"Car' at Fringe Festival

Car was an ambitious Fringe Festival experiment of Kate Watson-Wallace and her Anonymous Bodies group, who continue to push performance into the unexpected settings that reveal that all of life is a stage for performers, so y'all should climb on board. In Car, the director/choreographer took audiences of three or four in a car ride within the parking garage at the northwest corner of 40th and Walnut Streets, up and down parking levels and creating something of a cinematic experience as one watched, through car windows, a variety of scenes tending toward the aggressive and violent.

These latter, involving a drunk intersecting the car and a crowd shouting, "Get out of the car," or a foreshortened domestic drama within the car, didn't work as well as Watson-Wallace's more imaginative creations, like the initial soap sudsing of the outside windows (itself an often unwelcome intervention on city streets), which then led to video images projected from a hidden projector on the rear trunk and reflected off the inside of the soapy windshield.

And when, on the garage's roofless top floor, the company played with rolling a 2,000-pound car back and forth over an inclined surface, the minimalism of the action of simply pushing and "catching" a brakeless car resonated more than the earlier high-intensity theatrical scenes.

Committed performers included Lea Fulton, Makoto Hirano, Alexandra Holmes, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. John Luna, Chrissie Lotterer, Lorin Lyle, Megan Mazarick, Shannon Murphy, Claudia van Poperingen, and Alie Vidich.