Have you seen how much comedy is part of Philly Fringe this year? It's crazy! I like that I can steer this blog from an interview about Dada to a video about either the worst or best club ever, depending on your perspective, I guess. Meg, from Sketch and Improv Comedy Spectacular with Meg and Rob and BWP (which may have the longest show title in the Festival) sends in this video. They open tonight on the Mainstage at the Adrienne (2030 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, ten bucks), and also are up September 11, 15, and 19. As with most comic videos, maybe NSFW.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

That's right! You, theater fan, can win one of six colonics donated by the Infinity Health and Wellness Center to the Theatre of the Evangelical Scientific Revolution. At each of the three performances of A History of Shit: Manson in Thebes, which opens Friday, September 4 at The Rotunda, a raffle will award two audience members a good old-fashioned colon cleansing. That's Fringe, baby! Philly Fringe.

For more on the play, check out this article from the Communications from the International Brecht Society (word!), and below, enjoy a very well-produced sneak peek at a scene from A History of Shit: Manson in Thebes.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Experimental video collective Termite TV wants to show you a new side of Old City through the prism of your iPod. Deborah Rudman writes:

Termite TV Walk
Mobile Device Stimulus
Fringe Trip at the Bride

Stimulus is a collection of experimental walking tours of Old City. You download one to your iPod or iPhone, head to the starting location, and let the machine guide you through the neighborhood. And it's free!

Stimulus "opens" at the Painted Bride on September 4 at 6:00 pm. I write "opens" because starting at the Bride will give you a group experience, but if you can't make their times and want to go solo, download the videos anytime at termite.org/walkphilly/.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

This weekend? Hot and rainy. You should read Andrew Zitcer's great Q&A with Alice Nash of Back to Back Theatre. I already did, so I'm going to have a gin and tonic while avoiding these monkeys, who have been popular in our office this week.

But don't forget: Monday night is Super Giant Fringe Preview Part Two at Plays and Players!

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Entranced by its dance community, Megan Mazarick came to Philadelphia to be a part of the scene. After earning her BFA in dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she enrolled in Temple University's MFA program.

Megan had met Paule Turner, and after seeing his work—"I think it was a section of In the Mud"—she decided she wanted to move to Philly. "North Carolina was so conservative, and I wanted to be in a place where work like Turner's was produced."

After moving to the city, Megan immersed herself in Philadelphia's new work, working with Marianela Boan (a classmate from Temple), kate watson-wallace/anonymous bodies (in House, Car, Living Room, and Mentalist), and Merián Soto, among others.

"I learned a lot from Merián, Marianella, and Kate," Megan says. "My entrance to the Philly dance community was through Kate, and I did artistsU."

Megan's own work was in each of the Fringe Festivals immediately after her arrival. She says they were all collaborative, small pieces: Devastation Vs. Pop Culture in 2005, Avenge the Void in 2006, and Flight of the Cuttlefish and Mysteries of the Deep in 2007.

"I started wanting to produce my own work as soon as I got here. I moved to Philly to be a part of the community."

After the jump: promoting her own choreography, Megan's Kill Me Now characters tell you about themselves, and a cool video of a cuttlefish.

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A couple of years ago on a visit to Nuuk, Greenland, I had dinner at the house of Nive Nielsen and her boyfriend, musician Jan de Vroede. It was early November, there wasn't a whole lot of daylight, and there was a fresh coat of snow. The dinner—steak, onions and Greenlandic potatoes—was delicious. But the highlight of the evening was when the guitar was passed around and Nive performed some of her songs. Her voice has a pure, even haunting quality that manages to be quite personal and distinct, like she's singing secrets quietly into your ear, telling stories of the everyday, often with humor and touching insight.

I've kept in sporadic touch with Nive who has been plugging away in music studios for more than a year and will soon be releasing a full-length album, nive sings! in Europe this fall and later in the U.S. An advance EP (called nive sings! as well) is available on iTunes. Filter magazine named Nive the undiscovered band of the month in June. She has plans for a U.S. tour in the spring of 2010 with a few earlier dates thrown in this November. Listen to some of her tracks here.

Recently, I interviewed Nive, 29, on her music, her filmmaking, life in Greenland, and her awesome house.

Can you tell me a little about the new album?
I recorded in Montreal, Bristol (UK), Tucson, Ghent, San Francisco, and Nuuk. The record is produced by John Parish (of PJ Harvey and Eels fame) and Jan and I wrote and arranged all the songs. We have quite some friends/guests on the album—Howe Gelb, Ralph Carney, Eric Matthews, people from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Wolf Parade, Alela Diane, Evangelista, Tom Waits's band, and The Black Keys are on, too.

Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Nuuk. It's the capital of Greenland, and nowadays a big city (for the Arctic at least) with about 16,000 inhabitants. Back then it was way smaller. It's pretty up here—big mountains, a huge fjord system, the sea. Nuuk has pretty rough weather; it tends to change on a whim from freezing cold to sunny to snow fall to T-shirt temperatures. In the winter it's very cold. In the summer there's midnight sun. Loads of northern lights, too. Yeah it's cool here if you dig nature.

