Saffron-colored flower petals on the stage of the Academy of Vocal Arts. Surreal encounters at the Salvador Dal' show. Zen-inspired dancing in abandoned parking lots on Broad Street. 2005 proved to be filled with memorable moments in the arts and cultural life of the city. Our writers chose their favorites—some weird, some wild, all worth remembering, recorded here in no particular order. And it turns out Philly sports fans aren't the only ones who like to boo.

0.Beautiful and funny and heart-wrenching and charming, Madame Douce-Amére is about the life of a woman played by gifted mime Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey, who told this rich story without speaking a word. "Douce-amûre" means "bittersweet" in French, and she, like the show, is well-named. My favorite moment in the Live Arts production came when, in her old age, she becomes mischievous. She rushed out into the audience, snatched my purse and discovered a little bag of hard candies, which, with great joy, she distributed to the audience.

I've seen a lot of great shows in the past year, but if I had to pick just one favorite it would be Sarah McCoubrey's exhibition at Locks Gallery. McCoubrey's breathtakingly beautiful paintings of scrubby little pieces of semirural and suburban landscape are intimately detailed—with weeds, billboards, plastic pools and little pockets of mist—and enameled with a brisk northern light and unflinching melancholy.

Our favorite hometown literary festival loves to snag hot young authors from London and Brooklyn. And we bookworms love it for that. Even better, though, this October the 215 Festival's kickoff event proved that all the bait we really need is right here in our own city: A couple of old Philadelphia Independent writers had us nearly reeling with laughter on the Kelly Writers House floor. Matt Schwartz sang an original sea shanty to the tune of Gilligan's Island; Christine Smallwood read about her love-hate relationship with the Chinatown bus; and Erik Bader, debuting his novel-to-be True Jersey, described young love (from a girl's point of view) with the kind of gusto typically reserved for the theater. So much fun.

In January the Philadelphia Orchestra played Act III of Wagner's Parsifal semi-staged. Remarkable as the near-mute Kundry was Roberta Knie, a world-class Wagner/Strauss contender whose career a medical emergency stopped suddenly nearly 25 years ago. Her white hair simply shorn above a brown cassock, Knie—now an esteemed local teacher—lived every second of the role, her reactions, stance and eloquent hands speaking volumes. Kundry's poignant screams and two sung phrases revealed the shine of what was, and what might have been. True artistry and a brilliant casting coup.

Itinerant choreographer Leah Stein has been a specialist in on-site dance installations for many years with varying success. For those who witnessed her end-of-summer Live Arts' work, Bardo, performed in an abandoned lot on Broad Street across from the Kimmel Center, her movement images still haunt. On those hot, breezy nights, Stein's nomad tribe of dancers marked the space with ritualistic, elegaic and liberating communal dance. Urbania has it that the lot was once a burial ground where nothing can permanently stand. Stein's troupe has renewed the lease—at least for haunting dance.

Sarah McCoubrey at Locks Gallery

With West Fairmount Park a study in pink, the ornamental cherry trees' delicate blossoms shivering in the spring breeze, the Japanese community celebrated its traditions. Crowds gathered around the mobile stage rolled in among the trees to see student ensembles from Japan. The dancers wore traditional garb but seemed to add a few modern moves. The taiko drummers, bursting with vigor, showed ingenious elaborations on the traditional choreography.

Gas & Electric Arts introduced themselves with Anna Bella Eema, a play by Obie-winning playwright Lisa D'Amour. It was a showcase for three amazingly talented actors: Vivian Appler, Sarah McCarron and Rainey Lacey, who sat, jumped and climbed all over kitchen chairs using everything from bowls to eggbeaters to glasses to create an astonishing variety of sound effects. They sang, separately or harmonically, in eerie, lovely melodic voices. They spoke, too, in a variety of voices—some funny, some scary, some sweet. A superb debut.

Imagine a Monday night in August at Bar Noir in which a significant dose of the Fringe Festival's heavy hitters squeezed into the teeny spot to give a free preview of their work to Fringe-hungry fans. A.D Amorosi's Monday Night Club was totally high on Fringe, but no one OD'ed. Martha McDonald, Carmen Martella III, Scott Johnston, Needles Jones, John Lumia, Jimi Mooney/Helen Back, Dirty Diamond all performed to a rapt, rabid audience, which included other theater addicts like Madi Distefano, 1812 and Russell Brand. Intense.

Sweeney Todd

Arden artistic director Terry J. Nolan continues to keep the theater of composer Stephen Sondheim relevant even in a time of cartoon and jukebox musicals. His forensic restaging of Sondheim's masterpiece Sweeney Todd was a more sinister physical and psychological production than before. He transformed the Haas theater into a dank Dickenesque tenement of nightmares. Musical director Eric Ebbenga's lush vocal production was made memorably diabolic with his lean, mean orchestration that sliced the fat off Sondheim's cramped sinews cleaner than Sweeney could slit a throat. And the pipe whistle alone made your blood freeze thanks to sound designer Jorge Cousineau.

In retrospect, the most memorable effect of the towering Salvador Dalí show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was the uncanny psychic shadow it cast over the most ordinary behavior and remarks in its vicinity. The visitor amused and bemused by a plaster Venus de Milo interrupted with tiny drawers—each drawer pull a fur pom-pom—is startled by seemingly hysterical laughter shrilling above the sinister whisper of multitudinous headphones. The man ahead in the sluggish parade circling the gallery stops abruptly, staring wildly about the packed room searching for the artwork described on his tape. "I'm not there and I can't do anything about it," he moans. It all seems profound … or just a little nuts.

