Eight rising choreographers have been commissioned to stage eight major new works at the Live Arts Festival. Come see what they create.
Choreographers: Meg Foley, Eun Jung Gonzalez, Jaamil Kosoko, Megan Mazarick, Shavon Norris, Olive Prince, Jumatatu Poe, and Daniele Strawmyre.
Come and go all day long as 12 hours of nonstop music by modern composers is performed by a roster of more than 20 acts of known and should-be-known artists, including The Bang on a Can All-Stars, Don Byron, and the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Pig Iron explores the world of fairytales with equal shades humor, darkness, and wonder. Parents must save their cardboard baby by entering Flatworld, where the inhabitants are as flat as cardboard. In fact, they are cardboard. Features West Philly's pioneering puppeteer Beth Nixon.
“One of the few groups successfully taking theater in new directions” — The New York Times
Cédric Andrieux narrates and dances his way through the course of his career in this touching and humorous examination of the life of a dancer. With excerpts from work by Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Philippe Tréhet, and Jérôme Bel.
"Bel's work is genuine . . . exciting, smart and great, great fun." - Dance Europe
Oppressive boredom, obsession with nuclear annihilation, and growing petty hatreds inspire three guards stuck in a nuclear submarine to gleefully enact their worst fears.
The centerpiece of the 2010 Live Arts Festival, DANCE is the stunning collaboration of choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Phillip Glass, and filmmaker Sol LeWitt. Live dancers perform behind a film of the original cast that is projected onto a giant screen stretching across the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater stage.
"It conveys the elemental desire to move to music, to dance" - The New York Times
Click here for a video excerpt of a recent performance at The Joyce Theater.
The latest work from groundbreaking choreographer Marianela Boán places her dancers in an abandoned space surrounded by video cameras, microphones, and fast food residue. Decadere explores the clash of music, language, humor, and violence in a world in decline.
"The Cuban-born veteran choreographer of international stature combines wit, craft, and serious techno-smarts." - Lisa Kraus, The Philadelphia Inquirer
An ingenious mash of live theater and film, ¡EL CONQUISTADOR! follows the telenovela (soap opera) adventures of a doorman and the crazy and exotic residents who ensnare him into their devious plots.
Samuel Beckett's novella First Love is brought to the stage in this devastatingly funny, tragic, and brutal monologue in a seminal performance by Conor Lovett, one of the world's foremost interpreters of Beckett.
"Conor Lovett's supremely funny performance in First Love, a solo stage adaptation of an early postwar Beckett novella, is such a pleasing triumph because its gallows humor emerges so organically, the result of a prepared actor with a deep understanding of the text." - Jason Zinoman, The New York Times
Click here for an interview with Conor about his translation of Beckett's First Love to the stage.
Funny, lyrical, and provocative - and spanning a century and a half - this theatrical collaboration examines separatist cults from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to a dissolving band of washed up wannabe extremists in 2012. Featuring NPL company members McKenna Kerrigan, Jeb Kreager, and Mary McCool, with Riot Group regulars Drew Friedman, Paul Schnabel, Stephanie Viola, and playwright and artistic director Adriano Shaplin.
"The Riot Group has established its considerable reputation these past few years with scalpel-sharp, ultra-modern satires on American public life." - Brian Logan, Time Out London
"Each year, NPL sets out to create one completely original-and distinctive-work... [that] manages to be funny and, most important, wildly entertaining." - Philadelphia Magazine
This is not your mother's Romeo and Juliet. This ingenious and hilarious exploration of skewed memory attempts to retell Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet through the collected recollections of regular people - and goes wildly off course.
"The star-crossed story is twisted into a big, gnarly knot in this flat-out hilarious riff on that revered classic... Expect to be in floods of teary laughter midway through." - Christopher Isherwood, New York Times
The visually captivating and physically daring choreographer returns with a new work performed along a 120-foot long wall. Wild illusion and intense movement are pushed to the limit as a 1980s gay disco is mistaken for a 1280 monastery by a group of future asylum seekers.
"Full-bodied entertainment." - Deni Kasrel, Philadelphia City Paper
In this world premiere staging from acclaimed New York ensemble Elevator Repair Service, Hemingway's novel comes to life on a stage littered with liquor bottles, cafe chairs, and a table that becomes a snarling, matador-charging bull.
"Elevator Repair Service works with intelligence and imagination." - Variety
TAKES examines all the extra bits that surround the snapshots of our memory. Inside a giant box made of transparent screens, Nichole Canuso and Dito Van Reigersberg's live performance is melded with their character's personal memories and past moments through video projections.
"[Canuso] has a wide-eyed innocence and such a wonderful deadpan that every movement, or even a simple glance, is filled with humor and meaning." - Ellen Dunkel, Philadelphia Inquirer
