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.

Lucinda Childs’ Dance, (with music by Philip Glass and film by Sol LeWitt). Photo by Sally Cohn.

In a league of its own, and superseding any list of top picks, is Lucinda Childs’ Dance, with music by Philip Glass and film by the late Sol LeWitt.  It’s uplifting that these universally respected avant-garde giants of the 20th century, whose Minimalist/Conceptual work was misunderstood and criticized in its early years, would acknowledge their experimental roots and bring a reprise of their interdisciplinary collaboration to the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.  The two surviving members of this dream team will be on hand for a pre-show discussion on Sept. 10; this is your chance to converse with living legends.

Along with Dance, my top 10 Best Bets for 2010 are:
•    EgoPo, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (Fringe)
•    Theatre Exile, Iron (Fringe)
•    Luna Theater, Thom Pain (based on nothing) (Fringe)
•    Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, ¡El Conquistador! (Live Arts)
•    Jérôme Bel, Cédric Andrieux (Live Arts)
•    Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Romeo and Juliet (Live Arts)
•    Nevermore Theater Project, The Tell-Tale Heart (Fringe)
•    Hyphen-Nation Arts, The Jane Goodall:  Experience (Fringe)
•    Plays and Players, Hear Again Radio Project (Fringe)
•    Madhouse Theater Company, Dysfictional Circumstances (Fringe)

Ensemble in EgoPo’s Marat/Sade. Photo by Joshua Wallace.

The top three productions are by a trio of the most consistently excellent, compelling theater companies in Philadelphia.

Following its stirring adaptation of Beckett’s Company last year, EgoPo will kick off its “Theater of Cruelty” season at the Fringe with Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade.  Brenna Geffers directs a roster of all-stars, including Ross Beschler, Steven Wright, David Blatt, and Theatre Exile’s Joe Canuso, in the controversial and unrelentingly sadistic play-within-a-play, staged in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Catharine Slusar in Theatre Exile’s Iron. Photo by Robert Hakalski.

Theatre Exile, too, returns to the Festival after a five-year hiatus, with Philly Fringe co-founder Deborah Block (co-artistic director at Exile) directing award-winning actresses Catharine Slusar and Kim Carson in Iron.  Set in a woman’s prison, Iron tells the story of a mother and daughter struggling to come to terms with each other, and with themselves, 15 years after a brutal murder.

Poster for Luna’s Thom Pain (based on nothing). Photo by Scott Fowler.

And Gregory Scott Campbell directs another of Luna Theater’s characteristically quirky shows, Thom Pain–a haunting anecdotal monologue by New York playwright Will Eno, which won the Fringe First Award in Edinburgh.  With their accomplished casts, directors, and design teams, these disturbing dramas promise to be the most professional of the Festival, while still exhibiting the cutting-edge intensity for which the companies, and the Fringe, are known.

Thaddeus Phillips in Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental’s ¡EL CONQUISTADOR! Photo by Evan Kafka.

My next three picks are part of the Live Arts Festival, distinguished from the Philly Fringe by selection process.  The Philly Fringe is unfiltered; both new and established artists can present their work without an invitation or preliminary judging.  Live Arts features renowned contemporary performing artists from the U.S. and around the world, who have been invited to the Festival by producing director Nick Stuccio.

Thaddeus Phillips’ Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental was selected to present its innovative fusion of live theater and film, ¡El Conquistador!  Combining the daydreams of an impoverished underdog with the popular phenomenon of telenovelas (Latin American soap operas), the performance (presented in Spanish, with English supertitles) makes reference to such classic sources as Hamlet and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Cédric Andrieux in Jérôme Bel’s Cédric Andrieux. Photo by Jaime Roque de la Cruz.

Also noteworthy in Live Arts is Cédric Andrieux, a behind-the-scenes autobiography of the eponymous French dancer, in collaboration with choreographer Jérôme Bel.  I can’t help but think of Avedon’s famous photos of Nureyev’s feet, evincing the torturous training that results in a work of beauty on stage.

Robert M. Johanson and Anne Gridley in Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo & Juliet. Photo by Peter Nirgini.

