"Dancing Dead' by Brian Sanders

Works by the choreographer Brian Sanders succeed or fail for the same reason. As an artist, Sanders bursts with big ideas, and consequently his pieces either excite or fall short depending on the limits of his imagination.

For his Dancing Dead, Sanders drew inspiration from the death of two friends and set his work among the recently deceased in a graveyard. His set transformed the sub-basement of a Philadelphia condo building into a landscape of grass patches, slabs covering sarcophagi, mounds of freshly lain dirt and a wheelbarrow with a skeleton and a new corpse.

Dancing Dead also coincides with a zombie-mania that's infected American culture for at least a decade. The undead have ambled across all genres, from movies (Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, remakes of George Romero classics) to adult-themed TV shows ("The Walking Dead") to graphic novels and even books— first Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and, lately, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim.

Even Philadelphia theater groups have succumbed to the craze; in successive seasons, Plays and Players staged William Shakespeare's Land of the Dead and an original production of Zombie! The Musical.

Do zombies have feelings?

Works about the dead brought back to life capture not only our fascination with apocalyptic scenarios but also with our own mortality. Where Shelley's Frankenstein dealt with the Promethean aspects of reviving the deceased, zombies— as walking and waking dead— ask another set of questions entirely, to wit:

With only bodies, and no higher-cortex cognition, would our emotions still resonate through our limbs? Would our fingertips still long to caress another, our skins still crave affectionate stroking? As creative genres go, dance answers these questions best— and Dancing Dead answers them ingeniously with a resounding "yes."

Like Juliet's tomb

In the opening movement, a caretaker (Sanders) waltzes in on rollerskates. He unpacks one body from a wheelbarrow and drags another from a mound of dirt, laying them on a slab next to one another. When their bodies touch, the pair awakens—she first, like Juliet in the Capulets' crypt. It's the piece's most charming and vital moment.

Sanders reinforces the concepts of love and loss with a thematically tailored musical selection that includes "Annie's Song" and "Bridge Over Troubled Waters." Although Sanders infuses most of the segments with a haunting tenderness, his awakened bodies also reflect the persistence of anger and hostility. The dancers, having partnered off, still prove capable of fighting with loved ones, pushing and shoving away those who come too close.

Limited vocabulary

It's a brilliant and original concept. Still, if you've seen one Sanders piece, you've seen the limits of his movement vocabulary.

While he left out his signature whimsical humor, Dancing Dead includes the remaining crowd-pleasing stock from Sanders's limited bag of tricks. Two girls strap on harnesses to swing over slabs. Dancers perform incredible feats of bodyweight strength, climbing onto a pillar's ledge, holding their torsos and legs straight out from the pillar or forming a suspended inverted cross using it as a brace. Later, the ensemble members drape their bodies over wires to spin in a void to the chilling refrain of "Who Knows Where the Time Goes."

Most of the final movements served only as ego gratification for Sanders. The adoring zombies carry him aloft, or watch as Sanders swings about a rope that hoists him into an Ascension-like pose.

Live Arts as incubator

Other Live Arts stalwarts have used the Fringe Festival to evolve and develop their craft. Hamlet actor Geoff Sobelle performs magic tricks in Elephant Room, Headlong Dance Company's Red Rover experiments with movement, audience participation and multimedia; and the Fringe veteran Adrienne Mackey switches from serious themes explored with wacky comedy to a feminist diatribe about Shakespeare's Macbeth in Lady M.

By contrast, the disappointing Dancing Dead merely brings a promising if limited choreographer one year closer to death without yet leaving memorable new movement to live on in his name.