Smelling roses while you sleep improves your memory.

While tofu has shown to decrease memory in the elderly, tempeh consumption can help memory function.

Anne Hathaway was 8 years older and 3 months pregnant when she and Shakespeare got hitched.

The full title of "Romeo and Juliet" is actually "The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet."

Goldfish have a memory-span of at least three months

If someone gave you a quiz right now, what are you the chances you'd know the actual story of Romeo and Juliet, most of the details, or, at the very least, who was the Montague and who was the Capulet? Or would you beg for at least a few minutes of time with Wikipedia and/or a trip to the local bookstore to hurriedly read the back cover before you had to take this quiz? Would you worry that you were suffering acute memory loss, or consider starting to do crossword puzzles to improve your memory?

Nature Theater of Oklahoma takes the momentary panic/embarrassment/general cluelessness you are feeling as you think about this quiz and make it an entire, hilarious production. A Philadelphia premiere, Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo and Juliet is a conglomeration of the fleeting fragments of memories and conversations of the details that comprise and orbit the epic, often-referenced, tragic love story.

Taking the stage at this year's Festival. Don't forget.

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.

Unless you already got the tickets, we'll have to hook up late, because a couple of these guys are sold out. I'm not sure I can top the back to back small metal objects to Mortal Engine extravaganza of yesterday, but hey, let's give it a try. A future pluperfect look back at the night to come:

>>>Sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 am, I will have successfully made it back home, after . . .

>>>The penultimate night at the Festival Bar. We will have gossiped about controversies, shared our joys and sorrows from the past two weeks, chattered about who's mean and who's great and why, and we Twitterati will have celebrated our transition from #LiveArtsFringe to #PHLArts to keep the arts talk going. All the while, we will have been dancing to the Broadzilla DJs, who will have held it down all night on ye olde ones and twos. Odds are, we will have thrown back many drinks (as we will have tomorrow night when we will have partied 'til 5:00 am to close things out no kidding no kidding!). But I will not have arrived until about midnight, because . . .

>>>I will have just seen the last performance of FATEBOOK. Despite writing this blog, I will have avoided much of the press and word-of-mouth about this show, so I will have walked through the door with my eyes clear and open. I will have been out of breath, because I will have just ran the quarter-mile up North 5th Street from . . .

>>>Welcome to Yuba City. I will have not seen the show until tonight, although I have seen the set at different points, watched some rehearsal, and talked to the Pig Iron folks about their various and sundry projects. This will have been only the second show I've seen tonight, because . . .

>>>I will have had to kick things off at 7:00 pm with 13 Most Beautiful . . . Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests. I've been excited about this show ever since I talked to Dean Wareham about it what seems like forever ago, and I will have enjoyed it very much, I believe.

See you tonight somewhere, right? Right. And afterwards, for real, don't forget to get a good night's sleep because tomorrow we're partying like we're in Spain, but with better music.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

The Live Arts Festival has mad love for Australia this year. First, small metal objects from Back to Back Theatre opens tonight at the 40th Street Field in University City. You will go, you will wear headphones, and it may take you a minute to figure out who's acting, and who's just passing by. Site-specific work represent! But if you're worried about the weather, then you picked the wrong place to stay, because this show is happening rain or shine. To learn a little more about small metal objects and Back to Back Theatre, read Andrew Zitcer's great Q&A with Alice Nash, their executive producer. Then watch this preview video below:

And Mortal Engine from Chunky Move promises to be one of the most visually arresting performances any of us have seen in quite some time—possibly ever. Don't believe me? Then you haven't watched their preview video. They dance with light! OK, that might be a little reductive, but it certainly looks that way:



I'm excited about both, and I will put SEPTA to the test tomorrow as I try to rock them back to back (get it? get it? But really, I only have like 30 minutes between them)! smo (I can call it that because we're friends) is up first at 5:30 pm, and then Mortal Engine at 7:00. If I'm late, SEPTA, you can step into my office . . .

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Oof, late posting today. If you read this blog earlier, I hope you paid attention to the date on the post, as the more. dance party was last night.

Tonight, I'm headed to the rooftop of the Parkway House, an apartment building at the intersection of 22nd Street and Franklin Parkway, for Teenager: Anne Frank.