And the New York based Nature Theater of Oklahoma presents an amusing retelling of Romeo and Juliet, synthesized from telephone interviews with everyday people who were asked to give an account of the story in their own words.  Their embellishments, inaccuracies, and reinventions include scenes and characters that were never part of Shakespeare’s original.

John Zak in Nevermore Theater Project's The Tell-Tale Heart. Photo by Domenick Scudera.

Nevermore Theater Project offers another time-honored classic in the Fringe, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.  This one is a faithful word-for-word staging of the dark short story, starring Barrymore recipient John Zak as Poe’s man on the brink of insanity, and performed at the appropriately creepy Mütter Museum (admission to the museum’s collections is not included).

Marcel Williams Foster in Hyphen-Nation Arts’ The Jane Goodall: Experience. Photo by Libby Cady.

Three more Fringe events round out my Top 10 list, all promising to be both unique and entertaining.

Hyphen-Nation Arts’ The Jane Goodall:  Experience features Marcel Williams Foster as the renowned anthropologist, in a performance/lecture/tribute to the 50th anniversary of her pioneering research in Tanzania.  Now working in the world of dance and theater, Foster trained at Goodall’s Institute, and incorporates years of research, a profound love of apes, and a virtuoso shift between humans and primates in his self-described “peculiar drag parody.”

Ryan Walter, Lauren Basler, and David Stanger in Plays and Players' Hear Again Radio Project. Photo by Alistair E. May.

More traditional is Plays and Players’ Hear Again Radio Project, comprising vintage radio dramas from the 1940s, performed live with authentic costumes, sound effects, music, and commercials.

Colleen Corcoran in Madhouse Theater Company’s Dysfictional Circumstances. Photo by John Stanton.

Last but not least is Madhouse Theater Company’s Dysfictional Circumstances, a twisted dark comedy about Nazi propagandist filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, which just won the Audience Choice Award for New Work in the Theater Alliance of Greater Philadelphia’s Spark Showcase.

Beth Nixon and Alex Torra in Cankerblossom by Pig Iron Theatre Company. Photo by Jason Frank Rothenberg.

If you love inane Jerry Lewis movies circa 1960, and find over-sized glasses, crossed eyes, protruding teeth, and grating voices hilarious, you probably number among the masses that can’t seem to get enough of Pig Iron Theatre Company.  In light of the success of last year’s Welcome to Yuba City (both in the Live Arts Festival and with the Barrymore Awards), I would be remiss if I didn’t remind fans to get their tickets early, because this year’s offerings by Pig Iron (Cankerblossom) and Charlotte Ford (Chicken) are sure to sell out fast.

Charlotte Ford in Chicken. Photo by Jay Dunn.

Also among the annual favorites is Brian Sanders’ JUNK, this year performing Sanctuary (which comes with a warning that the production may contain nudity).  Described as “a dance of intense movement, ritual, and mistaken assumptions about the past,” and using a 14 x 120’ wall as the stage, the perfectly toned gravity-defying dancers will undoubtedly wow Live Arts audiences again in 2010.

Sanctuary by Brian Sanders' JUNK. Photo by Steve Belkowitz.

The 14th annual Philly Festival runs September 3-18.  If you’re truly living on the fringe, it’s not likely you’ll be able to see much of it, so choose your shows wisely (tickets & info here).  At a pricey $325/person ($650/couple), the “all-access pass” gives access to all shows, not access for all people.

'Muralmorphosis' by Eve Biddle and Scott Frankel, September, 2009

'Muralmorphosis' by Bonnie Brenda Scott (with assistance),September, 2009

The screening was at basekamp and while I was searching for the correct doorway I ran into three students from the Asian Arts Initiative (below) who were also looking for the event.

Sean Stoops at the film viewing, December 12, 2009, basekamp

Linda Saroeun, Suny Uy and Ratha Chea at film screening

The mural (which I missed, I’m afraid) was painted by Eve Biddle, Joshua Frankel, Bonnie Brenda Scott and Mauro Zamora, and rather than collaborate on developing and executing one design the artists painted over one another’s work so the mural evolved over the two weeks of the festival.

