We're Thrilled to Announce the Centerpiece Show of the 2010 Live Arts Festival...
DANCE
by Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass, and Sol LeWitt

Photo by Sally Cohn

"DANCE offers liberation through confinement, infinite variation through sameness; it conveys the elemental desire to move to music, to dance" - The New York Times

Lucinda Childs will bring her rarely performed signature work DANCE to the 2010 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival this September. In this seminal collaboration featuring music by Philip Glass, dancers seamlessly interact with a film by Sol LeWitt to create a powerful retrospective of the human form in motion and an exploration of musical movement, rhythm, and harmony.

CLICK HERE for a clip of a recent production of DANCE at The Joyce Theater.

Performances will be held at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theatre.
Tickets and a full schedule will be available at www.livearts-fringe.org beginning in May.

The presentation of Lucinda Childs' DANCE in the 2010 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival is supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through Dance Advance.

Spontaneous dancing erupted in the Mayor's Reception Room this morning upon the announcement of a project that will place a vibrant new work of community-based public art on the parking decks facing Interstate 95 at the Philadelphia International Airport. We're talking about a 50,000 square foot mural, incorporating the photographic work of its designer, artist Jacques-Jean "JJ" Tiziou.

Scheduled for completion in June 2011, this project is set to be one of Philadelphia Mural Arts' greatest accomplishments as it transforms a highly visible, dull facade:


into a brilliant representation of our city's life, culture, community, and artistic vision:



Visit This Page to learn more. And see the video in our previous blog entry.
Congratulations to Philadelphia Mural Arts and to JJ Tiziou!

From Philly Metro, Thursday, January 28, 2010:

"Reasons it was fun to live, work, and play in Philly
Why have we all had such a good time in Philly over the past decade? Here's just 10 of the reasons for it
#1 Tables turned: Thanks to powerhouses such as Stephen Starr; Marc Vetri; Jose Garces and Michael Solomonov, not even New York can pretend we don't have a dining scene to reckon with these days.
...
#3 Philadelphia Live Arts/Philly Fringe festival: This gigantic gathering of local, international, amateur and professional artists has been kicking since 1997, but it gets a little bigger, a little weirder, and a little more can't-miss every year."

But here's what the Metro doesn't know (yet!): Those powerhouse restaurateurs are in partnership with this year's festival, to bring you Feastival.
For more info on what will be the #1 reason it's fun to live, work, and play in Philly in 2010, CLICK HERE

What happens when the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program brings together the Philadelphia International Airport, Philadelphia Parking Authority, and photographer JJ Tiziou?

Come find out what happens, and participate in the announcement by Mayor Michael Nutter and Deputy Mayor Rina Cutler of an extraordinary new work of community-based public art that will celebrate How Philly Moves.

Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Time: Doors open at 9:30am. Presentation begins at 10:00am.
Location: City Hall, Mayors Reception Room - 2nd floor (please bring photo id to enter building)

Featuring live music provided by members of the ferocious and recklessly joyful West Philly Orchestra
This is about you, Philly. See you there.

>>>Some of our staff members have an absolutely crazy love for margaritas, hence their appreciation for (and insistence upon) El Camino Real for goodbye drinks. Tonight, we say farewell to information manager and copywriter Josh McIlvain, with whom I've worked closely on this blog (buy his books!). You have Josh to thank for the Fringe poems, which were his idea, and for the Festival Guide, which he shepherded through the publication process (or blame him if you find any typos, whichever). We're seeing off three of our interns too: Alexandra Nielsen, Sophie Ozenbaugh, and Geoff Weathersby (pictured right, with crowbar in hand at the new office digs back in May, prying metal studs out of a wall). They have all decided to continue their education, and not to enter the draft this year.

>>>Then around 7:00ish, we're hopping on the bandwagon and heading up to the opening party for the Pork Chop gallery. Featuring work by Jen Procacci (who totally hooks us up by distributing our Festival Guides thanks Jen!), five bucks gets you in, and over the endless beer, aerial performance, and solid music, you can argue about whether 1536 N. American Street is in Fishtown or not. Is the name Kensington really so bad?

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Photo by Alice Hershey.

Remember when we were all, "oh, you should go to the First Person Salons, they're so cool"? Well, that was our excellent ex-intern Jennifer Burrini, who's now columnizing for Saint Joe's student paper, The Hawk.

Of course, everybody loves that Jenn plugged us, but she was right about the Salons too. And tonight, Fringe artists take over half of the event:

>>>Shareef Hadid Jenkins (subject of an extensive Q&A in this space yesterday) will present an excerpt from his show with Gladys Productions, Getting Your Life.

