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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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

"You're Puerto Rican? I thought you were black!"

The final line of the monologue from Les Rivera's Platypus, which he took from a real-life conversation with a friend of four years, illustrates the questions of racial identity, identification, and perception that color his first foray into original choreography.

The first public performance of Platypus will be at the Live Arts Brewery Second Thursdays event tonight, with Jaamil Kosoko and Daniele Strawmyre also previewing new work (all three are appearing in 8 at this fall's Live Arts Festival. But yesterday at the University of the Arts, I saw a sneak peek that he gave for a handful of dancers and choreographers, and me.

"For the past four days I've been just: 'I've gotta present my life to these people,'" Les says. "To me, that's a story from A to B."

Storytelling has always been a key part of Les's performance career. He traces much of it back to his time with the hip hop dance group Rennie Harris Puremovement, of which he was an original member.

"[Founder] Rennie [Harris] was bringing stories to the stage that people were not [otherwise] receiving, in ways that were not just simplified."

In the first section of Platypus, as I saw it performed yesterday, Les danced over a monologue his thoughts about racial identity and complexity, and explores his movement history: tae kwon do, gymnastics, and diving. In the second, he moves into salsa dancing, a passion of his mother's. The monologue continues, ending with that line: "You're Puerto Rican? I thought you were black!"

After the jump: b-boying to Elvis, and what's wrong with modern dance.

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