All summer, we've been profiling the amazing Philadelphia choreographers whose work the 2010 Live Arts Festival is showcasing in 8: eight choreographers/eight new works, and we're revisiting those profiles this week. Below, learn more about Olive Prince's I desire, which you can see tonight and Sunday afternoon. For details and tickets, click here.

"To be satisfied with everything I do."

"To feel, look like, and have a million bucks."

"To have sex with 50 Cent."

These are just some of the responses scrawled on the notecards that Olive Prince hands out to friends, family, and even people she meets on the street, asking them to write or draw their answer to the same question: "What do you desire?"

Olive is using the notecards as Post Secret-esque research for her new dance I desire which will be performed in 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works) at the Live Arts Festival. The piece is centered around the idea of humans becoming machines, inspired by Olive's observation of people rushing to work as if on an assembly line. She imagines that flesh and bone and individuality and desire are lost as people "go through their day with blinders on."

Olive is not playing the role of enlightened artist, free from the 9-to-5, however. "I'm part of it," she admits. "I just wonder what would happen if we messed it up."

After the jump: Olive's desires.

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All summer, we've been profiling the amazing Philadelphia choreographers whose work the 2010 Live Arts Festival is showcasing in 8: eight choreographers/eight new works, and we're revisiting those profiles this week. You've already seen Megan Mazarick and Meg Foley over the last two nights. Below, meet Shavon Norris, whose dance the body in lines can be seen tonight and Sunday afternoon. For details and tickets, click here.

There are some people who make friends wherever they go, and I get the sense that Shavon Norris, one of the eight choreographers presenting new work in the upcoming Live Arts show 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works), is one of them. As soon as she walks into La Citadelle, the little café at 16th and Pine where she suggested we meet, the owner spies her and whisks over to give her a hug. They chat for a moment, her smile almost as big as her dangling pink earrings. For someone who just came from a full workday and is heading to an evening of rehearsal, she has an awful lot of energy.

Read on! Click More for more.

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Daniele Strawmyre's piece Kaidan, which will be performed at the Live Arts Festival in 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works), draws on Japanese horror movies and the ancient tradition of hyakumonogatari kaidankai, or "the telling of 100 ghost stories." Daniele's performance in 8 will be offered on Friday night and Saturday afternoon.

"I feel like there're a lot of people who just watch "So You Think You Can Dance" and Broadway plays—they're interested in being entertained. And they're the kind of people that go a lot of carnivals and amusement parks," she says. Daniele's not one to turn up her nose at a good haunted house, but in creating Kaidan she hoped to combine that enjoyment of thrill-seeking and an "appreciation of something that's beautiful or grotesque or thought-provoking, to bridge the gap between the elitist, 'high art' people and the thrill seekers." Kaidan, the staged performance you'll see this weekend, is a part of a longer work in development, Kaidan Insuto, which will emerge as an interactive installation later this year.

After the jump: so, what's so scary about dance?

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Hi friends! Sorry we've been out of commission for a day, but my presence was required at a wedding, and I was distracted by large amounts of Indian food and martinis. I ran into friend-of-a-friend and fellow theater blogger Matt Freeman there. After spotting my preferred drink of the evening, Tangueray martini with a twist, he ordered one too, but his came in something like a 12-ounce glass. Maybe more. Filled to the brim. My kind of playwright!

Anyway—tonight, the Live Arts Festival launches its showcase 8: eight choreographers / eight new works. This evening features Megan Mazarick, of whom you may have read here, and Meg Foley, of whom you've read below. As the shows come up, we'll be re-posting the 8 profiles from this summer. See you there!

8: eight choreographers/eight new works kicks off with the Meg Foley and Megan Mazarick pairing tonight and tomorrow at the Live Arts Studio, 919 North 5th Street, Northern Liberties. 8:00 pm both nights, $25.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Meg Foley uses many techniques when conceiving dances: storyboarding, visualization, real-time improvising, even blocking movement on graph paper.

"Match vs. Match married these things," Meg says about the dance she's performing on Tuesday and Wednesday as a part of the 2010 Live Arts Festival show 8: eight choreographers/eight new works. She says she's almost never in her own work, but she is this time—so I ask her how she imagines herself into her own dance realms.

"It's disassociation, a little bit," Meg says. "When I'm visualizing the dance, I'm trying through a formal lens: time, space, energetic quality.

"I think I was visualizing myself just as a body. But [the dancers and I] talk about our experience inside the dance. We each took a turn talking through the entire dance with the other performers. It made me really happy! It was interesting in moments of relationship [between the dancers] that the thing you were experiencing was vastly different than the others."

To some extent, this is a result of the structured improvisation techniques that Meg employed to compose Match vs. Match. But why include herself this time around?

"One reason I put myself in was to resolve the difficulty I was having talking about this with my dancers. I'm not interested in my dancers feeling lost or wandering. I'm not trying to toss them into the abyss."

Yet her plotting and conception, Meg says, creates a tension for her, and in Match vs. Match.

"That's where the richness of the work is happening," Meg says. "I come up against my analytical nature. I'm interested in heat, humanity, and messiness. If order wins out, it's too cool and delicate."

Meg also has been working on a larger project, portions of which you might have seen. It includes Natural, which she performed at the Rockys last year (don't forget Monday night's Rocky Awards at the Festival Bar!), a more recent work called Orienteering, and she wants to work them into an evening-length solo work.

"It's a lot about mapping my own experience inside dance," Meg says. "Visually, in terms of marking space, I've been imagining using tiny figurines to mark where action happened. Body painting is about illuminating sensation on my body. All of that is inside a conceit about performance identity and adornment."

For a dancer-choreographer attracting increased renown, Meg has some ambivalence about performance.