'Muralmorphosis' by Eve Biddle, Joshua Frankel, Bonnie Brenda Scott and Mauro Zamora

'Muralmorphosis' by Eve Biddle, Joshua Frankel, Bonnie Brenda Scott and Mauro Zamora

The film is incredibly witty, lively and fun; quite the opposite of the proverbial watching paint dry.  It was edited by Frankel and directed by Stoops with a score composed from the music of Planet Y with Charles Cohen and Yanni Papadopoulos.  Sean told me he’s entering it in upcoming film festivals, so watch for it!  It’s as good as any film on art that I’ve seen.

Hiro Sakaguchi and Anne Camfield at film screening

Joe Fig ‘Inside the Painter’s Studio’

I was sent a copy of Inside the Painter’s Studio (ISBN 978-1-56898-852-8), which I’ve been dipping into slowly.  It’s a perfect book to read short bits of at a time – hence when your reading time must be grabbed between other responsibilities.  Fig is an artist who’s created a series of miniature representations of other artist’s studios in obsessive detail, down to the last, squeezed tube of paint.  I saw an exhibition of his amazing work at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach some years ago.  Most of the constructions are 8 or 9.5 inches high, although the largest reach 4 feet.

Chuck Close in his New York City studio, all photos © Joe Fig

April Gornick’s New York City studio

In researching the project he had many conversations with the artists and at some point realized that they were worth recording.  The 24 artists range from the renowned to the little-known and cover three generations. Fig developed a series of questions, mostly about the studio itself and the artist’s working habits, so that he asked more or less the same information of everyone.  And each of the interviews is accompanied by numerous pictures of the studio and preceded by Fig’s miniature version.

Ryan McGuinness in his New York City studio

detail of Joan Snyder’s Brooklyn studio

It’s a wonderful book for artists and for anyone who’s a voyeur of other people’s work spaces.  For art historians, collectors or other art lovers it has the same appeal as paintings that show studio spaces: it brings us closer to the artists and hints at their working habits. Some studios resemble industrial spaces while others have a domestic feel.  One artist lines up paint tubes like toy soldiers and another assembles chaotic arrays.  We get to see the photos, post cards and ephemera that artists tack to their bulletin boards.  It’s a secondhand intimacy, but seductive nonetheless.

.

On this final weekend of the Fringe/Live Arts Festival, and after my third year in attendance, I finally grasped the meaning of the phrase “Live Arts.”  Thursday night, as we waited for Norwegian artists Verdensteatret to fix technical glitches in their show “louder,” I read and re-read their program – “[We are] artists from different fields who work together and make live-art and other art projects.”  That little hyphen provided the elucidation: “Live Arts,” more than an umbrella term for theater, is also live-art, something akin to “fine art” as covered by this blog.   Just as one “makes a painting,” Verdensteatret say they “make live-art.” 

  

Communist-issue megaphones. 

First, the megaphones alone sounded – dozens of dins, rasps, a collective hum.  Then, pairs of performers emerged, stretching filaments of wire taught between them as they spaced apart; others came forth to strum these wires with a bow.  Through many screeches a few pitches resonated, and from the back a cello hummed a two-note rhythm, unifying the dissonance into something palatable. 

  

Strumming on steel wire. 

Truly striking shadow-puppets now glided across stage, fastened to a wire-and-pulley system cranked by hands off stage-right.  Projections blended with the shadows; scrolling landscapes of soft hills with goblin-like silhouettes of the puppets.  Later, a lone woman emerged to conduct the megaphones – pointing to one cluster then another, each sputtered to life (sounding incoherent distortions of the human voice); our ears tracked the changing source of the noise. 

  

Puppets traverse the stage. 

“Louder” unfolds as a series of “movements.”  The performers work slowly, deliberatively, taking their time to let a conversation of sound emerge.  At the finale, people shout, the spider comes to life again, and a few rogue megaphones begin spinning in place, accelerating into oblivion as they holler.  Thirteen men and women take their bow, and all I can think is – airfare! shipping for all that gear! How lucky we are that the Norwegian government underwrites this kind of cultural exchange! 

