In this series, get to know your 2010 Philly Fringe artists a little bit better. Today, say hi to the creative force behind of MegLouise Dance:

Name:
Megan Pitcher

Age:
29

Where do you live now?
Cleveland, Ohio

Where were you born?
Grand Haven, Michigan

What's your show title?
. . . i learned not to kneel. . . and other advice from brilliant women

What was the first thing you stole?
A color changing lipstick sample.

What's your favorite alcoholic beverage?
A dark and stormy.

What was the last performance you saw?
Why I Had to Dance

What's your favorite Philly intersection?
The crazy triangle by the museum.

Do you have relatives more famous than you? Who are they?
I'm supposed to be a bastard descendent of Mary, Queen of Scots.

What's your least favorite country, and why?
Herzegovina, because I cannot say or spell it without assistance.

Do you have pets? If so, what are their names?
No, but i name possessions, like Mac Daddy, my computer.

If you weren't an artist, what would your job be?

I'd love to run a performance space and be a producer.

What's the most disgusting thing you've ever seen on SEPTA?
Mmmm, never seen it.

. . . i learned not to kneel. . . and other advice from brilliant women runs from Tuesday, September 7 through Thursday September 9 at 7:30 pm. CHI Movement Arts Center, 1316 South Ninth Street, Philadelphia. $10.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Photo courtesy of Megan Pitcher.

Tori Lawrence of the Lawrence-Herchenroether Dance Company sent this preview our way. Source is a site-specific dance performance that they'll install for 2010 Philly Fringe at Old City's Power Plant Productions:

Here at Live Arts, we're pretty big nerds. Or at least the blogfolk are. So we got really excited about a project designed by our Community Outreach All-Stars: a Festival reading list! Yippee! This compilation, hopefully to hit a shelf near you soon, includes a) books that upcoming Live Arts shows are directly based on, b) books that influenced the shows' creation in some way, and c) books that the artists just can't put down. We'll post some of our favorite artist suggestions here on the blog so you can get crackin' on your arts-tastic summer reading spree.

Today's literary pick: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Recommended by Brian Sanders, whose dance company JUNK will premiere Sanctuary at the Live Arts Festival this fall.

The novel is an Italian murder mystery novel set in the year 1327 that, as the good old Merriam-Webster Anthology of Literature tells me, "stands on its own as a murder mystery . . . [but is] more accurately seen as a questioning of truth from theological, philosophical, scholarly, and historical perspectives."

Ok, not a beach read.

But before you see Sanctuary, at least check out this book's postscript. Brian says he was "as (if not more) inspired by the postscript then I was by the book."

And if you're someone who Sparknoted your way through literature class, there's still hope--even Brian wasn't really feeling this text the first time around. "I am glad I waited until recently to read it and not in college when I was supposed to," he says. "I wouldn't have been nearly as ready to play."

Go grab a copy, it's your turn to play.

--Mara Miller

Sanctuary. Brian Sanders' JUNK. Theater East at The Hub, 626 North 5th Street. 9/3 – 9/18.

Here at the Festival Blog, we push Philly arts hard. But when we speak with many artists—especially dancers and choreographers, it seems—money always comes up. I'd bet we spend about a quarter of the time interviewing artists discussing how they fund their projects. But the landscape is challenging. Just a couple weeks ago, when I spoke with Bethany Formica, she told me that finding funding for dance, and particularly for individual grants and projects, has become markedly more difficult in the past couple years.

So this article from First Things (I know, weird, eh?) seems especially timely. Using Philadelphia-area native Lauren Zaleta (pictured here), who's training at the Joffrey Ballet School, as a window into the dance world, writer and former dancer Sara Hamdan roots around in the challenges facing the dance world. It's frank, and a little harrowing. Hamdan writes:

"American dance culture isn't just struggling. To some observers, its diagnosis seems to be especially grim, perhaps even terminal: Dance is a victim of inherent weaknesses made yet more dire by the profession's financial woes. Mounting deficits, shrinking audiences, and less critical support have combined to cause an entire art form to fear its fate in ways that other performing arts do not.