What's Nuuk like as a place to live?
At once real nice real boring, real fun, overtly familiar, totally frustrating, and a home I love. It's a safe and caring environment I grew up in. I dreamt of being an adventurer when I was little—thought that was an actual job. So musician seemed a good second choice. Growing up here means really feeling that you're on the very end of the world. Everything's really far away and unless you travel you learn about the outside world mostly through TV. Most people I know up here dream of traveling, meeting other people, seeing other places and life styles and what not. Yet most people, me included, would always choose to live here—it's relaxed, pretty, healthy, honest . . . ha, I sound like a new age guru gone tourist guide.

Nuuk used to be a really close-knit community—more back in the day than now; it's a little too big nowadays for knowing literally everyone. . . . By all accounts Nuuk's a modern city—small, but we don't exactly live in igloos either. There's a culture center, cinema, swimming pool, bars, and restaurants, cell phones, Wi-Fi, etc. The peculiar thing up here (and for Greenland itself) is that there's this weird combination of old and traditional (plus the inescapable nature) with the new and modern. There are no roads between villages so if you want to go to the next town you need to take a helicopter or plane, and in the summer when there's not too much ice you can sail. Plus the only way to go abroad is by flying to Denmark. There's no real underground scenes, there's no record stores, internet is so slow and expensive that downloading is just plain frustrating, there's hardly any visiting foreign artists and so on. On the other hand there's a notable interest abroad in Greenland. We travel. We bring home music and films and books and share them. So it's not as if we're totally oblivious of what's going on either. Mostly people abroad want to hear about icebergs and polar bears and Eskimos and perhaps social problems like alcoholism. Which is kinda annoying since we're many up here who make stuff, music, film, art, and so on which is not immediately "Eskimo" (I mean how many icebergs can you paint, huh?) yet people tend to be not aware of that. So most of what happens up here, art-wise, stays here.

After the jump, see a video of Nive's song "Room" plus see her documentary about the Greenlandic kayak.

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A couple of items this morning:

>>>The Portland Mercury plugs Back to Back Theatre and small metal objects, which will hit the TBA Festival at the Portland (Oregon) Institute for Contemporary Art a week before taking over the 40th Street Field in University City.

>>>One of those other City Papers (Minneapolis) writes up the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Leading off their Q&A is an item about The Best Little Crackhouse in Philly. I don't think the creator, Stan Peal, is from the city, but he seems to know how we roll. Video preview below:

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Kind words from Andy's friends:



Choice (and NSFW) words from Andy's enemies:



You can see these and more at Bacivo Nuggets YouTube channel, and you can catch Andy and his cohorts interweaving short comic films and live sketches in their Philly Fringe show Take Us To The Comedy Scene in September.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

In the Rift Valley community of Ibisil, Kenya, a water well is under construction at a secondary girls school with the help of Kristin Scott, a 31-year-old ballet dancer from Bristol, Pennsylvania. Through her organization Come Unity, which brings together dancers, largely from the American Repertory Ballet of New Brunswick, New Jersey, for fundraising performances, Kristin has been doing charitable work in Kenya since 2007.

Kristin has worked as a professional dancer since graduating Indiana University with her B.S. in ballet. She auditioned all around the country after school, and landed as a trainee at the American Repertory Ballet for a year, after which she joined the group. On summer breaks from the ballet, Kristin had traveled to Peru, Belize, and Mexico. But through the Global Volunteer Network, she decided to take a slightly longer trip - seven weeks in a slum near Nairobi.

"I wanted to experience it firsthand," Kristin said. "It wasn't a nice clean tourist trip. I lived with a Kenyan family that ran day programs for orphans and vulnerable children. They feed and teach these kids during the day, and a new program was just getting off the ground when I was there."

Funds she brought with her from the first Come Unity bought them a blackboard. Come Unity has since raised over $50,000 for projects in Kenya, turning its attention to improving access to clean water. At this fall's The Pointe of Water, dancers from American Repertory Ballet will choreograph and perform new work at the Painted Bride - some thematically related, some not - and educate audience members about the plight of communities with a scarcity of fresh water. It will be the first time that Kristin and the dancers from American Repertory Ballet have participated in Philly Fringe.

When I spoke with her, Kristin cited a buried cultural assumption that I hadn't considered before: when you're prescribed medicine to take with water, you don't think twice, right? Neither do I. But she pointed out that residents of communities without water access can't even use medications that come free from their government, let alone grow food, raise animals, or practice good sanitation.

After the jump, Kristin talks about her trip to Ibisil, and a Kenyan bartender explains how he'd alleviate some of the pressure on urban slums.

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You're at work, but all you really want to do is watch TV. Don't think we don't know. Based on when you're stopping by to read this here blog, you're at work, and you need a break.

Over there on the right side of your screen are these things we call "pods." Meet the new one: Festival TV. There are a lot of awesome videos by and about the people who are participating in Live Arts and Fringe this fall, and this slot gives us the opportunity to run a bunch of 'em. If you've got a video you think we should run, send me a link at nicholas[at]pafringe.com.

First up: audition tape cocktails with FATEBOOK actor Delante Keys.

--Nicholas Gilewicz