 
 The piece is massively collaborative, and requires precise fiddling, so each performance is different.  This from Håkon Lindbäck, a seven-year member.  And about the hour delay?  A card that individually controlled 64 megaphones simply frizzed out.  Prolific Philly sound designer Nick Kourtides came up with a near-replacement in a rush, but Håkon explained in his soft Norwegian accent, “I couldn’t figure out my internal routing – I’d had 64 channels, and this was 60.  It was a bit awkward, you know?”

If you’re intrigued, you can still hop the bus to New York and see “louder” at PS 122 Sept. 25-28th.

The source of the delay. 

Shift four miles west, the next night, to a minimal but equally effective installation at an empty Rite-Aid.  If you were lucky enough, you may have caught Rainpan 43’s Machines (x7) last year.  Imagine now that Geoff Sobelle’s character leaves that dystopian-futuristic apartment and submits to a workday alongside co-creator Charlotte Ford in Flesh and Blood, Fish and Fowl.   

The show starts, stylishly, without warning: a din on the PA suddenly peaks loudly, lights come to full strength, and our chatter silences.  Like a groundhog, Geoff pokes his head up from a mail cart, peers around, and crawls out.  In shirt and tie, frazzled hair, and glasses, he is a low-level manager, creature of that strange, artificial environment which has taken over so much of our world. 

A woman broken by alienation

Both characters convey volumes in their first steps.  Like a child at hopscotch, Geoff takes a few whimsical leaps to his desk, stepping only on the lines between floor tiles. Half idiocy; half a poignant bucking of routine.  And Charlotte, if you did nothing else that night, you’d have expressed enough in your first traversal of stage.  From the far corner of the space, we hear squeaking shoes before we see her: in a flaming red dress, she creeps, almost tip-toes, past Geoff, flashing wide, scared eyes his way – she is wretchedly timid, a woman broken by alienation. 

  
The story is simple; a woman tries to romance an uninterested man.   The narrative-minded (perhaps narrow-minded) might call it a “play,” but Flesh and Blood is closer to, in Verdensteatre’s words, “live-art.”  It is a social critique that the artistic team has sublimated into an aesthetic meditation.  The show lives in each of its small events – Charlotte making lunch, Geoff shuffling papers meaninglessly – with exacting attention to the visual and auditory; a series of compact essays, written through performance art, on our alienation from nature and from each other. 

  
The first 10 minutes pass without dialogue.  Our attention is honed, instead, to hear sounds:  Geoff riffs on his creaky chair, then chases an unseen but audible fly.  (It sticks to hanging fly-paper, which by invisible rigging, twitches and shakes as if the imaginary insect is struggling.)  Charlotte operates the microwave, but instead of a few beeps followed by the expected whir, she absurdly punches the keypad ad infinitum.  Beeping echoes eerily through the giant space.  When words are spoken, they, too, become an abstraction of sounds: Charlotte’s nasal drone as she reads a generic memo, Geoff’s flat utterances, in mindless response.  “Hmm…yeah…I gotta make these copies…ok, right…yeah, can you collate these for me?…hmm.” 

A full-size black bear attacks

What begins as a creeping recrudescence of nature now comes in full force.  A full-size black bear attacks Geoff in the corner office.  He and Charlotte, undressed and bloody, huddle on the floor, hollering on absurdly about the memo, over a roaring wind, denying the transformation of the office around them.

Then, a true finale: where “Convenience Foods” remains emblazoned on the back wall from the days of Rite-Aid, panels literally burst off, revealing a brilliantly-lit diorama that might be found in the Museum of Natural History: taxidermied animals, painted landscapes, dangling vines.  The music hit an awe-inspired crescendo, and from the ceiling tiles above descend a flock of fish and fowl.  Behind us, Rachel Moffat (who proved herself operating the contraptions in Machines) pulled strings (literally) to make all this happen.  Finally, she released a bale of leaves onto the protagonists, who arose together like Adam and Eve.  There is wonder in the world! Nature prevails! 

  

Nature rumbles up from below: a stage-set to make Gregory Crewdson swoon.