"I really love it and also really hate it. I feel it feeds the awesome parts of me and the not awesome parts of me. Showboating," which Meg says she often enjoys in the moment, "is a double-edged sword. You're placing yourself in this incredibly precarious position dependent on the audience reception of you."

In Natural, Meg says, "I start the section so pleased and enjoying the task. By the end I realize I'm finding the degree of awesomeness is dependent on what the audience is getting. By the end, I'm indignant."

But according to Meg, it's not because of you, Philly. You're down with good work!

"People are here to be excited and interested in new things." As an artist, Meg says, "It's easy to be here. Philly is great to come back to. It doesn't forget you."

It's hard to, when our 8 crew has so much talent. 8: eight choreographers/eight new works kicks off with the Meg Foley and Megan Mazarick pairing on September 7 and 8 at the Live Arts Studio, 919 North 5th Street, Northern Liberties. 8:00 pm both nights, $25.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Bob Wuss, the artistic director of the West Philly-based production group The Shakedown Project, writes in with this video response to Olive Prince's piece I DESIRE. The dance premieres at the 2010 Live Arts Festival next week as a part of 8: eight choreographers/eight new works.

"I was challenged by Olive to come up with a video using postcards that we have gathered over the past few months with people's desires written or drawn on these cards. I had traveled to parks around the city asking people what their deepest desire was and what we found was incredibly insightful and inspiring."

8: eight choreographers/eight new works kicks of September 7. Olive Prince is paired with Shavon Norris on September 9 at 8:00 pm, and September 12 at 3:00 pm. Live Arts Studio, 919 North 5th Street, Northern Liberties. $25.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Let's jump right in:

>>>City Paper cover story is more like a cover package: A.D. Amorosi interviews Charlotte Ford about CHICKEN, Mark Cofta on all the Billy Shakes, a piece on all the undead (so many undead), Shaun Brady on Bang on a Can and Release, and more.

>>>Philadelphia magazine's website has a slideshow of 11 of your favorite Festival performers.

>>>Daily News: Jonathan Takiff interviews Joe Blake, former DN reporter turned playwright and writing teacher, about his Philly Fringe show A Separate Sun.

>>>Edge Philadelphia: What's gay at the Festivals? They've got us covered.

>>>Edge redux: Article on the very talented Meg Foley, whose choreography will be featured next week as a part of 8: eight choreographers/eight new works.

>>>TheaterMania: J. Cooper Robb covers the opening of the theater season in Philly, with plugs for the Live Arts production Cankerblossom and the Philly Fringe show The New & Improved Stages of Grief.
>>>First Person Arts shares their picks too, focusing on memoir and documentary, of course. Click on over, and find out how to get an FPA discount to Cedric Andreiux.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Photo by Jay Dunn.

Megan Mazarick missed the surprise Lucinda Childs performance at the last Susan Hess Modern Dance event in its old space this spring. She was cleaning up from her own dance.

"Ben [Asriel] and I did this piece in dirt. We got stuck in the stairwell, spitting dirt into a bucket of water."

"It was such a big name at this small little event. It's representative of how this [Susan Hess residency] touches all these different people. A lot of older artists had shown up to support Susan. What folks saw at Susan Hess is now a part of Neon Gothic."

Megan showed a different excerpt earlier this year at the Live Arts Brewery Second Thursdays series, but she promises entirely new work for her showing at 8, which will eventually become a full-evening piece.

At the L.A.B. performance, Megan's characters' voices reminded me of the overly-close friends Walter and Perry from Home Movies. Megan says maybe a little of that is there, but she says the voices of a cartoon-within-an-online-cartoon inspired them.

After the jump: 70 pounds of peat moss, avoiding shooting your image wad, and burial.

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It's that time of the month again . . . the last Monday. Remember last Last Monday? What, you didn't think Last Mondays would last past that last Monday? (Ok, we couldn't resist.)


Tonight Hybridge Arts Collective presents their second event of their Last Mondays Performance Series, and this time around they will be previewing a few Philly Fringe works-in-progress. Don't miss sneak peaks of Hyphen-Nation Arts' drag parody of the famous monkey whisperer, The Jane Goodall: Experience, and Bright Light Theatre Company's PRECIPICE, a post-apocalyptic piece of movement-based theater featuring 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works) choreographer Daniele Strawmyre's dramaturg-extraordinaire, Katherine Cooper.

As always, a homemade vegetarian dinner is included in the $5 ticket price. The event is at Broad Street Ministries, 315 S. Broad Street, between Spruce and Pine.

--Ellen Freeman

When you move around the globe as much as Eun Jung Choi has--she's lived in her native Seoul, as well as New York, San Diego, Colorado, North Carolina, Philly, and takes frequent trips to Mexico--you tend to lose stuff. Eun Jung's new work All My Socks Have Holes, which will be featured in the 2010 Live Arts Festival's 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works), examines how the stories and memories that we forget are concealed in the objects we have to leave behind.

In Seoul, Eun Jung attended an arts junior high and high school where she spent a lot of time in the studio studying traditional Korean dance, an art she began at the age of six.

"It's sort of similar to contemporary Western dance in the way that it moves from the center out," she says, adding that because the traditional dance focuses on the breath, "Many people think I've had [José] Limón training, but I haven't."

She was going to attend Ewha, a prestigious women's university in Seoul, but cut her plans short because of the corruption of the university system, with professors going to jail for accepting bribes. "I was prepared for school but then I lost hope," she says.

Then she saw a performance by contemporary dance group Pilobolus. "I had never seen that before in my life. This was how I was introduced to modern dance—besides Martha Graham," she adds. "I felt like my spirit was lifted." Her mother calculated that she could afford to send Eun Jung to study in America for a few years, so in '91 Eun Jung began at and later transferred to University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

After the jump: American compliments, memory collapse, and stolen art.

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