Live Arts & Fringe Festival Blog - 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works)

8 Redux: Meet Olive Prince

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:41:00 -0400

All summer, we've been profiling the amazing Philadelphia choreographers whose work the 2010 Live Arts Festival is showcasing in 8: eight choreographers/eight new works, and we're revisiting those profiles this week. Below, learn more about Olive Prince's I desire, which you can see tonight and Sunday afternoon. For details and tickets, click here.

"To be satisfied with everything I do."

"To feel, look like, and have a million bucks."

"To have sex with 50 Cent."

These are just some of the responses scrawled on the notecards that Olive Prince hands out to friends, family, and even people she meets on the street, asking them to write or draw their answer to the same question: "What do you desire?"

Olive is using the notecards as Post Secret-esque research for her new dance I desire which will be performed in 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works) at the Live Arts Festival. The piece is centered around the idea of humans becoming machines, inspired by Olive's observation of people rushing to work as if on an assembly line. She imagines that flesh and bone and individuality and desire are lost as people "go through their day with blinders on."

Olive is not playing the role of enlightened artist, free from the 9-to-5, however. "I'm part of it," she admits. "I just wonder what would happen if we messed it up."

After the jump: Olive's desires. [More]

8 Redux: Meet Shavon Norris

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:35:00 -0400

All summer, we've been profiling the amazing Philadelphia choreographers whose work the 2010 Live Arts Festival is showcasing in 8: eight choreographers/eight new works, and we're revisiting those profiles this week. You've already seen Megan Mazarick and Meg Foley over the last two nights. Below, meet Shavon Norris, whose dance the body in lines can be seen tonight and Sunday afternoon. For details and tickets, click here.

There are some people who make friends wherever they go, and I get the sense that Shavon Norris, one of the eight choreographers presenting new work in the upcoming Live Arts show 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works), is one of them. As soon as she walks into La Citadelle, the little café at 16th and Pine where she suggested we meet, the owner spies her and whisks over to give her a hug. They chat for a moment, her smile almost as big as her dangling pink earrings. For someone who just came from a full workday and is heading to an evening of rehearsal, she has an awful lot of energy.

Read on! Click More for more. [More]

Horror On The Dance Floor? Daniele Strawmyre Brings The Scary To "8"

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:58:00 -0400

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?

[More]

Tonight: Launching "8"

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:00:00 -0400

Hi friends! Sorry we've been out of commission for a day, but my presence was required at a wedding, and I was distracted by large amounts of Indian food and martinis. I ran into friend-of-a-friend and fellow theater blogger Matt Freeman there. After spotting my preferred drink of the evening, Tangueray martini with a twist, he ordered one too, but his came in something like a 12-ounce glass. Maybe more. Filled to the brim. My kind of playwright!

Anyway—tonight, the Live Arts Festival launches its showcase 8: eight choreographers / eight new works. This evening features Megan Mazarick, of whom you may have read here, and Meg Foley, of whom you've read below. As the shows come up, we'll be re-posting the 8 profiles from this summer. See you there!

8: eight choreographers/eight new works kicks off with the Meg Foley and Megan Mazarick pairing tonight and tomorrow at the Live Arts Studio, 919 North 5th Street, Northern Liberties. 8:00 pm both nights, $25.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Troubles With Awesome: Meg Foley and "8"

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 02:43:00 -0400

Meg Foley uses many techniques when conceiving dances: storyboarding, visualization, real-time improvising, even blocking movement on graph paper.

"Match vs. Match married these things," Meg says about the dance she's performing on Tuesday and Wednesday as a part of the 2010 Live Arts Festival show 8: eight choreographers/eight new works. She says she's almost never in her own work, but she is this time—so I ask her how she imagines herself into her own dance realms.

"It's disassociation, a little bit," Meg says. "When I'm visualizing the dance, I'm trying through a formal lens: time, space, energetic quality.

"I think I was visualizing myself just as a body. But [the dancers and I] talk about our experience inside the dance. We each took a turn talking through the entire dance with the other performers. It made me really happy! It was interesting in moments of relationship [between the dancers] that the thing you were experiencing was vastly different than the others."

To some extent, this is a result of the structured improvisation techniques that Meg employed to compose Match vs. Match. But why include herself this time around?

