), who by his own admission gets into sculptor Adolph's (Hodge) head and "jams a stick in the works," poisoning his love for wife Tekla (Apple), an independent author on her second husband. "The last person a man should trust is his wife," Gustav purrs, and even while we chuckle, we know that when it comes to love twisted by jealousy, no one is above suspicion. While nudity and spectacle pull more attention during the Live Arts-Fringe Festivals, Creditors shows that nothing succeeds better than genuinely acted, smartly directed, down-and-dirty drama.
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: Silken Veils
GROUP: Leila Ghaznavi and Pantea Productions
GENRE: Theater
ATTENDED: Wed., Sept. 12, 7 p.m.
CLOSES: Sat., Sept. 15
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Nominated for a Fringe First for best new work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (“Magical and Enchanting 5 stars!” - The Scotsman) Silken Veils combines Rumi poetry, puppetry, animation and Iranian history. Darya questions the value of love as she relives her chaotic childhood during the Iran-Iraq War.
WE THINK: At first, audience members may wonder if Darya — having just fled her wedding into a storage closet — has lost her mind, or if she’s just lost in her memories, as her dead brother returns to life, bringing with him her parents and childhood, all represented both through puppets and the silhouettes of never-seen cast members, acting behind a backlit screen. But Silken Veils quickly reels you into the story behind the story: how Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 and later the Iran-Iraq War tore apart a family, slaying some with landmines and others with sheer grief. It’s no light subject matter, this investigation of whether to love in a world with so much loss is a futile endeavor. But the clever use of projected animation, dance, poetry and marionettes and other puppets makes it an exciting and unpredictable ride.
Existential dilemmas, questions of conscience and magical treatises on daily living (to say nothing of his deconstruction of the detective story) brought the literary toast of Brooklyn Paul Auster to our attention. Since the time of his earliest audacious works The Invention of Solitude, The New York Trilogy and Disappearances: Selected Poems, Auster has become an incisive self-absorbed chronicler of missing fathers, Asceticism, and the algebra of failure. Though a master of fiction and a delight as a poet, Auster is at his fullest as an essayist, and Winter Journal is a personal best. It’s not just that Auster looks upon his own passing of time with glee. He makes the reader part of the joy and melancholy of watching the woman you love sleep or taking an inventory of the scars that we hide.
Tonight, Thu., Sept 13, 7:30 p.m., $7-$15, Free Library of Philadelphia, (central branch), 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.
The Gazela isn’t your run-of-the-mill handsomely aged boat. You could blame its current acclaim on the fact that the Penn’s Landing legend is the oldest wooden tall ship still sailing in American waters. But seafaring status such as the Gazela’s certainly owes something to its occasionally visiting (and performing) bustier-and-fishnet wearing dignitaries from Philadelphia’s Seven Deadly Seas. That’s the crack team of burlesque locals (Peekaboo Revue’s Melissa “Bang-Bang” Forgione, Shoshanna Ruth, Kimberlie Cruse and Christine Fisler) and gypsy music practitioners (led by Jay Purdy and Sarah Lawson) that gather aboard the Gazela to act out strip-and-peels (in PG, not X fashion) and sing sea shanties with a pirate theme. There’s always a variation on that buccaneering theme (this season it’s corporate panty raiding) and, of course, the run of Stowaways & Sellouts, runs coincidentally with Sept. 19’s “Talk like a Pirate Day.”
Starts tonight, Thu., Sept. 13, 9 p.m. Runs through Sept. 23, $15-$25, The Gazela, Penn's Landing, Columbus Blvd and Market St.
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: Notes on the Emptying of a City
GROUP: Ashley Hunt
GENRE: Performance art
ATTENDED: Tue., Sept. 11. 7 p.m.
CLOSES: Sept. 11
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: In a performance acting as a dismantled film, a narrator pieces together the sounds, images, and voiceover of a documentary before a live audience. Seated at a desk with a text and a laptop computer, artist and activist Ashley Hunt weaves video-testimonies of survivors together with his own personal recollections as a documentarian and organizer in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
While new disasters and emergencies move through the headlines on a daily basis, the political and human crisis of Katrina has, for many, receded into the past. Notes on the Emptying of a City brings back to the present the ruined and emptied homes, the cataloguing marks left by soldiers and police, and the prison that the city refused to evacuate. Hunt’s performance re-opens complex questions of race, visibility, and speech, which still beg for answers.
WE THINK: In a place where law has been suspended and at a time when people are scrambling to survive, Ashley Hunt could have gone in a variety of directions while covering New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Really, he could have honed in on just about anything and made a documentary out of it. He doesn't do that, though. Despite being deeply immersed in the scene for several months, Hunt speaks from a position of being a step away from the action. As he states early on, "My audience won't be able to consume this greedily like something strewn together on Fox News to run in between commercials." He gives the survivors a voice, but also manages to tackle race relations, abandoned buildings, and the media's presence.