I hope this production will be given a second life – though it won’t be the same without the cruddy retail aesthetic.  (I overheard Geoff telling a real critic afterwards that the Rite-Aid, which seemed a perfect match, fell into place late in the piece’s genesis.  “But that’s what I like – the performative challenge,” he said.)  In the meantime, you can catch Geoff Sobelle in Pig Iron’s Chekhov Lizardbrain.  It premiered last year at the Latvian Society on North 7th St., and now goes to New York for a run Oct. 2nd – 19th.

–Jacob Hellman is a writer, artist and a political activist based in Philadelphia. He previously wrote on Oedipus at FDR.

Notes from Oedipus at FDR
created by Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey for Fringe Festival 2008

Cast bowing after performance of Oedipus at FDR Skatepark.  All photos in this post by Jacob Hellman.

Pig Iron, our forcefully creative theater company, has multiple presences at this year’s Fringe Festival.  Last night, I let my $25 ticket expire to their headliner, Sweet By-and-By, when a spare one surfaced to the free but long-sold-out Oedipus at FDR.  Emmanuelle Delphech-Ramey, former Pig Iron member, has done here what classics are made for, and re-imagined an old play in the present.

By school bus and South Broad, we made our way to the FDR skatepark.  The long route left us wondering, is this part of the concept? We disembarked at dusk, the last bus, under the giant supports of I-95, where two hundred people milled amidst flaming trash cans, a mime on a soapbox, a tarot reader, and techno beats dampened by the whoosh of vehicles overhead.

When dark settled, we were ushered in, and seated ourselves on the concrete.  At each spot, a pair of big studio-style headphones, connected to repeater boxes in ganglia of wires.  Some donned them immediately.  I resisted, wanting instead the experience au naturel – to feel the breeze around my ears, and hear the “house” music, made muddy, as it ricocheted from the PA system throughout this giant site.   Anyway, the program explicitly compared the skate park in which we sat to a classical amphitheater – so why quash the intimacy of a briefly united public by isolating each with headphones?  This is concept killing experience, I thought – but I would be wrong.

Wrestling under I-95

Antigone enters, leading Oedipus from the far edge of the skate park, as if atop a mountain range.  Blind, clinging to the long, long tail of her stark red gown, he asks, “Tell me what you see here?”   With the intonation of classical drama, she answers: “In one direction a city; in the other, sea, ships, rail; overhead, a highway.”  Once these words were spoken, I began to get it:  this is a place unique in the built environment, an arena of sculpted concrete and faded graffiti, red lights projected on the steel girders above.  We are outdoors, and apart from the city proper.  That is why they bussed us so far.  Tonight, FDR skate park replaces Colonus as the refuge that Oedipus seeks.

More scenes from the play

New York’s CUE Art Foundation invites curators of substance to in turn invite artists to exhibit in its beautiful space. This month, Pepe Karmel invited my friend Lenore Malen, who installed two new video projections, new photographs and a long vitrine with historical and fictional artifacts, including precariously stacked little magnets, which with their invisible pull and their ramshackle tininess seem to push up the extremely large expanse of glass.

Magnetic power pillars holding up the glass top on the vitrine.

I went up to see the exhibit with Diane Burko; Lenore, Diane and I went to Skidmore College (class of ’66) and then we met up again when we were in graduate school at Penn (Burko in art, Malen in Art History and me in English Literature).

Malen spliced archival video footage of the New York World’s Fair (on rear screen) and NASA footage of U.S. astronauts with her own footage (front screen) of “members” of the New Society for Universal Harmony on the old World’s Fair grounds.

All Malen’s objects tell the tale–a blending of fiction and historical fact–of the New Society for Universal Harmony, her personal metaphor for the search for utopia and for spiritual and physical healing. Malen incorporates and undermines the idea of “animal magnetism” of Anton Franz Mesmer. The imagery of her friends undergoing quack cures and subjecting themselves to outlandish processes brings to mind Justine Kurland’s photographs of utopian nudist colonies, but adds a dose of sympathy and irony. Malen’s point is that these people aren’t really freaks. They are us, searching creatures that we are, willing to go to ridiculous means and buy into unprovable notions in hopes of finding a better life and an escape from the body’s mortality.

Malen’s display of archival and the pseudo-archival cures in progress.