"One reason I put myself in was to resolve the difficulty I was having talking about this with my dancers. I'm not interested in my dancers feeling lost or wandering. I'm not trying to toss them into the abyss."

Yet her plotting and conception, Meg says, creates a tension for her, and in Match vs. Match.

"That's where the richness of the work is happening," Meg says. "I come up against my analytical nature. I'm interested in heat, humanity, and messiness. If order wins out, it's too cool and delicate."

Meg also has been working on a larger project, portions of which you might have seen. It includes Natural, which she performed at the Rockys last year (don't forget Monday night's Rocky Awards at the Festival Bar!), a more recent work called Orienteering, and she wants to work them into an evening-length solo work.

"It's a lot about mapping my own experience inside dance," Meg says. "Visually, in terms of marking space, I've been imagining using tiny figurines to mark where action happened. Body painting is about illuminating sensation on my body. All of that is inside a conceit about performance identity and adornment."

For a dancer-choreographer attracting increased renown, Meg has some ambivalence about performance.

"I really love it and also really hate it. I feel it feeds the awesome parts of me and the not awesome parts of me. Showboating," which Meg says she often enjoys in the moment, "is a double-edged sword. You're placing yourself in this incredibly precarious position dependent on the audience reception of you."

In Natural, Meg says, "I start the section so pleased and enjoying the task. By the end I realize I'm finding the degree of awesomeness is dependent on what the audience is getting. By the end, I'm indignant."

But according to Meg, it's not because of you, Philly. You're down with good work!

"People are here to be excited and interested in new things." As an artist, Meg says, "It's easy to be here. Philly is great to come back to. It doesn't forget you."

It's hard to, when our 8 crew has so much talent. 8: eight choreographers/eight new works kicks off with the Meg Foley and Megan Mazarick pairing on September 7 and 8 at the Live Arts Studio, 919 North 5th Street, Northern Liberties. 8:00 pm both nights, $25.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Live Arts Festival TV: "I DESIRE" Video Responses

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:03:00 -0400

Bob Wuss, the artistic director of the West Philly-based production group The Shakedown Project, writes in with this video response to Olive Prince's piece I DESIRE. The dance premieres at the 2010 Live Arts Festival next week as a part of 8: eight choreographers/eight new works.

"I was challenged by Olive to come up with a video using postcards that we have gathered over the past few months with people's desires written or drawn on these cards. I had traveled to parks around the city asking people what their deepest desire was and what we found was incredibly insightful and inspiring."

8: eight choreographers/eight new works kicks of September 7. Olive Prince is paired with Shavon Norris on September 9 at 8:00 pm, and September 12 at 3:00 pm. Live Arts Studio, 919 North 5th Street, Northern Liberties. $25.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

So Much Press

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:02:00 -0400

Let's jump right in:

>>>City Paper cover story is more like a cover package: A.D. Amorosi interviews Charlotte Ford about CHICKEN, Mark Cofta on all the Billy Shakes, a piece on all the undead (so many undead), Shaun Brady on Bang on a Can and Release, and more.

>>>Philadelphia magazine's website has a slideshow of 11 of your favorite Festival performers.

>>>Daily News: Jonathan Takiff interviews Joe Blake, former DN reporter turned playwright and writing teacher, about his Philly Fringe show A Separate Sun.

>>>Edge Philadelphia: What's gay at the Festivals? They've got us covered.

>>>Edge redux: Article on the very talented Meg Foley, whose choreography will be featured next week as a part of 8: eight choreographers/eight new works.

>>>TheaterMania: J. Cooper Robb covers the opening of the theater season in Philly, with plugs for the Live Arts production Cankerblossom and the Philly Fringe show The New & Improved Stages of Grief.
>>>First Person Arts shares their picks too, focusing on memoir and documentary, of course. Click on over, and find out how to get an FPA discount to Cedric Andreiux.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Photo by Jay Dunn.

Megan Mazarick Gets Dirty And Dark For "8"

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:07:00 -0400

Megan Mazarick missed the surprise Lucinda Childs performance at the last Susan Hess Modern Dance event in its old space this spring. She was cleaning up from her own dance.

"Ben [Asriel] and I did this piece in dirt. We got stuck in the stairwell, spitting dirt into a bucket of water."

