Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe have returned to provide the City of Brotherly Love with another 16 days of entertaining and thought-provoking theater, dance, music and everything in between, Sept. 4-19. And, as always, the festival is presenting a wealth of LGBT talent, making its mark with amazing displays of creativity. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough space to highlight all of the shows and exhibits worthy of catching, but the following are some of the LGBT performers and performances that should not be missed this week.
TIDE
SCRAP Performance Group is using the world premiere of its show to celebrate the company’s 15th anniversary. In “TIDE,” the experimental dance-theater examines the disconnection of humans and the natural world through the stories of six witnesses and asks what pieces of our past we hold on to to survive.
“It’s complicated,” SCRAP co-founder Myra Bazell explained. “The original idea is full and rich and complicated. A slice of that original idea dealt with being at the end of time. So indeed there is mass destruction going on — and we know there is — that means we’re at some edge. We’re experiencing this tipping point and this end. Part of this piece is how we don’t see this as one big thrust, one big band and one big blinding light. We’re seeing it in tiny little increments around the globe.”
The show will be especially notable, as Bazell will be performing with the group for the first time in a while. Her life partner, Madison Cario, credited a wager between them for getting Bazell back into the spotlight.
“I won a bet and I get whatever I want,” she said. “I wanted to see her back on stage. She’s one of the most phenomenal performers that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of performers. I have a vested interest and I’m a little biased, but still.”
SCRAP is calling this performance of “TIDE” a world premiere and, essentially, it is. But if anyone caught the group at Broad Street Ministry or Philadelphia’s Magic Garden, they witnessed the early and in-progress versions of the show.
“This is the third iteration,” Bazell said. “The other two versions were leading up to this one. It’s the same jumping-off place, same point of departure, same concept, same research and the same issues.”
“It’s a very different world, though,” Cario added. “When we first started this piece, George W. Bush was still in office, which emotionally and politically was a huge impetus and drive to work on this.”
“Those were hard years, but still the premise and the basic concept we set out to make took two years to develop,” Bazell said. “And now it’s premiering. So we’re at the culmination and climax of that two-year process. There were two performances of this work — one happened two years ago and one happened last year at the Fringe Festival. [They] were sort of works-in-progress but they were full-out productions in their own right. When we put something on stage, there’s going to be an integrity to the work. When we invite an audience to see a piece, they’re going to see a full production. However, we knew that we were showing the public pieces and parts of this work that would eventually culminate in this final production.”
One major change in the final production of TIDE is the venue, which Bazell said gives the performance a different aesthetic than the previous performances.
“We edited, omitted and lost a lot of material, and took with us what we thought were the pearls and essential elements, and put it in the Ice Box, which is the antithesis to Isaiah Zagar’s Magic Mosaic Garden, which is all texture, all information, all color, all the time. The Ice Box is a big, white, empty box, which ties back to our initial concept for the work. So we let the work go through all these iterations to gather material and glean stories from our environments.”
SCRAP Performance Group presents “TIDE” through Sept. 7 at Ice Box Performance Space, 1400 N. American St. Call (215) 413-1318 for tickets.
Wake Up Philadelphia
“Our weather lady is a drag queen,” David Burgess said about “Wake Up Philadelphia.”
Sold!
Even if Casaburdan Productions didn’t boast a mostly gay cast and a multimedia send-up of Philadelphia’s colorful news personalities, forecasting in drag is pretty much a lock for our Fringe dancecard.
The company’s founding members, Burgess and Kevin Jordan, said that while the names have been changed to protect … well … them, the funny and fictional tales of the cast and crew of Channel 42 News should be familiar to most.
“It’s really just about having a good time and enjoying the news. It’s local comedy, local situations and local locations,” Burgess said. “We’re making fun of everything that has to do with Philadelphia morning news.”
“The show takes place over a nine-month period of time,” Jordan added. “There are four 15-minute acts: Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. So there’s a storyline and character development that you will experience as well. It’s not just the news. There’s a story with it. We stick with the lives of the anchors. You see a little bit of what’s going on behind the scenes.”
Jordan also said recent Philadelphia events might seep into the production.
“With Michael Vick in the news so much, it would be a real shame not to have something about that. We have stories hitting on the economy, Philadelphia being the fattest city and needing to get trans fats out of our children’s diets.”
Yeah, yeah, right … back to the drag queens. Wouldn’t we all watch the news a little more if drag queens were the anchors?
“I don’t know,” Burgess said. “They could be really hard to deal with. That was sarcasm. We’ve both done our share of drag.”
“Wake Up Philadelphia!” “airs” Sept. 5-13 at Walking Fish Theatre, 2509 Frankford Ave. Call (215) 413-1318 for tickets.
Urban Scuba
With its location and degree of technical difficulty, JUNK’s production “Urban Scuba” is bound to be one of the more striking visions found at Live Arts this year.
Out choreographer Brian Sanders presents his newest dance production in the basement of the Gershman Y, in the venue’s huge, abandoned swimming pool, which has been deserted for 15 years. He said the stark and neglected setting provides the perfect backdrop for this piece.
“It takes place in the deep end of a swimming pool. The audience is going to be sitting in the shallow end,” Sanders said. “I’m doing a piece about life in the city. We go into this hole, which is anywhere between an old swimming pool and a tar pit, excavating the history of this hole. I wanted to use water and play with light and the reflective qualities of water. That gave me some inspirational ideas. It’s definitely a site-specific piece.”
Sanders also admitted that, while the pool makes for a great setting, it also presents some technical challenges for him and his dancers, who are trying to combine humor, exotic costuming and extreme physicality into this unique performance.
“Obviously there’s been plenty of aquatic artists,” he said. “Ester Williams, synchronized swimmers and all of that stuff has been done before. We’re just going to take a new bent on things and invent things anew. We’re dealing with dance inside [in a medium that is] weightless. Normally dance is done with weight. Some way or another, we pretend that it doesn’t exist or try to defy gravity. When you get inside water, the weight goes away. You become buoyant. We’re also having to deal with the lack of traction. We literally couldn’t do anything we planned on because it was too slippery, so we had to redesign costumes or invent new movements. All the usual known factors change.”
Urban Scuba hits the water through Sept. 13 at the pool at the Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St. Call (215) 413-1318 for tickets.
Inside Julia Child
“Either we’re just coincidentally well-timed or it’s some kind of collective subconscious thing going on,” said John Jarboe about his one-man show, “Inside Julia Child.”
The openly gay actor, who co-created the show with Rebecca Wright, said they had no idea the hit movie “Julie & Julia” was going to hit screens a month before their show was set to debut at Philly Fringe. But they’re not worried about it stealing any of their thunder.
“The piece we’re doing has no relation to the movie at all except it’s about Julia Child,” Jarboe said. “I do get a sense that there is a Julia Child mania going on right now. I think it’s going to draw people to the show.”
Jarboe and Wright use Child’s career in the culinary arts and television as an inspirational map for Jarboe’s experiences as a gay man.
“We’re both kind of obsessed with Julia Child,” he said. “It relates to her relationship with public failure. Actors are having to get up in front of an audience all the time and fall on their faces. Julia Child does it with such grace and humor. I had received as a gift a bunch of her TV episodes. I used to just watch them over and over again for entertainment. I didn’t even do the cooking.”
“Inside Julia Child” heats up Sept. 5-6 at Philly Kitchen Share, 1514 South St. Call (215) 413-1318 for tickets.
For more information on Philadelphia Live Arts and Philly Fringe, visit www.pafringe.com.
Larry Nichols can be reached at [email protected].