>>>Music and Motion Dance previews two excerpts from the 9 muses.

The Salons are pretty cool events: the audience is interested and supportive while experiencing new works and works in development, and the opportunity to so intimately engage people about their art is pretty rare. Also on the lineup tonight: artists Damon Reaves and Jennifer Baker.

Go, grasshopper. Learn from the arts. $8, 7:30 pm, Laurie Beechman Cabaret at the Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad St.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

At the fairly desolate corner of 41st Street and Haverford Avenue in West Philly is an enormous brick building known as the Philadelphia Tracking Company, where back in the day, like the late-19th-century day, trolleys were built. Now, the structure is basically just four big walls and a pitched roof. Inside, Jordan Griska (www.jordangriska.com) is building things.

"Angle grinder is the number one tool," explains Jordan. "Cut, grind shape, drill press—it's the go-to workhorse of metalworking."

Jordan shares one half of the floor space with six other artists who work in metal and other hardy materials. They all have a decidedly reclaim-and-reuse aesthetic, with a lot of their raw material coming from the trash transfer station in the Northeast and eBay. The artists also want to spruce up the space by creating mini-environments for themselves, so Jordan has plans this fall to build a small skyscraper of glass and steel, which will serve as his office as well as an art piece. It will be about 12 feet by 10 feet and rise some thirty feet to the building's rafters. Jordan likes to build big. And he likes being able to put himself, and others, in the middle of his art.

On September 12, starting at 5pm, Jordan will present Icarus at the Philly Fringe. The work is a strange and wondrous contraption that involves a metal frame that curves like the hull of a boat, to which Jordan attaches, an airplane propeller, a tractor seat, a fly wheel from an elevator, a bike chain, himself, and a parachute of reflective Mylar. With his feet tucked into bicycle clips, Jordan sits on the tractor seat which slides along a metal bar, functioning like a rowing machine. He pulls on a chain that turns the wheel which spins the propeller which produces the wind which blows back at Jordan which inflates the silver parachute.

The visual spectacle is arresting, and during its first iteration, which Jordan presented in 2007 at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, it proved to be quite dangerous, too. Then called Sisyphus ("Seemed a good metaphor for the creative process," he says), Jordan successfully (see video below) completed one demonstration, but when he tried repeating the spectacle, the chain snapped, and he was propelled backwards off the contraption. The next thing he knew he was in the intensive care unit with a fractured skull and two broken vertebrae. He stayed in the I.C.U. for five days. With Icarus—Jordan seems to have an affinity for fate-tempting names—he has made some improvements to the original model.

Jordan, who is 25 and lives in Center City, grew up in Narberth. "My family is not artistic. My mom and dad are doctors and my brother's a doctor," Jordan explains. Growing up, Jordan was always building things. "I started out with forts in the woods in back of the house, then skateboard ramps." In high school he developed more as an artist, and became interested in the processes involved in the discovery of new materials as an approach to creating art. He started college at George Washington, found that was insufficient and ended up the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he had gone one summer to learn how to weld.

"I never thought I would get into performance," Jordan explains about his decision to put himself within Sisyphus. "It got me thinking about performance as a venue."

His next major project after a long recovery from his art injuries was ad-infinitum. He was attracted to the elbow joint from the kind of tube slide you'll find in a McDonald's playground, seeing its potential for creating a unique structure by fitting together a whole bunch of them. So he made a molding, fabricated some out of fiberglass, and created a 10-foot twisting tubular sculpture. Then he attached 8,000 LEDs which he connected with painted circuits of silver based ink. The lights are on the outside and the inside of ad-infinitum because the audience is invited to crawl around inside the sculpture, creating three separate interactions with the artwork: seeing it from the outside, experiencing it from the interior and becoming an active participant in the work, and the view from the outside with shadows of people crawling around inside.

"Ideas come in all different ways." says Jordan, looking over Icarus. "One night I had this idea, did drawings and developed it, then found parts afterwards." Asked if one of the additions to his performance at the Fringe might be a helmet, Jordan replies, "Yeah, I'm thinking about it. My mom will probably kill me if I don't."

--Josh McIlvain

Photos of Sisyphus and ad-infinitum courtesy of the artist. Photo of workshop by Josh McIlvain and Mara Miller.

Linda Dubin Garfield likes to draw her Philly Fringe audience into the artistic process, even those who haven't felt artistic since kindergarten. This year the visual artist presents Crowning Glory: Hair Portraits and Stories. This is her fourth Fringe show and the format represents a mix of Linda's career as a full-time artist, her former career as a counselor, and her doctorate education.