"It was such a big name at this small little event. It's representative of how this [Susan Hess residency] touches all these different people. A lot of older artists had shown up to support Susan. What folks saw at Susan Hess is now a part of Neon Gothic."

Megan showed a different excerpt earlier this year at the Live Arts Brewery Second Thursdays series, but she promises entirely new work for her showing at 8, which will eventually become a full-evening piece.

At the L.A.B. performance, Megan's characters' voices reminded me of the overly-close friends Walter and Perry from Home Movies. Megan says maybe a little of that is there, but she says the voices of a cartoon-within-an-online-cartoon inspired them.

After the jump: 70 pounds of peat moss, avoiding shooting your image wad, and burial.

[More]

TONIGHT: Fringe show previews @ Hybridge Arts' Last Mondays

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:51:00 -0400

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

Eun Jung Choi and the Reconstrucion of Memories

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:02:00 -0400

When you move around the globe as much as Eun Jung Choi has--she's lived in her native Seoul, as well as New York, San Diego, Colorado, North Carolina, Philly, and takes frequent trips to Mexico--you tend to lose stuff. Eun Jung's new work All My Socks Have Holes, which will be featured in the 2010 Live Arts Festival's 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works), examines how the stories and memories that we forget are concealed in the objects we have to leave behind.

In Seoul, Eun Jung attended an arts junior high and high school where she spent a lot of time in the studio studying traditional Korean dance, an art she began at the age of six.

"It's sort of similar to contemporary Western dance in the way that it moves from the center out," she says, adding that because the traditional dance focuses on the breath, "Many people think I've had [José] Limón training, but I haven't."

She was going to attend Ewha, a prestigious women's university in Seoul, but cut her plans short because of the corruption of the university system, with professors going to jail for accepting bribes. "I was prepared for school but then I lost hope," she says.

Then she saw a performance by contemporary dance group Pilobolus. "I had never seen that before in my life. This was how I was introduced to modern dance—besides Martha Graham," she adds. "I felt like my spirit was lifted." Her mother calculated that she could afford to send Eun Jung to study in America for a few years, so in '91 Eun Jung began at and later transferred to University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

After the jump: American compliments, memory collapse, and stolen art. [More]

Forever Young: Jumatatu Poe Explores the Immortal Image

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:08:00 -0400

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. [More]

Hybridge Arts Collective's First Last Monday

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:59:00 -0400

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.

Olive Prince Creates A Dance Named Desire

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:20:00 -0400

"To be satisfied with everything I do."

"To feel, look like, and have a million bucks."

"To have sex with 50 Cent."

Olive is not playing the role of enlightened artist, free from the 9-to-5, however. "I'm part of it," she admits. "I just wonder what would happen if we messed it up."

The choreographer, whose day job for the past two years has been teaching dance at Drexel University, is similarly conscious of how the images that first inspire her work may not be evident to an audience. Olive uses what she calls "movement metaphors" to transform the literal images in her head into the movements that the audience sees.

"The way you take a movement and repeat it, shape it, and find variation takes on a meaning, like a phrase in a song." As she speaks about the inspiration behind I desire she shuffles through the notecards, then mentions images as vastly different as "a tree that's very much underground, very rooted," and "family snapshots" all in one breath.

"I don't even really like talking about it, because most people, when they watch it, will have no idea that it came from what I'm talking about."

After the jump: Olive's desires. [More]

Getting To Know Shavon

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:16:00 -0400

Shavon has been on the move since she was kid growing up in the Bronx. All the children in her family—quite a flock, thanks to her great-grandmother's ten children—grew up dancing. Shavon had an uncle who was a passionate dancer and dance teacher, so "it was almost like the family business," she says.

Uncle Timmy, as she and her cousins knew him, was Shavon's mother's best friend and a big part of her life. When he died from AIDS complications when Shavon was 14, the joy she found in dance was shattered. "I was heartbroken," she says. She didn't dance again until college, when she was moved by a performance of Bill T. Jones' Still/Here, a piece about people with terminal illnesses. "That stayed with me for a long time," she says. "It was like a black hole inside me started to fill up."

Read on! Click More for more. [More]

TONIGHT: Les Rivera's Platypus Steps Out At Live Arts Brewery's Second Thursdays

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:12:00 -0400

"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.

[More]