The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts will take on a time-travel motif when it hosts the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts through April 27. To this end, PIFA asked a diverse group of artists to explore a specific moment in time and create thought-provoking new works that will transport the audience to those eras.
The festival will include the installation of a “time machine” in Kimmel’s Commonwealth Plaza, which will serve as a hub with free programs and activities, and a street fair along the Avenue of the Arts to close the festival.
One of the shows that is answering the time-travel call is “1096,” an all-female collaborative-performance installation work between flamenco dance company Pasión y Arte and postmodern dance group Fresh Blood.
The piece opens in Salerno, Italy, in the year 1096, with the first female gynecologist, Trotula of Salerno, who was the first woman to publish a work on the female body. It then goes on to visit pivotal periods of women’s history.
“This piece is really about the concept of all women,” Pasión y Arte artistic director Elba Hevia y Vaca said. “History is not linear for us. It’s kind of jagged and circular. We go forward and then we go back based on the trials and tribulations that have been put upon us. The exploration is about women’s history as not linear versus men’s history as linear. I was very fascinated by this woman, Trotula of Salerno. This was a woman who wrote the book in that time of 1096 and that just blew me away. So from Trotula we went further back, looking at women who had power in ancient Egyptian times. It was interesting to see how historically it’s been so back and forth. You can imagine, this was the first book that was written by a woman in 1096 for women. This is after the fact that there were healers that were doing this in ancient times. Of course, patriarchal religions came in and called these healers witches and all the men took over the medicine. [Trotula’s] particular book was used for centuries by doctors that were men. It influenced how people view issues about women’s health.”
Hevia y Vaca said she enjoyed collaborating with a modern dance company like Fresh Blood on a piece like this.
“It’s an interesting place to gather five women and find a commonality and a common language,” she said. “It’s been an interesting process. This is my first time having a collaborative experience with modern dancers. I’m looking forward to people’s reactions to that kind of dialogue. This is what’s happening in 21st-century flamenco in Spain. So I’m also educating the public that flamenco is constantly changing and evolving. That is what’s happening here.”
And likewise, Fresh Blood respects what Pasión y Arte brings to the work.
“The way the two styles have come together is quite amazing,” Fresh Blood choreographer KC Chun-Manning said. “Flamenco is very classical like ballet. There are certain understandings and ideas about the body that are similar. It’s interesting to see how they fold together. It’s really been very exciting and I’ve never had an experience like this before, nor have I seen a work like this before. It’s been interesting stepping into this world and all that comes with it. I feel that we are getting a really new place for both of us and both the forms.”
The Bearded Ladies Cabaret is also taking a trip back in time with “Wide Awake: A Civil War Cabaret,” a folk-punk extravaganza of music and comedy that PIFA organizers asked the Ladies to revisit and expand upon for the festival.
“We actually did a production of it at the Wilma Theater in the fall of 2011,” cabaret member John Jarboe said. “We had very little rehearsal. We had very little funding and we were in the lobby, which is our home space. It’s a really interesting space but there were restrictions in terms of tech and size. The Civil War is so huge and the piece itself is so ambitious in what it is trying to do. The Kimmel Center and Bearded Ladies teamed up to write a grant for it and to get the support to give us the time, energy, funding and space we needed to make it what we wanted it to be.”
In the hands of the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, the Civil War becomes a cultural fight between North and South that still rages on to this day.
“Initially, our hypothesis is that the Civil War hasn’t ended,” Jarboe said. “It’s still being played out in popular culture. We were inspired by the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. We feel like the war is not quite over. The recent election fed into that hypothesis because of the maps that would look at illustrating the division between blue and red [states]. There are just a lot of things that are happening in popular culture and politics that made us think that doing an exploration of the Civil War was actually a very contemporary thing and not just looking back into history. We’re using the Civil War as a way to talk about the state of the American Dream now.”
Yes, it sounds very deep and intellectual, but fear not: The Bearded Ladies have a reputation for campy fun, and they aren’t about to curtail their special brand of outrageousness any time soon.
“It is a cabaret,” Jarboe said. “The premise is that the Civil War began before the war in popular culture and it is still going on in popular culture. Our ammo is music. It’s very much a battle of the bands. We use over 30 songs from 1832-2013. We use songs from that whole period and we mash them up and have historical characters singing them in wacky costumes. There’s a lot of gender-bending that goes on. I play a huge Southern belle. I’m 9-and-a-half-feet tall because I’m on stilts in a huge dress and there are women wearing mustaches and men playing women. It’s a very wacky, flashy exploration of the Civil War.”
Jarboe added that people who saw their original incarnation of the “Civil War Cabaret” will witness a different show at the festival.
“It’s completely rewritten,” he said. “A lot of the characters are the same. We’re working with a full band. We have a huge set called the America House. Basically, the premise is that during the renovations for PIFA, the Kimmel Center discovered a house underneath the building and all of these ghosts of the Civil War are living there and want to sing songs. It’s very different.”
Close to modern times is Penndixie Productions’ “Animal Animal Mammal Mine,” set around May 11, 1960, when the FDA approved the sale of birth-control pills. The show uses dance, projections and the sculptures of Martha Posner to weave together the stories of women who have inherited the technology of the ’60s.
“The piece is based on interviews with 50 women,” said Penndixie artistic director Anisa George. “A number are gay and one of them was a lesbian couple and another was a transgender individual. A couple that is in the play is based on two women [whose] journey is that one of them wants to have a kid and the other one doesn’t want to have a kid, to getting married to them deciding that one of them is going to try to get pregnant. The whole piece is this complicated mosaic about women’s bodies, fertility and ecology. It’s a very epic story, but they are at the heart of it in a lot of ways.”
The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts runs through April 27. For more detailed information on the festival’s shows, artists and performers, visit pifa.org.