"Already less popular than other cultural offerings, even on a good day, dance relies far more heavily on audience support than does its competition. A dance aficionado can't download a performance on an iPod and enjoy it in the car during a long drive. Dance demands a different kind of interaction with an audience; it takes more effort and concentration—and money—for a dance devotee to end up in a theater or concert hall with a group of dancers and watch them sweat, listen to their breathing, and marvel at the command they have over their bodies. Dance is an all-or-nothing proposition for its audience, and this may end up being a principal reason for its demise.

"Unfortunately, it's not just the worst possible time in dance history for audiences. It is, simply put, the bleakest it has been for the dance industry itself in nearly a century."

Yikes. (Still, it's a great feature and very much worth a read.) Dance is a huge part of what we do at Live Arts and Philly Fringe, and on good days, I feel optimistic, and quite excited about the future of dance here. But professional careers—making your living from dance—do seem increasingly hard to come by.

What do you think? Is dance in Philly endangered? Do young dancers and choreographers have a shot at not just an artistic career, but a professional one? Please feel invited to discuss in the comments, or if you want to share longer thoughts, email me responses for publication at nicholas[at]pafringe[dot]com.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

28-year-old Jumatatu Poe is ready to be old. "It's a tactile thing--I want to know what it feels like," he explains. But growing old doesn't sound so bad when you think about immortality as much as Jumatatu does. It's a topic he's exploring in his new piece Unstuck for the Live Arts Festival's 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works) and at the free workshop he's leading this Saturday from 12–3pm at UArts.

Jumatatu isn't talking about the Tuck Everlasting fountain of youth type of immortality--exactly. The piece is inspired by a question that he posed to students at his alma mater Swarthmore College, where he is now a dance professor: "What if there were only this moment . . . forever?" One way that he delineates that kind of immortality is in the interactions we have with people we meet and never see again.

"What is that immortal image that I leave with them, that they can morph whatever way they want, and that I'll never have any relationship with? There are all these me's running around that don't have much to do with the me I'm creating," he says. That's not to rule out the fantastical--Jumatatu loves "glitter and magic and fancifying things." He calls his pieces "urban fables" because of the way that he abstracts the world we exist in, using fairy tales and fictional creatures as symbols to talk about social phenomena.Unstuck, he says, is connected to a larger piece he'll eventually create about a vampire love story.

Perhaps his love for fantasy is an attempt to balance the academia he says he was surrounded by growing up. His family, with four younger sibling and three older half-siblings, lived in practically all of the Sans and Santas of California. When he was 14 they moved to Philadelphia so that his parents could go back to school full time, his father earning a PhD in African-American Studies at Temple. Jumatatu wanted to become a biomedical engineer, a dream that lasted "about 2 weeks into college."

After the jump: the making of a dancer and hypotheses on the function of art.

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Do the twist:

>>>All weekend: QFest continues to roll. Previews and roundups in Philadelphia Weekly, Philebrity, and City Paper.

>>>Friday: Lunch break with Chubby Checker concert at City Hall. Noon! Free! Weird!

>>>Friday: Holiday-delayed First Friday. Good bets: Tiger Strikes Asteroid has "Lovetown, PA" upstairs from "Vox VI" at Vox Populi Gallery which is mere blocks from "A Guide to Salvation" at Space 1026.

>>>Saturday: Go find a state-run wine vending machine. Breathe into it to get your hooch. Contemplate how these make any sense. Quoth Keith Wallace of the Wine School of Philadelphia: "The process is cumbersome and assumes the worst in Pennsylvania's wine consumers, that we are a bunch of conniving underage drunks." Would we really have it any other way? If you find a machine, send us your pictures of blowing for booze.

