   Photo: Mhari Scott Oedipus at FDR , Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey
Former Pig Iron Theatre Company member Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey (Madame Douce-Amere, 2005) returns to the Live Arts Festival with a site-specific world premiere that revives the tradition of staging classical Greek drama in an outdoor amphitheatre. Set at FDR skate park in South Philly, Oedipus at FDR re-wires Sophocles'; Oedipus at Colonus for the modern imagination. 
Photo: Geoff Sobelle Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl
Charlotte Ford and Geoff Sobelle In a collection of darkly humored fairy-tales, Charlotte Ford (Flamingo/Winnebago, 2007) and Pig Iron Theatre Company's Geoff Sobelle (Amnesia Curiosa, 2006) blend stop-action animation with antique illusion to invoke a primordial world of fecund crones and giant rats where humans are game and taxidermied animals are the hunters. Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl digs beneath the floorboards to give center stage to the mice and worms. 
ACCIDENS: matar para comer
Rodrigo García/La Carnicería Teatro (Spain)
What happens to a lobster before being served with a lemon wedge and a ramekin of butter sauce at its side? Madrid-based theater artist Rodrigo García presents ACCIDENS: matar para comer, a visceral, highly sensorial experience that questions the increasingly artificial quality of the food we eat.
 Artwork: Dave Jadico Disco Descending, Karen Getz
Death! Middle age! Spandex! Local choreographer and director Karen Getz returns to the Live Arts Festival with the world premiere of Disco Descending, the sequel to her 2006 runaway hit, the comic actors' ballet, Suburban Love Songs. Can love beat death while wearing platform shoes? There's only one way to find out.  Photo: Knut Bry The European Lesson , Jo Strømgren (Norway)
The Live Arts Festival presents a world premiere by internationally acclaimed Norwegian director Jo Strømgren (The Convent, 2006), created in residency with Philadelphia actors Aaron Cromie, Jeb Kreager, Sarah Sanford, Catherine Slusar, and John Zak. The European Lesson is a pseudo-realistic and highly physical lecture that ruptures American misconceptions of European culture and reveals many apparently unpleasant truths about Slovakia. Tourists, beware.  Photo: Anton Hampton Etiquette by Rotozaza (England)
In this entirely pre-recorded piece of live theater, England’s Rotozaza invites you and a friend to star in a two-person show. Participants will share a table in a small cafe. They will wear headphones through which different voices tell them on how to behave and what to say to one another, bringing them together in a kind of pre-imagined dialogue. Etiquette offers the fantasy of speaking with someone without having to plan what you say, exposing human communication at its rawest and most delicate.  Photo: Nick Scando store, Matsune & Subal (Austria)
Vienna-based artists David Subal and Michikazu Matsune will set up a shop that sells performance art to the public. Store will be open during business hours for two days during the Festival. Shoppers can stay as long as they like, buying and observing conceptual creations, and pondering the strange relationship between consumerism and art.  Photo: Jacques-Jean Tiziou Sea of Birds, Sebastienne Mundheim
Performance artist and writer Sebastienne Mundheim (Currently Franklin, 2006) returns to the Live Arts Festival with Sea of Birds, a three-dimensional story book of delicate paper sculpture, dance-based puppetry, and live musicians. Structured like Homer's Odyssey and reminiscent of The Little Prince, Sea of Birds transports audiences to a fantastical world, exploring history, memory, and the power of imagination.  Photo/Artwork: Daniel Rudholm Sweet By-and-By, Pig Iron Theatre Company/Slava Theater
Dan Rothenberg and Dito van Reigersberg of OBIE award-winning Pig Iron Theatre Company team up with Daniel Rudholm, leader of the music-spectacle group Slava Theater, to revive the story of Joe Hill. Sweet By-and-By features Hill's wickedly funny songs on banjo and concertina, while following his journey from Sweden to California to a Utah jail (on trumped up charges) and on up to Mars, where all good union leaders go to die.  Photo: The Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental The Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental/Thaddeus Phillips
This final installment of The Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental/Thaddeus Phillips' Americas trilogy explores the indigenous cultures of the Americas in a fast-paced new work that slams the past into the future. With shadows, object transformations, and other spectacular illusions, the company that brought youFlamingo/Winnebago in 2007 and ¡El Conquistador! in 2004 will use Mesoamerican concepts of time to explore the questionable future of life on earth.   Photo: Mussacchio Laniello The show must go on, Jérôme Bel (France)