Ever since we published a story about the show back in July, I've been excited to go to what I think will be one of the coolest Fringe venues. The view of the skyline in the promo art from the show? That's the backdrop for the performance, and I don't think I could ask for better weather for a touch of outdoor theater. Tix are still available if you want to join me! (And it also runs every night at 8:00 pm through Sunday night.)

--Nicholas Gileiwcz

Photo Credit: Linda Schirona & Hannes Richert

So we were culling the tweets about the Festival this week, and came upon this tweet from @RiversAreDamp:

Chlamydia dell'Arte - Fairly juvenile, but fairly entertaining, too. That's more vagina than I've considered in a lifetime. #liveartsfringe

How's that for a quickie review of sex ed burlesque? We liked it. Congrats to Chlamydia (not something I thought I'd ever write . . .), and congrats to Jay Frazier, our third TwitterFest winner!

"I'm a 40-something attorney (yawn!), who's always looking for something 'different' to do. ('Different' means it doesn't involve the Bankruptcy Code or Treasury regs, I guess.) Throughout the year, I see a lot of live music, film, and baseball games. But when it's time for my [Festival]-going, I'm usually drawn to theater and dance. I've already seen seven shows, and they've given me a lot to think about. I'm still pretty much reeling from [Thursday's] performance of Witold Gombrowicz's Operetta. That show is one of the most amazing things I've seen anywhere . . . ever.

"Twitter is a great way to get and provide word of mouth about shows from the people who are actually seeing them. (Use that #LiveArtsFringe hashtag!) Even if it's something as banal as advice about where to sit, it's good information. I like to tweet mini-reviews about shows, and my tweet about Chlamydia dell'Arte was in that vein. The show made me laugh, and I wanted to convey a little bit of that."

Jay, pictured at right trying to absorb his experience of Operetta, is using his free pair of tickets to see more. on Monday night. (For more on more., read Lisa Kraus's report here, and our own Q&As with the Headlong co-directors Amy Smith, Andrew Simonet, and David Brick.)

And if you want a pair of free tickets, all you have to do for a chance to win is use the hashtag #LiveArtsFringe in your tweets about the Festival. And you can search by the tag to see what people have been talking about so far. This week is your last chance!

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Photo courtesy of Jay Frazier.

Alisa Sickora Kleckner and Chris Kleckner are the wife-and-husband team behind Little Bunny Voodoo, a puppet theater company that "makes works of puppetry for the mature person." For their third Philly Fringe show they are presenting Fractured Scary Tales: The Black Cat, a work after the famous Edgar Alan Poe story. Tonight and tomorrow night, the show will be almost entirely a movement piece along with music, permeated with and the couple's usual brand of fantastic puppets, humor, and boundary-pushing.

Alisa and Chris, now in their mid-thirties, first met in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania in the late 1990s, while Alisa was working on costume design and Chris was doing at tech at the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. Puppetry really became their signature art form in 2000, when the two attended what turned out to be the final Jim Henson Festival in New York City.

"My love for puppetry was really born there," explains Chris. "Up until that point I had a very American view of puppets—as Muppets really, very child oriented—that [festival] was my first experience of puppetry for adult audiences and it completely shattered my view of puppetry."

"And one of the best if not the best thing I've ever seen was a show there," remembers Alisa. Chris adds, "Within in five minutes I forgot it was a puppet."

While neither Chris not Alisa is anti-children's puppet theater (never fear—they are not out to beat up children's puppets), it is just not what they are interested in creating. They make shows for "adult audiences," a term they are a little uncomfortable with as it carries overtones of puppet porn. They do admit to having displayed a naked puppet or two, and about this Chris muses, "Don't know where puppet nudity falls in the grand scheme of decency."

After the jump: Leaving small town Pennsylvania, puppets in Prague, and bringing the puppetry back home.

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I talked to Mike Daisey in this space last week about his show How Theater Failed America, which I finally was able to see on Sunday. It blew me away. But its run is over.

Never fear! You can still catch his next show, The Last Cargo Cult, which premieres tonight as part of the Live Arts Festival. Mike's monologue will take you from the financial capital of the world to the South Pacific and back again, while tackling the financial crisis, material obsessions, and currency as an act of faith.