Continuing the exploration of ideas Malen explored in her exhibit at Slought Foundation (see post here) in 2004, the work continues to walk the line between the comic vulnerability of the human condition and our desire for a spiritual bond. I am reminded of all my friends (who may never talk to me again after this comment) going off to yoga retreats and seeking various shamanic cure-meisters, looking for a way to feel better–about themselves, their bodies, their lives, their place in the universe.

This is not work about juicy precious objects, although it mixes archival history from the work of Mesmer and other historical belief communities of his period with Malen’s staged archives from the present “revival.” It mixes concepts and culture, optimism and pessimism, and ultimately the slippery state of reality and reportage. Malen also has written a book, a sort of history of the New Harmony “movement,” based Mesmer’s own cure and belief community. The book was co-published by Slought Foundation and Granary Books.

Well, that was the reason for my spending Thursday in New York; more later on the rest of the stuff I saw.

And at the Fringe…

Then last night Murray and I went to Headlong Dance Theater’s Philadelphia Live Arts/Fringe presentation, Explanatorium, which felt not all that far-removed from what Malen was exploring. The participatory event, held in The Rotunda, was also about that desire to believe the inexplicable and believe in the power of unseen forces. By involving the audience in the performance, the split between observer and performer was challenged (but not erased–almost everyone in the audience was tentative with their change in role); and the idea that an audience becomes an ephemeral community was translated into the physical and spatial terms of dance. The final action in the performance of an audience snailing into a center and out (think the Greek folk dance misirlou) was a climax that brought that feeling of awe, of being a part of something larger than oneself, that all successful religions manage to create during a ceremony or service.

At the same time, there was a sense of irony and humor there that those of us who stand back from religion were sure to notice and take comfort in. I’m not so sure it was there for those who prefer to go with spiritual forces walking the land.

While I spent much of the “performance” trying to figure out whether I was even willing to go along with the most minor of requests–like pretending to reach to the ceiling or saying “go” to a small group so they knew when to reach–I did follow the crowd as requested. It just made me a little squirmy, having a life-long discomfort with obedience.

But my personal confusion was no worse than anyone else’s, as far as I could see. Others even sat it all out, watching from the sidelines. Only a couple of people in the audience really tried to be one with the company of performers.

I suppose my self-consciousness was an impediment to being swept along by the event, but in the end it did get me, and gave me something that I was happy to take away. Murray, who was less self-conscious than I–I know that because he didn’t notice when he wasn’t doing what everyone else was doing, nor did he seem to mind that–came away with pretty much the same reaction.

On the other hand, the Wooster Group’s great-looking Emperor Jones production, while quite interesting, I thought fell short (I was with Murray, Roberta and Steve, Andrea, and Maya). I should say at this point that this for me was another Skidmore connection; the play was directed by still another Skidmore classmate, Elizabeth LaCompte.

Most of our group, seemed delighted by the Butoh-like production of this Eugene O’Niell play. But Murray and I go to theater to be transported and be part of the group reaction. We were interested, we loved the dancing, the costumes, the use of the television screen, the witty propman choreography, but we weren’t transported. I spent a fair amount of the play wondering if the actor playing Jones was a woman and then, once I ascertained that was so, I wondered about why they might cast a woman in a man’s role; I entertained thoughts of George W. Bush as the emperor, and either Karl Rove or Richard B. Cheney as Smithers; I related the themes to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi; I noodled with the magic properties of social power in general. But ultimately I wanted something more–that moment of awe when the ideas of the play become bigger than the play and my own feelings of seeing things a new way become one with the entire audience’s new vision.

I guess that’s my way of looking for connection.

This Emperor Jones production had a ceremonial quality that reminded me of a production of Medea I saw many years ago at the Public Theater. However, Medea moved me.

Bohemian Rap City
A town hall meeting puts art on the mayor’s front burner.

A must-see Philly Fringe event for every artist and friend of the arts is the Culture, Creativity and the City town hall meeting at the Painted Bride Sunday. The free public meeting, organized by activist Matty Hart and a team of concerned art-worlders, is the first step in a campaign to put the arts on the front burner for the mayoral candidates—and keep it there for the next four years.