>>>Saturday: Calling all dancers! Jumatatu Poe, who's new dance Unstuck will be featured in 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works) is leading a FREE workshop with his company idiosynCrazy productions from 12–3 at UArts where he will explore the question "What if there were only this moment . . . forever?" E-mail molly@livearts-fringe.org for details and to reserve a spot.

>>>Sunday: Duh, you're coming to ICA to see the Philip Glass documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, the first film in our series exploring the artists of Lucinda Childs's Dance. ICA, free, 2:00 pm, RSVP please! To RSVP@livearts-fringe.org.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

In this episode of our occasional media digest of things you probably care about:

>>>Philadelphia Weekly's J. Cooper Robb picks the best of the best of theater for this past season. The top 10 productions include EgoPo's Company which ran during Philly Fringe last year, and Pig Iron's Welcome to Yuba City, which premiered at the Live Arts Festival and was also Robb's selection for best new play, best ensemble, best choreography, and best scenic design (by Mimi Lien). Congrats to everybody, for, as Robb writes, " For the past two decades, the theater community has grown in both quantity and quality; now, previously young companies are now artistically established, and over the years have been cultivating a stable of talented local designers, directors and actors." Damn straight.

>>>In Sunday's Inquirer, which I had missed while I was fleeing the black bears of Canada, Howard Shapiro writes up the rise of Temple Repertory Theater, the new professional-level theater affiliated with Temple University's MFA theater program. Quoth Shapiro: "These new troupes are the salvation of American repertory theaters, which offer actors steady gigs and artistic attachments, and which were becoming rarer by the decade."

>>>Lucinda Childs's Dance was up at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. last month. In The Post and Courier, reviewer Eliza Ingle raves:
"As the dance unfolds trancelike, the dancers turn on their axes like spinning planets, at other times they could be cellular activity under a microscope. Most powerful is the second section where the image of Lucinda Childs stands larger-than-life with the look of an artist who is confident her work will not disappear. Dancer Caitlin Scranton mirrors the choreographer, weaving in and out of the footage in a brilliant light design by Beverly Emmons."

>>>Hey, they've got a lovely interview with Lucinda Childs up as well!

>>>Remember Justin Aaron Poole, and his obits for Everyman? He's an academic too, and in a recent issue of Theatre Journal he offers some thoughts on last year's Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe. Subscription (or access to an academic library) required, but here's a taste:
"Following the argument that the Fringe showcases mythic, David and Goliath-type stories linked to the Philadelphian psyche, the enthusiasm for ideas, coupled with the lack of established training that characterized some (though not all) Fringe shows, seems fitting. Perhaps a Fringe artist's lack of experience is not call for alarm, but rather for celebration. In the contemporary American theatre, where many venues are becoming detached from the communities they serve, is it not cause to celebrate when an event such as the Philly Fringe can so unabashedly support the free expression of locals who, although they may not have much experience, have identified something that they wish to say or a segment of society that they believe needs to be provoked?"

We think so. Thanks!

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Photos courtesy Pig Iron and Cross Cultural Theatre Initiative

"I'm more interested in performing than choreographing," says Bethany Formica, who will be dancing in Marianela Boán's new piece for the Live Arts Festival, Decadere. "I ended up choreographing because otherwise you have no ownership over your work. It's a struggle of wanting to be known for that, but I have to force myself to choreograph."

Bethany is not unknown for her choreography; after all, she received a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts choreography fellowship in 2008. But she is better known for her performances in some of the region's best-received dance performances of recent years, such as Nichole Canuso's Wandering Alice and Teatr Dada von Bzdülöw's Faktor T (to which she also contributed choreography).

For her work in Faktor T, she and the Teatr Dada von Bzdülöw went back and forth from Poland over the course of a year while they rehearsed.

"It was a difficult process," Bethany says. "It was a small company with huge egos, and we'd be sitting in dark theaters for twelve hours smoking cigarettes and doing nothing."

Still, Bethany says the international opportunities she's had in Philadelphia have been remarkable, citing Dance Advance in particular as an organization that promotes international exchanges.

