Philly Fringe 2024: _mixlit presents Line///////Movements

Two standouts in a worthwhile evening

Two pieces struck me as standouts for the evening. The first was Evalina Carbonell’s interpretive dance to Massimo Elijah’s poetry, gorgeous in Body of Clay. Carbonell, wrapped in a long, dark cloth, unwound her way across the performance area, leaving a path of blue in her wake. Elijah handed her a brown paper bag of potting soil, which she emptied along the path she had come. As he performed his poem, tying us all to Earth by the clay we are made of, Carbonell held up fistfuls of dirt and danced around him. The poem extolled the embrace of nature, telling us that we are made of Earth and love, and as always, Carbonell’s dancing was technically grounded and evocative of the message in the poem.

Poet Sekai’afua Zankel’s playlet, The Ancestors Let Them Come In, was a wistful reflection on loss and aging. Zankel, in a brightly-printed red dashiki top, played an older woman living alone in an apartment building. She chattered a bit about snacks and wine, then opened a small chest, drawing out a string of pearls—her grandmother’s jewelry, she said—and Alison Lubar, her grandmother as a young woman, entered with a brief but lively dance. Zankel called up grandpa, and Elijah crossed the performance space crouched over a cane but still dancing. We did not see Uncle Mel, but Zankel assured him she was not ready to come with him yet and greeted yet more invisible ancestors before heading out to party. I found the play inspiring in a way—our ancestors welcomed as dear companions, even in spirit form.

Hopeful movement

In Things To Do When You Are Alone, Longmire’s poem encouraged dancer Caiola to take a breath: “Your arms can move mountains,” he said, and “You are enough,” as she shed her grey hoodie to reveal a crop top the color of bright sunshine underneath. Caiola set After the Assault to the voices of assault survivors she interviewed for a Capital Public Radio podcast in Sacramento. The three dancers embodied the voices talking about their lingering fear and their loss of self and self-love, but a poem offered hope: planting a seed of the self that grows in the dark. The piece ended with Lubar drawing an eerie tone from a crystal singing bowl.

Miryam Coppersmith and Mazel Mones rounded out the evening with a clowning piece. Dressed in contrasting black and white polka dots, they twined around each other with non-verbal cues—crying, laughing, and more complex emotions, and Noah David Roberts and Aleesha Polite performed another choreo-poem.

Missing philadelphiadance.org

Every September, the Philly Fringe gathers artists, both well-known and less so, under the festival’s umbrella. But chatting with Dancefusion director Gwendolyn Bye before the show, we mourned the loss of philadelphiadance.org, Philly’s go-to website for dance throughout the year. It disappeared with the abrupt closing of UArts at the end of June, and as the arts season opens, it will be orders of magnitude more difficult for companies and audiences, and even us reviewers, to find each other.