Philly Fringe 2024: Gunnar Montana Productions presents BLACK WOOD: WINTERBORN

Narratively, the new hour-long piece seems more coherent. It begins where the story ended last year: in a forest of snow-covered trees (designed by Montana and Will Bryant) that surround the audience.

The witches, who last year dropped the dead body of dancer Frank Leone’s character into a well, hoist them out again, covered in blood and slime and suspended in a sling of chains. As Leone hangs overhead, four dancers circle the well, a glowing orb in each hand. They swoop low, rise up, and their arms sway in what is easily the most beautiful dancing in the show. Then Leone returns to life, becoming one of the witches via a tortured wallow in a pool of slime. WINTERBORN isn’t about beauty so much as it evokes the grotesque of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights: sensual, nearly naked bodies interspersed with dark images of torment.

Murder, resurrection, and grisly fates

The first act foreshadows the story that follows: the witches catch a handsome woodsman in a bear trap. They kill and cannibalize him, but one of their number (Katherine Corbett) mourns our hero and resurrects him with a little bit of spell-work and his bloody skull. Teddy Fatscher plays the hero, resurrected out of a cauldron of sorts set on a table surrounded by audience members. The duet that follows, low lift after low lift, is acrobatic and performed nearly naked (most of the show is danced topless, in G-strings). It’s sexy, but I did not find it passionate, and I wondered whether that was the complexity of the dance or a carefulness about a vulnerable dance partner.

In this darkly gothic tale, however, the coven will have none of that happy stuff. They perform a ceremony involving bursts of candle flames to summon the Goddess. Mika Romantic, resplendent in the head of a horned owl and bedecked with fox tails and ruffles, pronounces the lovers’ grisly fate before she sheds her trappings to dance naked in all her generous proportions.

Approach with care

Throughout the performance, the story shifts between the beautiful and the grotesque: the work on a pole swaying from the ceiling is eye-popping in its complexity as each dancer performs singly or in pairs. Fatscher, in particular, is powerful and elegant, clad in jeans with his body held at an angle to the pole, supported only by his extended arms. Jessica Daley and Desiree Navall, in flesh-colored G-strings, perform a complex, sensual duet suspended in a ball made of just two crossed hoops. In a more bondage-centric section, the dancers perform a full-body cats cradle, with a slick cord tying them together by their wrists and wrapping their necks.

There were a few glitches—a couple of the dancers slipped in liquid that had gotten onto the floor during one of the ceremonial bits, and a couple of the lifts seemed a little insecure, but the piece was difficult and well-performed. The violence is extreme, however; WINTERBORN is not for the squeamish.

Know before you go: WINTERBORN is for adult audiences, and no one under 18 will be admitted without a parent or guardian.

At top: Frank Leone in Gunnar Montana’s BLACK WOOD: WINTERBORN. (Photo by Garrett Matthews.)