Town Hall Meeting convener, Matty Hart. Photo by Peter Lien.

Like all town hall meetings, this one intends to bring the voice of the people to the higher-ups. Hart has gold-plated credentials as an organizer who puts the welfare of artists first. As founder and executive director of Spiral Q Puppet Theater, and national director of Public Engagement for Solutions for Progress, Hart has long advocated that artists have a seat at the policy table.

Hart says he got the idea for the panel after reading the arts platforms of the two mayoral candidates. He realized the mayoral hopefuls knew all about the needs of commercial interests, but nothing about the needs of artists. That bias spurred him to action.

Working with a team of like-minded organizers, and with financial help from numerous local foundations (and with in-kind support from nonprofit arts groups), Hart’s team organized a meeting that promises to dispense with the bull and actually deliver hard information about how three culturally enlightened cities—Baltimore, Denver and Phoenix—are helping artists while bolstering their economies by using the arts in their civic brand.

Artists add energy to a city’s cultural life. They also act as individual engines of economic development. (Like when Philly artists discovered first Northern Liberties and then Kensington/Fishtown, rehabbing buildings and creating small businesses.) Enlightened cities want artists to come, live and create the buzz that makes their city a destination. Enlightened cities also develop social policies that help keep artists in town.

But without a civic policy focused on artists—including grants for new businesses and for rehabbing buildings, and healthcare options for a largely self-employed population—many artists will ultimately abandon Philly for cities with more beneficial policies.

Right now we’re fortunate to have an influx of artists to Philadelphia despite having no civic policies to welcome them and some that actually discourage the arts (high wage, business and sales taxes; no office of arts and culture). This creative influx shouldn’t be taken for granted. It should be seized as the moment to enact new policies.

The mayoral candidates won’t be at this meeting but their advisers will be watching, in person or by proxy. Michael Nutter, the heir apparent to the mayor’s office, would be foolish not to listen.

Culture, Creativity and the City, a Fringe Festival Town Hall Meeting
Sun., Sept. 9, 5:30pm. Free. Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St. 215.925.9914.

Louise Barteau Chodoff at work on Grove

Louise Barteau Chodoff has brought a bit of Wissahickon Valley Park to Northern Liberties with the first part of her larger project “Grove”: a wonderful installation at The Media Bureau (725 N. 4th St.; “Grove; Part 1: In an instant, everything changes” can be seen Thurs. – Sun., 5-8 pm through Sept. 15) as part of the Fringe/Live Arts Festival. I saw the beginning of this project in the artist’s studio seven months ago, and I’m absolutely amazed at what she’s accomplished, artistically and logistically.

Grove, by Louise Barteau Chodoff, and all images that follow

Barteau Chodoff takes us into the woods in winter and shares her sensitivity to the dramatic impact of changing light. It’s a subtle drama, perceptible only if we slow down, and really look. Artists, like small children, can make us see the extraordinary in the everyday. And such intense concentration produces a meditative calm; these are woods where one lingers contentedly. The artist has provided couches, and I spent a peaceful hour.

Around me a group of tree-trunks constructed from papier-mache stood in a 25 x 75-foot space (seven months ago there was only one sample tree). Video shot in Wissahickon was projected onto the trees and walls. Barteau Chodoff shot fifteen hours to get eighteen minutes of video which she compressed to ten; these run in a continuous loop. The camera was fixed, straight ahead at eye level. It captured only tree trunks; no leaves, ground or sky. The only movement was from an occasional swaying of a birch. But the movement of clouds overhead created changing light on the trees and at one point, referred to in the title, the tonality shifted abruptly. The changing light was mirrored in the appropriately-subtle soundtrack, created by Simon Rogers: a soft hum that changed pitch according to the shifting blue/yellow balance in the video image.

The scale of the work is large, physically and conceptually; on her web-site the artist describes the ideas she incorporated as “ paper, trees, light, sound, change, perception, consciousness, loss, attachment, grief, decay, disintegration, death, invasive plants, forest, recycling, oaks, birds, community, planting, tending, harvesting, and papermaking.” But ultimately, “Grove” is a beautiful and moving meditation on the cycle of life and death.

