Taking the sting out of the last days of summer is the return of Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe, which brings over two weeks’ worth of shows and cultural experiences to venues all over the city by local and international artists and performers.
As with previous years, there is a plethora of LGBT artists and themes to feast upon at the festival, especially on the Fringe side of things.
A frequent Fringe participant and performer, out choreographer Brian Sanders and his dance theater group JUNK are bringing back an updated and re-imagined version of one of his most popular Fringe shows, “The Gate.”
Sanders said he is always trying to outdo his previous Fringe shows — known for being amazing.
“Even with redoing something I still want to make it better, bigger and more badass,” he said. “We’re not just redoing the same show. I set out to do two shows this year and, halfway through the process, I realized I couldn’t do them both. It was going to be too much. So I ended up taking the older piece, “The Gate,” and this new idea I’ve been working on and merged them into a new piece. There are portions of pieces of the old ‘Gate’ from 2003, but there’s a lot of new stuff as well. The cast is twice as large. This year it’s in the round. The piece that it merged with had a lot to do with rituals. I like the idea of bringing that concept into ‘The Gate.’ ‘The Gate’ has always been about pushing through to the next boundary through that gate into the next whatever you are pushing through, whomever the individual is. I really looked toward the sense of ritual this group of eight kind of partakes in to move through to another level.”
To achieve that level, “The Gate Reopened” takes over Municipal Pier 9 warehouse on the Delaware River, with the in-the-round performance taking place inside a 20-foot high cylindrical octagon. The troupe of eight dancers will transform the space into a futuristic, post-apocalyptic coliseum with spinning ladders, moving walls and water as the setting for their feats of physicality.
Sanders said he doesn’t remember the show being as risky in 2003 as he finds it now.
“We didn’t think it was very hazardous the first time around,” he said. “We had a ball making it. This time, recreating a lot of what we had done, the company has suffered a couple of injuries already. It’s not like dancing on a regular floor and there’s a learning curve to it. Part of the piece is about the precariousness and the thrill of being on the edge.”
Another Fringe show with a high level of physical challenges is Tangle Movement Arts’ “You Don’t Say,” which uses aerial acrobats to bring to life the drama and tension erupting out of a dinner party.
“We were really motivated by taking circus arts out of the big top with the spandex and the sparkles and elephants, and bringing it to the more intimate arena of dance theater,” said Tangle performer and founder Lauren Rile Smith. “So we’re hoping to tell stories about human relationships of strength and support between women. One of the strongest emotional arcs of our show is between the host of the party and her ex-girlfriend, who starts chatting up another guest at the party. This sets off a triangle that gets played out 18 feet in the air with duets that explore the support and absence that you feel with someone that you really care about but you know you can’t rely on versus the spark of someone new. We’re bringing this well-known and well-loved lesbian drama to the stage — in the air — with this performance.”
Smith added that the performance group wanted the show’s focus to be as much about the story as the aerial movements.
“We started out knowing that we wanted this to be about a network of human relationships and we also knew that we wanted to do a lot of aerial choreography that included a lot of duet and partner work and a lot of weight-sharing exploring the intimacy and trust that you take when you go into somebody else’s hands and allow them to suspend you up in the air,” she said. “So we converged on who our characters were and the stories they were telling. We came up with characters based on the kind of work we wanted to explore.”
Smith said it took months of intense training to get the show together.
“Most of us have trained for three or four years in aerials and some of us have a background in dance or gymnastics,” she said. “Some of us have never done anything physical before we started doing aerial acrobatics. Some of us have been hitting the gym every single day. There is so much physical maintenance that goes into being able to do this work. On the creative side, we’ve spent three-and-a-half months putting together this show.”
If emotional dexterity turns you on more than physical dexterity, you might want to check out “Raw Stitch” by playwright Jaqueline Goldfinger. Though the author is admittedly straight, her monologues and characters cover a broad spectrum of emotions and sexual identities in the show.
“I went to an all-women’s college and I saw women, especially young women, in our late teens and early 20s trying to figure out our sexual identities and sometimes making great decisions and sometimes making destructive decisions,” Goldfinger said about the inspiration for her monologues. “I realized that the lynchpin of sexual identity was going to define the rest of their lives in terms of community, employment and social action. That had a big influence on the monologues, the experience going through the identity crisis and watching my friends at school. That informed a lot of the monologues.”
Another show exploring issues of identity is Kicking Mule Theatre Company’s production of “The Maids” by gay playwright Jean Genet. It is the story of two servants, sisters Solange and Claire, who create extravagant plots to destroy their employer, Madame. As an added twist, this production is set in a prison environment and the roles of the sisters are played by men.
Director Francine Roussel, who also plays Madame, said that changing the setting and the genders gives an added dimension of complexity to the sisters that she believes Genet would appreciate.
“I see them as being very proactive with the dilemma that they are facing,” Roussel said. “The root of it is the lack of appreciation for who they are and who the mistress is. They are not mistreated — they are just feeling that they are part of the underbelly of society. In a way, like Genet, they would like to be part of the upper class but at the same time they also want to claim, almost like a nobility, to be of that oppressed class. Genet dealt with that contradiction throughout his life. When he was a young man, he was incarcerated and developed a sense of a bond with inmates, not just because of his sexuality, but I think on a human level. When he finally was freed from prison because of the credible quality of his writing, he went through a deep depression because, in a way, his identity was lost. He overcame that and reinvented himself with writing more plays. It’s interesting that his journey was from being a not-very-talented thief to becoming a brilliant writer who became a symbol for liberation, particularly for the gay community, but I would say for everybody. His writing is absolutely amazing.”
Roussel said “The Maids” also addresses issues of violence, which, judging from the headlines of late, is very timely.
“When I mention the subject of the play, people say, ‘I want to see it,’ because I can feel they are dealing with a problem at work with their boss where they have moments where they say to themselves, ‘Oh, I’m likely to kill him or her,’” she said. “Fortunately, it’s an expression or a cry from the heart coming out of deep frustration. Most people don’t act on it. We see, though, in the news that you hear about people losing their jobs or having problems, and people act on these frustrations out of ideology or pure resentment. So I think to recognize that is very helpful, and to try and be creative in addressing this problem.”
Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe run Sept. 7-22. For a complete list of performers, events and showtimes, visit www.livearts-fringe.org.