Twenty Philadelphia-based dancers will perform French choreographer Jerome Bel’s Bessie award-winning The show must go on at the Kimmel Center. Set to music by pop artists like David Bowie, Lionel Richie, and Queen, The show must go on is an irreverent, informal, non-virtuosic performance by a crowd of “everyday” people. This will mark the first time that Bel has set his choreography on dancers from the U.S.  Photo: Association RB Pichet Klunchun and Myself, Jérôme Bel
Contemporary French choreographer Jerome Bel and classical Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun come together in a performance that combines dance and discourse, comparing the fundamental differences between classical and contemporary dance and delving into themes of Euro-centrism, inter-culturalism, and cultural globalization.  Photo: Bill Hebert Wandering Alice, Nichole Canuso Dance Company
Nichole Canuso creates a full-scale production of her 2007 work-in-progress, Wandering Alice. The fearless Alice has grown up and embarks on a lucid dream-filled journey, leading audiences through an ever-changing scenic world and introducing them to many strange places and people along the way.  Photo: Matthew Hollerbush Factor T, Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre (Poland)
Founded in 1993 in Gdansk, Poland, Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre considers itself a punk, counter-culture alternative to Poland’s high art movement. In 2007, they presented the Live Arts Festival hit, Several Witty Observations. This year, they will bring their latest work, Factor T, featuring Philadelphia dancer Bethany Formica. 
Photo: Lisa Rastl bodies in urban spaces, Cie. Willi Dorner (Austria)
Vienna-based choreographer Willi Dorner will make his festival debut with bodies in urban spaces, a free, traveling outdoor dance event for audiences of all ages. Philadelphia’s best-known architectural works will create the scenery as a cast of twenty Philadelphia dancers leads audience members through the city, exploring and manipulating familiar spots along the way.  Photo: Wonge Bergmann Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day, Jan Fabre (Belgium)
Based in Antwerp, Belgium, Jan Fabre is internationally known for his work as a choreographer and director of contemporary performance art. This year, the Live Arts Festival has co-commissioned a world premiere solo by Fabre, Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day. Inspired by Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe,” the solo will feature Croatian dancer Ivana Jozic.  Photo: Alex Escalante Everyone, Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People
Brooklyn-based choreographer Miguel Gutierrez makes his Live Arts Festival debut with Everyone. Everyone engages audiences with energy, joy, and intimacy, while examining the wonder of embodied presence and the commonplace phenomenon of realizing that you are one among many.
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 Photo: Belakwir Photography stuporwoman, Tania Isaac Dance
stuporwoman marks the third installment in Isaac's stuporwoman series that explores the psychological history of motherhood. With live music and original choreography and text, Isaac’s newest work will discuss the social and cultural conceptions of mothers and their choices about parenting.
 Photo: Steve Weinik IN FLUX, Mascher Space Cooperative
Mascher Space Cooperative’s IN FLUX series showcases works-in-progress by emerging and mid-career local choreographers and follows each showing with a conversation about the works, led by a local artist-moderator. IN FLUX choreographers will audition their finished work before a panel in May, which will choose four pieces to present in the IN FLUX Emerging Artist Program in the 2008 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.  Urban ECHO: Circle Told, Leah Stein Dance Company/The Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia
Choreographer Leah Stein returns to the Live Arts Festival in a collaborative work with the internationally renowned Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia. One hundred singers will provide ample, mellifluous sound as Stein’s dancers perform in the architectural splendor of West Philadelphia’s Rotunda.  Photo: Kate Watson-Wallace Car, Kate Watson-Wallace / anonymous bodies
Site-based choreographer Kate Watson-Wallace returns to the Live Arts Festival with Car, in a full-scale production of her 2007 work-in-progress. Car is a movement installation for an audience of three that takes place in and around a moving vehicle. Audience members move and are moved through a series of dance and video installations that inhabit the at once private and public space that is a car.   Photo: Asle Nilsen louder, Verdensteatret
One of the most innovative contemporary arts groups in Europe, Oslo-based Verdensteatret will bring audiences into a highly experimental audiovisual installation inspired by their journey up the Mekong Delta. Louder uses sculptural scenography and technological relics of a bygone era to create a spectacular universe that unites concert, art, and theater. |
Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe
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