Dance at the Fringe: Something missing

After a week of decompressing from 16 days on the streets, I'm looking back on Philadelphia's 2012 Live Arts/Fringe Festival with mixed feelings. I'm primarily a dance writer, and there were slim pickings for me this year in the realm of pure dance, or what the festival's producing director Nick Stuccio likes to call dancey-dance— and most of that came from the Fringe, the self-produced side of the festival.

That situation, Stuccio said, was mainly due to the absence this year of funding from Dance Advance (the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage funder) "But they've always funded us before and we'll apply again next year," he added hopefully.

The festival did include circus arts, body art and physical theater. And on the Live Arts curated side, Stuccio programmed several conceptual or social art projects related to community involvement and audience building. At these, artists bring in amateur performers, who in turn learn the inside workings of making a performance and then become ambassadors for art in their own circles or neighborhoods.

Surprised spectators

From Montreal, Sylvain Émard's Le Grand Continental featured some 200 non-dancers line dancing in front of the Art Museum steps. Of course some ringers infiltrated the corps of volunteers. But in all, the event created a 30-minute, free spectacle to the surprise of many onlookers who hadn't known any performance was scheduled.

Émard's corps rehearsed for several months. But since they're unpaid, non-professional performers, I had difficulty reviewing the work or saying more than it succeeded at what it set out to do.

The same goes for Headlong Dance Theater's project, This Town is a Mystery, which took place in four private homes in different neighborhoods of the city. The performers were the family members and the ten-person audiences (who brought potluck dinners), and the topics were family and neighborhood stories, as directed and choreographed by the Headlongers, Amy Smith, David Brick and Andrew Simonet.

Now, if I walked into someone's house and didn't like the wallpaper, would I have to say (vide Oscar Wilde), either it goes, or I do?

We did get a lot of professional movement and some original pure dance in at least three other categories:

Astonishing somersaults

Sequence 8, from Montreal, was one of the most sought-after tickets, following the group's spectacle of Sequence 7 last year. The astonishing somersaults on the Russian board"“ a long, flexible board held on the shoulders of two men— seemed effective as choreographed athletics, but it had less to do with dance as with figure skating or gymnastics, which operate on different criteria.

Brian Sanders's Gate Reopened came closer to dance— a marvel to behold, too, with its floor-to-ceiling multipurpose apparatus smacked down in the middle of Pier 9. The space is about the size of the Hippodrome in Istanbul, where the Empress Theodora's father fought bears that were probably kept in a cage more rudimentary than this.

The dancers reinforced that image when they came running through the audience and did a turn around the structure, looking gladiatorial as all get out. But the design, with its necessary focus on the dancers' safety, may have left Sanders too little time to put the same effort into his choreography.

Don't get me wrong— Gate Reopened was worth the ticket price. But the ending, which seemed to be going somewhere with the water and the mists, abruptly cut off as if Sanders had finally run out of ideas. And that would be unthinkable, wouldn't it?

Architectural poem

Leah Stein's Hoist took on the Maas Building up on Randolph Street without doing a thing to it. She simply exploited that beautifully stripped former trolley repair shop by blending her own and her dancers' bodies into the organics of brick, mortar and metal for an architectural poem. Stein often luxuriated on a high beam like the Cheshire Cat, as David Konyk, Michele Tantico and Jungwoong Kim variously draped themselves from the rafters, or used those rafters as balance beams or hooked their flexed feet over the beams and swung from them.

The piece was sweaty and gymnastic, but it never looked like it stepped out of dance. It certainly wasn't dancey-dance.

Cleanest and sweetest

When we audience members arrived at Colony up at the Pig Iron School on North Second Street, Kelly Bond and Melissa Krodman were already running in place in tandem with Greg Svitil's minimal sound design. To me, this was the cleanest, sweetest, most mesmerizing dance I saw at the Festival. The two were dressed in French-cut, black-and-white-striped leotards and matching sneakers, the only other color they wore (other than their exertion-reddened cheeks) was their bright red lipstick.

We took our places around the perimeter of the room, standing or sitting on the floor while the dancers created multiple variations on the running and jumping steps, covering the space forward and in reverse and on the diagonal, X-ing out the space and making eye contact with us. At points, each of them stood before selected audience members, pronouncing, "I'm in love with you"— which was more amusing than disconcerting.

Some Festival devotees might place Sophie Bortulussi's haunting choreography in Thaddeus Phillips's Red Eye to Havre de Grace in the category below. Her body movements were so sinuous, so graceful and so nightmarish that only a dancer/choreographer with her sensitivity could have intertwined it into the play's brilliant dreamscape. Bortulussi made us want to follow her dance to death just as much as Phillips's Edgar Allan Poe did.

Physical theater: Death at 27

Mining the Mine of the Mind for Minderals, by dancer/choreographer Megan Mazarick and actor Mason Rosenthal (with Michael Kiley's music and Ryan Kelly's design), was a title too long for this short piece. The movement and text based on Antonio Damasio's and Eckhart Tolle's work on the mind managed to spoof and pay homage to the two thinkers while simultaneously making us think as well.

Whit MacLaughlin's 27 was a surprise hit for me. It featured singers who died at age 27— Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse. As Morrison, Kevin Meehan's running jumps— freeze-framed while gazing out at the audience as if startled by his own death"“ was very funny in its first iteration. But the mordant message ultimately struck deep and disturbing chords with each exact repetition.

Naked and fleshy

After seeing in-your-face nudity in several shows, some with not-so-beautiful bodies, I ventured with some trepidation into Untitled Feminist Show. Although I was grateful to be in a center seat when one of its raft of hefty-fleshed ladies burst out into the audience, the six alleged "stars" of downtown (Manhattan) burlesque and cabaret theater performed Young Jean Lee's experiment with such joie de vivre that I couldn't help but be charmed along with everyone else.

Idiopathic Ridiculopathy's Ivona, Witold Gombrowicz's wounding satire on pre World War II Polish upper classes, was an exceptional effort, if a bit overdrawn.

Toshiki Okada's Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech had far less text than Zero Cost House, the overbearing, preachy play he wrote for Pig Iron. The movement and dance of the fine Japanese cast translated Okada's wit, style and psychological insights more effectively.

Finally, a performance feat in itself, the Feastival— the FUNdraiser held in Pier 9— kicked off the Festival. Some 100 restaurants from Amis to Zahav proffered little bites that added up to a banquet. You sipped prosecco, bit into a prawn, watched Sanders's pros flying squirrel-like overhead and anticipated the two weeks of shows to come.