When a dear friend passed away several years ago, she left Linda some money to "do something special." Linda, recently retired from thirty years as a counselor in the Philadelphia public school system, went on a trip to Mexico with her art teacher. There were twelve other people on the trip, all of whom considered themselves artists. "I was the only one who wasn't calling myself an artist. I thought, this is crazy," says Linda. "So when I went home I cleaned out my son's room and made it into my art studio, and I made card that said: Linda Dubin Garfield, artist."

Linda, now in her early 60s, was not new to making art, but throughout her 36-year career as a guidance counselor in the Philadelphia public school system she considered herself a hobbyist. Linda grew up in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia and attended Germantown High. In 1964 she entered Temple University and began an academic relationship that lasted on and off for 20 years. She earned a B.A. in English, later a Masters in counseling, and returned once more for a Doctorate of Education, which she completed in 1984. Her interest and specialty were in group and social processes and dynamics—watching how people interact in groups, the norms of a group, who has the power in a group. Her thesis was on teacher burnout and stress in the Philadelphia public school system.

Her job was to help kids with social, emotional, and academic problems, and later worked to help kids get into college. During her career as a counselor, she worked at Henry C. Lea School, West Philly High School, and ended up at the High School of Creative and Performing Arts. "I was there for nine years and it was just the best," Linda enthuses of CAPA, from where she retired in 2002.

Hit more for more of Linda's work and story.

[More]

A good trip home to the steel city includes food, art, and shopping, and I managed a good mix this weekend.

Our first stop was the Society for Contemporary Craft nestled in the historic Strip District market where you can find delicious pierogies, any Italian cheese imaginable, and enough black and gold knickknacks for the next hundred Super Bowls. The craft exhibition on our radar was Beyond Shared Language: Contemporary Art and the Latin American Experience, which brought together the work of 14 artists (working in clay, glass, metal, wood, fiber, and mixed media) who share Latin American heritage. My mother had seen a write-up in the City Paper of a meat sculpture made out of fabric, and we just couldn't stay away.

Bound (2007) is the handiwork of Tamara Kostianovsky, who writes that her aim is to "confront the viewer with the real and grotesque nature of violence, and offer a context for reflecting on the vulnerability of our physical existence, brutality, poverty, consumption and the voracious needs of the body." And I thought we were just going to see a giant cloth steak.

On Sunday we headed to the I Made It Market where more than 70 artists sold everything from poster prints to necklaces made from old typewriter keys (get your own at junxtaposition.com). The Market takes place throughout the year at different spots, but this weekend the artists set up shop at the South Side Works, as part of the Exposed festival. Tons of booths featured some sort of recycled material--River Rats Designs for example, cleans up local rivers and turns the junk into jewelry and home accents.

And the Sardine Clothing Company, whose owners made the trip west from Manayunk, patches together strips of old T-shirts to create unique and eco-friendly skirts. The Market is all about things creative and keeping the earth happy. There's already a branch in Los Angeles, and if the website isn't lying to me, an in-the-works extension in Philly as well.

I'll leave you with an image from a sidewalk art contest that unfolded near the Market, our favorite by far: Billy Mays, born in Pittsburgh's McKees Rocks, immortalized in chalk. At least until it rains.

--Mara Miller

Tonight: Vox V. Curators Ryan Trecartin and Larry Mangel guarantee awesomeness from these young emerging art bucks. Well, they didn't offer me, personally, a guarantee. But their reputation precedes them, and Vox Populi shows are always solid and usually a party. Tonight, 6:00 to 11:00 pm, 319 N. 11th Street, free! (And Saturday, head west and hit up the Philadelphia Record Fair, sponsored by Vox Pop, over at ICA.)

All weekend: The Nikola Tesla Inventors Club has dinner at Balkan Express (which has delicious foodstuffs, by the way) and celebrations, exhibitions, and demonstrations about the legacy of Tesla. Did you know that the genesis of the monologue Monopoly! from Mike Daisey (How Theater Failed America, The Last Cargo Cult) lies in the Tesla-Edison war over electricity? AC/DC throwdown! Tesla also has a star turn in Mike's Great Men of Genius. Various locations and prices, visit the website for details.

All weekend: In case you missed it being splashed everywhere, QFest is all over town starting, um, yesterday (oops). But you still have ten days to enjoy the largest queer film festival on the East Coast.

--Nicholas Gilewicz