The 2015 Fringe Festival explodes into every nook and cranny of Philadelphia from September 3rd-19th. Performances take place in a variety of locations but the FringeArts’ waterfront location will remain the anchor of the Festival, staging late night programming every night and providing a place for audiences and artists to socialize and talk about their experiences with the day’s Festival shows.
Tickets are on sale now for FringeArts Curated programming in the 2015 Fringe Festival, presenting arts innovators from all over the globe and advancing Philadelphia’s dialogue with the international arts movement. “The Festival is an opportunity to look beyond the boundaries of our city and see what’s happening around the world,” according to President and Producing Artistic Director Nick Stuccio. “We’re curious about what artists are saying about the places in which they live, and through that process of sharing and exchanging, we learn about our world and ourselves.”
With regards to DANCE, the curated programming offers up these delights …
Lucinda Childs, one of the most celebrated choreographers of the modern era, revives Available Light (September 10-12), her seminal 1983 collaboration with composer John Adams and architect Frank Gehry. Within the large, open confines of the Drexel Armory the Gehry-designed set is built anew, with two industrial platforms for dancers (three on top, eight on the bottom), along with chain link fencing, and a lighting design that plays off the natural surroundings of the space. The music by John Adams was inspired by the variations of natural light on a landscape. Created on synthesizers played by Adams, along with some ghostly horns, the score exists only as a recording (not to be played live) with all its sonic dynamics becoming carefully crafted arrangements.
Available Light is about space, time, and the interaction of dance, light, sound, and architecture. Movements and patterns are exchanged between the dancers of the upper level and the bottom level in a choreography that continually evolves at subtly shifting angles at exquisitely arranged intervals. The full effect is that of a complete work of art, beyond a singular viewpoint, a deeply realized artistic encounter that creates a world of its own and is a joy for the senses.
David Zambrano, a highly regarded experimental choreographer and improviser, is known for bringing wildly unique, high intensity movement out of his dancers’ bodies. In Soul Project (September 18-19), an international cast of virtuosic dancers performs a series of mesmerizing dance solos to live recordings of classic soul songs—from Aretha Franklin to James Brown.
Each night the order of the solos and their location in the space changes, as a dancer will create a “center stage” wherever he or she decides to. Throughout the performance, audiences roam freely, get up close to the cast, and witness the dance from the angle of their choosing. The experience is intimate—you can feel every tremble and sigh of the dancers’ bodies—and communal, a shared experience in the discovery of sublime expression.
Photo credit: Phile Deprez
Two dancers – Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido – play out scenes of male friendship, machismo, and the naked male body in this mischievous dance, a kaleidoscopic view of friendship—rife with tensions and aggressions, clumsy desires of harmony and virtue, whispered tunes of togetherness and solitude. Still Standing You (September 9-11) is a daring, hilarious dance work that travels from the aggressive to the intimate, and the forms two bodies create.
With a dance idiom entirely their own Pieter and Gui shamelessly, and mischievously, seek out what they mean to each other. Are they friends, partners, lovers, rivals or even enemies? The only instrument they can use is their own body, the irony of their displays of muscle, the intensity of their boyish friendship, the capacity to turn one’s limitations into virtuosity and the ability to combine all this into a dynamic performance in which ruggedness, anger, and love are entwined in one great physical and all- encompassing embrace.
The 2015 Fringe Festival runs September 3rd – 19th, 2015. Tickets for most shows are priced between $10 and $29; some shows are free. Students and Festival-goers age 25 or younger receive $5 off tickets to all shows priced above $10 and pay $15 for tickets to FringeArts Curated shows. Discounted tickets are available to Members. Members save 30% on all shows (including year-round programming), can exchange tickets, receive admission to exclusive artist receptions and other special events, and enjoy priority seating at select performances. Groups of 10+ save 25%.
Tickets to the FringeArts Curated shows are on sale at FringeArts.com or via phone at 215-413-1318. Tickets to all other 2015 Fringe Festival shows will go on sale by the end of July.