Marc Anthony Thompson got lukewarm notices for his work-in-progress, Sheep, at the Live Arts Festival, but he made a memorable impression at Fringe's late-night cabaret poetry slam. A drunken Thompson didn't make it too far into his song—or, rather, Martin Luther King Jr.'s love song for Willie Nelson—before the audience booed him offstage, but he fought back. At the next night's cabaret, he reprised the song, with a warmer reception. Genius.

Outrage

Epic in scale, sense and sensibility, 22-year-old Itamar Moses' Jiri Zizka-directed Outrage leapt from the Inquisition to the present, from Brecht to Alcibiades, through four periods of time with 30 characters in tow—and all in the name of martyrdom and persecution of all sorts. Take that, Da Vinci Code. Really. One was able to feel and smell the dust of historicity racing through Moses' insistently busy plot, one that concerned a university's questionable gift from a wealthy donor and the potential—no, the need—for protest at all times.

Each for our own reasons, painter Rachel Bliss and I knew we'd miss Susan Hagen's opening at Schmidt-Dean so we saw the show 24 hours early. Hagen (who also writes about art for City Paper) showed sculptures of extinct animals ("Animalia Rarissima") and, in another room, "The Lost Army," a patrol of Iraq war soldiers carved from linden wood. Fully armed and equipped, and charred almost black, the figures were grouped but isolated, seemingly mired in a fog of hollow air. Under the spell of such human and animal tragedy, Rachel and I went to nearby Flower Expressions to order flowers for Hagen's show. A funeral wreath suddenly seemed like the perfect response and we ordered an unconventional one—all red. "For the lost ones," we inscribed. According to reports, the florist fulfilled our request perfectly and people at the gallery were satisfyingly surprised.

When the statuesque Jilline Ringle—a legend of Philly theater known for Mondo Mangia, Box Office of the Damned and Merrily We Roll Along, to say nothing of scads of sassy cabarets—passed away in February, it was left to her family in the theater community to come up with an event as big as she. They did. In April, they presented Requiem for an Amazon: A Celebration of Jilline Ringle at the Trocadero, benefitting the Jilline Ringle Solo Performance Fund. Though Ringle's pals (including Lee Etzold, Michael Byrne, Todd Waddington and Joe Canuso) toasted her by singing her best-known songs with the accompaniment of Andy Bresnan's Big Mess Orchestra, 1812's Jennifer Childs truly evoked Jilline's spirit by stripping out of her own clothes to reveal herself in a girdle gifted to her by the grand dame.

Noche Flamenca artistic director Martin Santangelo and his wife, Soledad Barrio, danced with vigor and originality—causing me to rethink the flamenco performances I've seen in Mexico and Madrid. Their outstanding performance at the Perelman Theater in February featured highly stylized, personal interpretations of flamenco dancing that were both sexy and mesmerizing.

Tchaikovsky's last opera, Iolanta, is a rarely staged specialty, exquisite music set to a ridiculously fluffy libretto. AVA presented the complete work in a piano reduction of the score, but with full staging. The February weather was cold and dreary, but inside the lovely Helen Corning Warden Theater, it was radiantly springlike, as AVA's extraordinary young singers breathed new life into the music, from a stage aglow with saffron-colored flower petals.

Philadelphia Theatre Company's Take Me Out, staged back in June, was memorable less for the nude men showering and more for actor Kraig Swartz's funny and moving portrait of Mason Marzac, accountant to a recently out baseball player. Swartz stole the show with his enthusiastic jumping and his speeches about loving baseball.

Pay Up

One of my favorite moments of the year was walking into the steamy old National Building on a warm September night and being asked to put on a pair of plastic surgical booties before entering Pig Iron's laboratory-like show Pay Up. Armed with five dollars and a map indicating only whether the vignettes behind the temporary walls were "sad" or "funny," I was asked to choose my own theater adventure at a buck apiece—with everyone literally running around to get one of the limited seats in each mini-show, pressured by the loudspeaker counting down the time to get from one to another. I knew theater was a competitive business, but usually not for the audience. On the way out, I picked up the brochure for the company's upcoming residency at Drexel—five shows and a cabaret series?!? Where do I pay up?

What a thrill watching Riolama Lorenzo's post-Edinburgh Festival Swan Queen performance. Lorenzo danced the lead in Philly's Swan Lake premiere excellently. But she (and the whole Pennsylvania Ballet) came home from their international triumph with a confidence and luster you can't learn in the studio. Lorenzo brought poise and command that was not there before. She now owned the role, she wasn't just performing it. This was her Swan Queen—beautiful, gracious and, yes, grand.

Adding to more than a century of morbid speculation about the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe is Thaddeus Phillips' remarkable show called Red-Eye to Havre de Grace, a new genre he's calling "action opera," filled with mysterious and often gorgeous effects, both aural and visual, providing wow "moments" by the dozen, including bowing the strings of a piano, and a park guard bursting into full-throated baritone. Geoff Sobelle, Charlotte Ford and Jeremy Wilhelm performed dazzlingly.