For those of us who don't know (and I didn't until I learned about the show): What is a cargo cult?
A cargo cult is a phenomenon where isolated islands in the South Pacific, which had very little contact with the outside world and had only Stone Age technology, suddenly had military bases built on them during WWII. Overnight the natives encountered airstrips, planes, chocolate, refrigerators, radios and all the amazing cargo we create in the first world.

After the jump: the cargo disappears, cultic consumers as cultic, and what is money, anyway?

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StreetTalkin' talks to the Nick Reeves and John Wilder of Rails. Did you miss them this weekend? Luckily, you can still catch this Stumble Goat Productions production. Three dates left: September 12, 14 and 17 at the Arts Garage.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

daDAda opened at Philly Fringe on Saturday, with two shows at the Northern Liberties Community Center. I caught up with Thomas Choinacky of the Anthology Project to see how the group's piece reimagines the early 20th century (anti-) art and literary movement.

How is daDAda different than the original Dada movement?
Really there isn't much of a difference because the performance is based off the same ideas of the earlier movement. My interpretation is influenced by the cabarets that they would put on in Zurich. A lot of their work was very improvisational and certainly not plot driven. For instance, one performer could be reciting a poet while another is lying on the floor and screaming nonsense. In short, I like to think of this production as a "mash up" of how Dada progressed and eventually came to an end.

What is Dada and what isn't Dada?
It's hard to describe because Dada is the inverse of itself. Most people consider Marchel Duchamp's readymades, or a Tristan Tzara poem to be representative of Dada work. It's much easier to say that this object is Dada while this piece is not. That was the challenge in putting onto this piece. Often a friend would say that's too Surrealist, which came after. Really, my goal for this production is to revive the spirit of Dada by bringing it to the stage. I think it's a shame the movement had to end and I think it's time we bring it back.

Do you think Dada is relevant today?
I think Dada can be the Twitter account for theatrical performances. It'll definitely appeal to the ADD crowd.

How are your going to translate your interpretation of Dadaism to the stage?
At the beginning of the show, we're going to distribute playing cards from the game Apples to Apples to members of the audience. We want to include them in the show because their role will help influence our performance. If someone hands me a card that says "Depression," I might break out in an interpretative dance based on that word. Because a Dada production lacks a traditional narrative, the focus of the show will be directed toward the character's movement.

As an actor, you really have to get into a different mindset. There's not the same level of self-reflection that goes into a character's development. And you have to realize that not all members of the audience will understand or respond positively to what you are doing.

How many performers will we see on stage?
There will be two actors on the stage, but the audience is also a performer. In fact, before the show begins, anyone can get a discount on the ticket price if they recite a poem, sing a song, or perform an absurd act. As I've said before, they're also driving the content of the show. Also, the props we will use, our location at the Northern Liberties Communty Center, and our costumes are important actors to consider. For instance, I'm definitely going to hold interesting conversations with a cardboard box.

Tell me more about the costumes.
I would say that the costumes are over the top. I'll be wearing a very brightly colored suit with suspenders and a wig. Let's just say there's not going to be a natural look to anything.

What's the story behind the Anthology Project?
We're a group of three theater professionals that formed when we were apprentices at the Arden Theater. We come from different professional backgrounds; I am involved with production while Carla Emanuele does costumes and Rachel Robbins comes from a development angle. Together we want to offer a new voice to performance art and experimental theater. We've performed Gas in last year's Philly Fringe festival as well as put on one man shows in apartments and food stores.

After daDAda's run at the fringe, will we expect more productions from the Anthology Project?
We hope to take daDAda to Fringe festivals in other cities. We also want to perform a series of experimental one man shows and somehow carry the spirit of the Philly Fringe festival throughout the year. It's shame there aren't more venues for experimental theater year round, but our goal is to expand more opportunities on a grander scale.

daDAda continues at Philly Fringe on September 9, 12, and 19. Two shows each night, 7:00 and 9:00 pm. $15, at the Northern Liberties Community Center, 700 N. 3rd St., Philadelphia.

--Spencer Silverthorne

Photo credit: Thomas Choinacky.