The 2010 Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival is over, after sixteen days of nearly non-stop performances. As anticipated, Lucinda Childs’ Dance–a re-staging of the original piece of 1979–with film by Sol LeWitt and music by Philip Glass, was the exemplar to which all other avant-garde work should aspire. With Childs’ roots in the original “fringe” of conceptual artists at New York’s Judson Memorial Church in the early 1960s (which offered unconventional figures like Yoko Ono, Allan Kaprow, and Claes Oldenburg a place to show their work), these trailblazers all helped to redefine dance, music, theater, and the visual arts.
By Debra Miller The 2010 Festival line-up is staggering, with nearly 1,200 performances of approximately 200 shows, ranging from theater and comedy to dance, music, and the visual arts.