LGBT performers and artists are pushing the envelope with some of the edgiest shows as part of this year’s Philly Fringe, the annual arts and music festival running through Sept. 22 at venues all over the city.
Fringe shows usually run the gamut from thought-provoking to risqué, but the show to beat this year for shock value is “Basement” by out choreographer Gunnar Montana, Sept. 13-20 at The Asian Arts Initiative, 1219 Vine St.
In the dance/art show, Gunnar takes the audience on a journey of sex, blood and heartbreak to a place designed to resemble the end of his past relationship — with dancers amid what looks like the dimly lit den of a serial killer.
“It’s all choreographed and produced based on this breakup I had in January,” Montana said. “It all comes out of that. There’s a lot of danger in it. There’s a lot of sadness in it and there’s a lot of sex, blood and guts. It’s this amplified version of what I was feeling. It’s super-artsy in a way that I felt like in the situation my heart was being ripped out of my body, and I’m taking that and making it real by ripping a heart out of somebody’s body.”
Montana assured us that the former object of his affection is alive and well, and that he is over their breakup.
“This whole thing was set up so that we broke up in January and now I’m ready to move on. I’m done,” he said. “I’ve got it all out. I’ve said what I have been able to say about it. I’m not trying to make a big hoopla about it. I’m just trying to present it in a more artistic manner, and I think it comes across as more beautiful and sad than anything else.”
“Basement” also features music combining mournful oldies and modern-day electronic.
The musical selection is another reference to Montana’s ex.
“I used to fight with this guy a lot about music. I used to hate his music and it was all oldies,” he said. “And I like the new hip stuff where it’s all electronic beats. So I’m doing half the show in the music he would like to listen to and the other half in music I’d like to listen to.”
Out choreographer Brian Sanders, coincidentally a mentor of Montana, is no stranger to Philly Fringe, having created some of the more eye-catching and talked-about performances the festival has seen in recent years with his dance-performance troupe Junk.
This year promises to be no different as Sanders world-premieres his latest show, “Hush Now Sweet High Heels and Oak,” Sept. 6-15 at 23rd Street Armory, 22 S. 23rd St.
“I’m trying to push myself in a little bit of a new direction creatively and work with a couple of new elements and things I haven’t done before,” Sanders said. “I’m nervous but excited about them. I’m hoping it’s going to be spectacular. It started abstract. A lot of times I start with a very space-specific idea in mind. With this show, although there were specific origins to the idea, what I wanted to do with them was up in the air. So much of the process this time around was about exploring the ideas and finding the possibilities. I knew I wanted a big tree. I knew I wanted a big pile of sand. And I knew I wanted heels. From there, everything has been a fun and creative process. Part of the idea behind this piece is this is how nursery rhymes look to us as adults played out in the bedroom. It’s about the strange metaphors in nursery rhymes and what they mean to us as adults.”
Did somebody say heels?
“I was working with a sculptor and I was talking with him about the idea of why men can’t wear high heels, rather that it’s a thing exclusive to women,” Sanders said. “So we were talking about how to make a masculine high heel. So that’s where the idea of the high heel came from inside of this piece.”
Like previous shows Sanders has put together for Fringe, there is an element of physical risk to the performance.
But he assured us the shows look more dangerous than they actually are.
“I don’t know if it is in my nature to seek that out,” Sanders said about the extreme physicality of his shows. “The performers are hanging from very high up. But it’s all as safe as it can possibly be. Sometimes I choose a sense of peril as part of the tension of the piece, and I don’t think that it is part of this piece at all.”
Another group producing a physically demanding and dangerous-looking performance this year is Fringe alum Tangle Movement Arts with “Break/Drift/Resist,” through Sept. 7 at Philadelphia Soundstages, 1600 N. Fifth St. In the show, the seven-woman cast ricochets from floor to ceiling to represent the friction and warmth of a close-knit community.
Out poet, performer and Tangle founder Lauren Rile Smith said the risky nature of the performance is relative.
“I have to say that the drive on the highway that I do between our rehearsal studio and my home is definitely more dangerous from a statistical perspective,” she said. “I think that the element of risk definitely lends a dimension for the audience in our performances and we play with that element of suspense. That sense of having ventured into an unknown space will resonate with audience members on an emotional level. We’re telling a story about people going out on a limb in their own lives.”
Their third Fringe appearance, Smith said, is more ambitious than any of the other shows they have done.
“We wanted to use aerial equipment and new ways to generate new types of movement,” she said. “We’re always interested in questions of how to represent community and multiple close relationships on stage. We built this surreal vertical stage to offer a mirror for the interactions of everyday life. Our inspiration for the show was the way that conflict can ripple through a community, affecting the people that are the center of the drama but also their friends and their partners. It was inspired by our own close-knit queer community based in West Philadelphia. So perhaps the little dramas on stage will be relatable to audiences from their own lives in this more-abstract dance form.”
Fringe isn’t all gore and daredevil feats this year.
Recent New York transplants trans-identified playwright MJ Kauffman and gay director Jack Tamburri formed MJ/JT Productions to create their show “GAYZE: A Real Life Web Series,” an episodic comedy with a message.
“Jack and I both just graduated from the Yale School of Drama and while we were studying there, we took a TV-writing class together,” Kauffman said. “We were both interested in this web-series medium because of short episodes and the fact that one can watch many at once. We wanted to use some of the structures of that form, like montage and fast-forward, and turn them into live theater.”
“It was fun to play with those sitcom episodic structures, but that extremely popular form also seemed like a great place to create satire,” Tamburri added. “One of the things we wanted to do was examine and scrutinize some of the images we see of queer people and queer life in mainstream media, which we don’t think really accurately or wholly represent our lives or the lives in our community. Essentially, it’s a situation comedy. There’s physical humor and snappy dialogue. What we want is to make a really entertaining hour of theater, and then within that we want to have some serious political thought going on.”
Philly Fringe runs through Sept. 22 at venues all over Philadelphia. For a complete list of performances and events, as well as ticket information, visit www.livearts-fringe.org.