Split into two parts, it starts off as a fairly straight-forward production. However, after sharing his collection of notes and shot footage Hunt opens the floor up for discussion. He explains that whenever he takes Notes to a new city, he records this portion and it is added to the official record of his findings. Which is to say that the piece will never be completely finished, but then again the work in New Orleans won't either.
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 Edge of Our Bodies
GROUP: Theatre Exile
GENRE: Theater
ATTENDED: Tue., Sept. 11, 7 p.m.
CLOSES: Sun., Sept. 23
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Adam Rapp (Red Light Winter) captures with startling intimacy the vulnerability and insight of a teenage girl at the threshold of adult experience. Somewhere “just beyond the edge of what we know. Where the skin contains us.” A Philadelphia premiere directed by Matt Pfeiffer, starring Nicole Erb.
WE THINK: The Edge of Our Bodies presents a tale — perhaps a tall one — told in the first person, by Bernadette (Nicole Erb), a 16 year-old girl who leaves her boarding school to give some unexpected news to her boyfriend in New York. Initially reading from a journal, she shares the windmills of her mind about a series of encounters, which reveal her to be precocious, vulnerable and confused; she wants to be noticed and invisible at the same time. Or maybe not. Bernadette is an aspiring writer and she might be making the whole thing up.
It’s a keen portrait of an anguished teen, with a dash of meta-theater tossed in, and if you’re drawn into Bernadette’s drama, you may find the meticulous nuance of playwright Adam Rapp’s script quite poignant. Or, you could lapse into ennui and think this is all just a bunch of whining from a poor little rich girl. I found it a bit of both. Erb’s delivery is intentionally dry, with occasional flickers of energy, the script seems dark for the sake of dark, and that gets tiring.
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 Big Nude Pinhole Shoot
GROUP: RA Friedman/Tsirkus Fotografika
GENRE: Photography
ATTENDED: Tue., Sept. 11, 9 p.m. at Ven and Vaida Gallery
CLOSES: Mon., Sept. 17 at The Rotunda
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Meet the artist and sign up to bare it all, make some amazing art, and get a free archival print as artist RA Friedman uses primitive photographic tools to fashion a dazzling tableau. Tsirkus Fotografika, (Tsirkus.org) or the "Photographic Circus," was founded in 2008 by artist RA Friedman and is an ongoing non-profit, public arts project based in Philadelphia, PA, designed to bring the creative process directly to communities and document populations at their most lively. Since 2010, Tsirkus has been working toward doing multi-figure nude public shoots using pinhole photography. The 2012 Fringe event is the first.
WE THINK: If you didn’t sign up to be snapped by Friedman — Philadelphia’s premier photographer dedicated to ages-old techniques, film stock and experimentalism — you can’t act voyeuristically at his nude Sept. 17 shoot where all but a pinhole of light will shine through the darkness of the Rotunda. That doesn’t mean you’ll miss out completely. Last night, a klatch of Philadelphia models, professional and novice, signed up anonymously to have their naked selves photographed by Mr. Friedman. Once there, they got a glimpse of Friedman’s rotogravure-like techniques as applied to other naked models, wedding participants and cabaret/burlesque performers. Those photographs will stay on the walls of the Ven and Vaida throughout September.
—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: Le Mirage/Dead City Philly
GROUP: DysFUNctional Theater
GENRE: Rock opera
ATTENDED: Mon., Sept. 10, 8 p.m.
CLOSES: Tue., Sept. 11
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Jenny is alive. Claudine is a ghost. They're lookalikes who want the same man. Who will win his love? Based on Georges Rodenbach's 1892 novella, Bruges la Morte. Re-imagined as a rock opera. Set in Philly. Debuted at Fringe 2011. Includes new songs, added scenes. Back by popular demand.
WE THINK: The love triangle is just about the oldest plotline there is, so how do you make it fresh again? Well, making the spurned woman a ghost whom her ex is obsessed with bringing back to life is one way to go. This is director/writer/bandleader Janet Bressler’s supposedly partly “autobiographical tale,” told through the music of Sylvia Platypus, a rock band that here functions as character, narrator and Greek chorus. And the music is worth a listen: 14 catchy, original songs featuring Bressler’s high-energy performance and Etta James-low vocals, an impressive variety of bagpipes played by Charlie Rutan and guitar from prog-rock veteran Bill Barone. The ballad “Claudine 2,” especially, and “If It Don’t Kill Me First,” co-written by Bressler and the prolific Scot Sax, will stick in your head for hours. The other highlight is Lesley Berkowitz, performing a profoundly creepy modern-dance interpretation of Claudine’s ghost, lurching across the stage and slithering onto the floor. Now, the downside: The clunky acted scenes between the songs, which sometimes felt like half-assed interstitials and other times dragged on way longer than the relatively straightforward plotline required. Also, the constant slideshow of photos and video projected behind the performers, though it occasionally helped to advance the story, more often had the feel of either a karaoke backing video or someone’s wedding PowerPoint. Still, it’s easy to see why Dead City was revived and expanded for a second year at Fringe; if they bring it back next year, we hope they’ll lose the slideshow, keep the necrophilia.
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