Congratulations to Michelle Angela Ortiz, who has been recognized as a Citizen Artist Fellow, and to Eastern State Penitentiary, which received an award for excellence in exhibitions. Monument Lab has announced more details about the 21 artist projects for fall 2017, including stalwarts like RAIR. Printmakers, check out the fellowship opportunity at Second State Press (deadline 5/22). Plus, queer sci-fi reading at Vox Populi, Lenka Clayton and Dan Byers in conversation at the Fabric Workshop, PAFA’s 116th Annual Student Exhibition, Broad Street Review hosts a discussion about arts funding, and a good read about cartoonist Roz Chast’s embroidery.
Read MoreThe integration of the visual and the visceral was particularly successful in “Bonzi,” whose titular character (dancer Edgar Anido) is a traveling salesman who leads a humdrum life trying to sell people things they neither want nor need. At the start of the performance, the bowler-hatted Bonzi knocks on a plain white door and sets in motion a series of surreal vignettes involving multiple doors, bowler hats, apples, and eggs–all motifs familiar from the paintings of Magritte. Dancers hiding behind movable doors on casters swirled around the stage, dazzling poor Bonzi as well as the audience. With constant costume changes and the clever use of props, the dancers playfully shift personas from alluring coquettes with quixotic tree-like headgear circling around Bonzi, to a self-contained corps of dancers that largely ignores him. By the end of the performance, Bonzi seems to enter the dancers’ madcap surreal world, leaving behind his heavy black briefcase with unrestrained glee.
Read More