Only recently did she return from the Dominican Republic and Colombia, where she performed with Marianela Boán. In Decadere, Bethany says the cultural interactions between Marianela and the dancers create challenges, but rewarding ones.

"There are so many things Marianela doesn't explain. It's a mix of cultures, two languages in the rehearsal room all the time. The Colombians and Scott [McPheeters] and I had worked together as pairs before, and as a quartet, we have to figure out how to mix. Marianela pokes fun at the culture she's living in. Now that she's in the U.S., she's focusing on what we're doing wrong."

Bethany looks forward to seeing the cultural mix in action in the United States.

"We only performed Decadere in the Dominican Republic in front of Spanish-speaking audiences. There were jokes [in Spanish] that I didn't get. We're definitely exploited as the gringos in the piece. Whether that's amusing here, I don't know."

After the jump: dark humor, collaboration, and "the best most horrible thing that ever happened to me."

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Whoops, I almost forgot! The Philadelphia Independent Film Festival's got it going on this weekend too. Here's Philebrity's handy Philadelphia Independent Film Festival post.

And, drumroll, our very own Pia Agrawal and Emma Ferguson have put together a three-part documentary film series in partnership with ICA and the International House to delve deeper into the minds behind Dance, which is coming to the Live Arts Festival this fall. We've got Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, Patrick Bensard's Lucinda Childs, and Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera. Best of all, all screenings are free with an RSVP to rsvp@livearts-fringe.org!

After the jump, trailers, reviews, and screening details.

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There's a new collective in town. They go by the name of Hybridge Arts. This Monday the 28th they're kicking off with their first Last Mondays event at 7pm at Broad Street Ministry.

Hybridge Arts was recently formed by all-star alumni of the Headlong Performance Institute (HPI), which is starting its third year of intensive "study-abroad-in-Philadelphia" semesters in interdisciplinary performance (taking students from various colleges as well as post-grads). Marcel Williams Foster, a founding member of Hybridge Arts, explains that the group of young "hybrid" artists (incorporating dance, theater, poetry, music, etc.) wants to create a "bridge" that connects emerging artists to a welcoming audience.

The inspiration for Last Mondays came from HPI faculty member Mark Lord. He and his company Big House (plays and spectacles) used to put on a monthly Last Mondays event where $5 would get you a home-cooked spaghetti dinner and a night of experimental performance by emerging artists, and when Hybridge Arts formed they decided to resurrect Last Mondays.

"The idea of continuing what Mark Lord began was an honor," says Marcel, "and an amazing opportunity for us to continue working together and to provide opportunities for Philly's emerging artists in all disciplines."

HPI fosters the bonds of community that Hybridge Arts's Last Mondays hope to embody. Lauren Dubowski, program coordinator for HPI, says that of the 30 alums since the program started in 2008, 17 have continued to live and make work in Philly--and will be featured in Philly Fringe shows like Louis DeVaughn Nelson's Man Bites Dog, Hyphen – Nation Arts' The Jane Goodall: Experience, Media Res Theater Company's A Lesson in Dead Language by Adrienne Kennedy, Movement Brigade's Constants, and Bright Light Theater Company's PRECIPICE, to name a few.

The first Last Monday (it'll never get old) will feature Jaamil Kosoko showing material from his upcoming Live Arts piece American Chameleon, Kelly Turner, whose work Marcel calls "one of the most fluid and virtuosic interactions I've ever seen between a chorus of dancers and a soloist. Not to mention gut-wrenching, heart-breaking," Rose Luardo of local band Sweatheart, and Triberious, a Philly trio who Sam Towers, another Hybridge Arts member, says create an experimental quality "through a darkly complex blend of drums, bass, and the extremely talented Mark Allen on the saxophone." All that and dinner prepared by one of Broad Street Ministry's chefs sounds like some serious bang for your five bucks.

Hybridge Arts will host Last Mondays at Broad Street Ministry every month from now until July 2011.

--Ellen Freeman

Photos by Lauren Dubowski and Andrew Simonet.