Barteau Chodoff has a rare skill with big spaces, and the expansiveness seems right. “Grove” has three parts which will encompass actual decay and regeneration in the original, woodland site and involve a community in an environmental reclamation project. Friends of Carpenter’s Woods will work with the artist for Part 2; they’ll clear invasive plants from an area and site the paper tree-trunks, filled with compost. The following spring after these have decayed, they’ll plant the area with oak trees, chosen because they attract migratory birds which use these woods. The third part of “Grove” will be a workshop on papermaking with invasive plants. Details are here.

Meanwhile, take advantage of this oasis of calm amidst the frenzy of the Fringe/Live Arts Festival. It’s rare to find a forest in this part of town.

–Andrea Kirsh is an art historian based in Philadelphia. You can read her recent Philadelphia Introductions articles at inLiquid.

One show at the Philadelphia Fringe is not enough. It’s so hard to know what will be good, what will not, that you sort of have to sample a bunch and hope for the best. This year, we finally figured that out and purchased tickets to four shows. Two down, two to go–plus a bonus.

by Miriam Singer

The bonus was added on to show number one. Murray and I got to the Painted Bride early to pick up our tickets, and there were works by Miriam Singer hanging on the wall in the cafe area, where InLiquid curates member shows. It’s such a gloomy space that if anything looks good in there, it’s probably good. On top of that, I’m a Singer fan, having first come across her work in a show at Siano Gallery (now the late lamented Siano Gallery, it turns out–we heard from gallerist Luella Tripp that it’s going to be a furniture store, instead. But look for Tripp to run another Old City gallery in six months or so).

by Miriam Singer

Singer’s work in her show de’rive dreams merges drawings with prints on paper that has been folded and unfolded and otherwise distressed in the course of her travels. She adds to them on the run as she moves through her life, and they have the jazzy rhythms and compression of city life–showing hints of stores, apartments, reflections, compression, circles, parks, bicycles, cars. None of it is spelled out, but all of it is in there, chock-a-block and rubbing elbows, inch by inch across the page.

The performance we saw at the Bride–Flamingo/Winnebago–was almost really good. It’s about a road trip across America with actors and creators Thaddeus Phillips and Muni Kulasinghe. Their two private journeys seek a piece of the past in the seediness of Las Vegas and the environmental disaster of the Salton Sea. Along the way, their searches for the American Dream cross paths. The performances were great. The set was witty and iconic. But call in an editor to trim the talky rants about the environment and politics. The show also sagged in spots, the timing not quite on target. Otherwise, pretty interesting. And, Murray, who always bumps into someone he knows, ran into someone he had written about in the Inquirer, years ago.

Waiting in a kind of staging area before the play begins. It’s really the back of the stage set for Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven

We had given up the possibility of bumping into someone we knew when we were waiting for the beginning of another Fringe show, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, at the Arden. But sure enough, one of our neighbors stumbled in, his unlimited admission pass to all Fringe shows hanging around his neck. Dragons, by Young Jean Lee, is about her conflicting identity as a Korean and an American. The show included enough spectacle and emotion to keep us riveted. But honestly, I was a little confused now and then and couldn’t quite buy into the extremity of Korean self-disgust. And when the show was over, I had much too much to ponder. Still, I enjoyed it. As for our neighbor, he was taking his unlimited admissions badge and moving on to another show. Not us. We went straight home to hug our TV and watch U.S. Open tennis. I’m at it again today, and I’m writing this during the commercials (c’mon, James Blake; I can’t believe you’re going down!)

Philadelphia Fringe Coordinator Mathilda McCommon wrote:

The Philly Fringe invites diverse artists from near and far to this year’s Festival, which runs August 31 – September 15, 2007. For artists who wish to self-produce their own performances or presentations….There are only EIGHT DAYS LEFT to sign up for the 2007 Festival. Artists should simply go to the Festival website and from the home page click on “How to Participate in the Philly Fringe” to access the electronic participation form. Filling out this form is an important first step for artists wishing to be part of the 11th annual Festival which features works in theater, dance, music, interdisciplinary works, and the visual arts.

All information must be filled out online by Friday, April 13.