Crowded House

Live Arts Festival + Philly Fringe

by Carolyn Huckabay

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Published: Aug 27, 2008

Lisa Rastl

Usually we sit around the art meeting talking about upcoming issues and trying to come up with a couple of striking images that might work on our cover.

'This time we had a million of 'em. That's Fringe for you.

'We could have picked the giant mechanical spider presiding over Verdensteatret's 'Louder', but its massive junkyard parts are still being shipped in from Norway, leg by gangly leg.

'We could have photographed nine male canaries and a pile of coal, set pieces for 'Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day', but birds are not the most obedient photo subjects. Neither is a live lobster, the co-star of Rodrigo Garcia's one-man, one-ambulatory-shellfish show 'ACCIDENS'. Plus, lobsters don't turn that nice, jump-out-of-the-honor-box red color till they're boiled. Ouch.

'So, appropriate to these conjoined-twin festivals' purpose of bringing together an enormous pool of extraordinary talent, we chose the Philadelphia dancers of Cie. Willi Dorner's 'Bodies in Urban Spaces' to represent us.

'Over the next two weeks, you might come across 20 or so of them squished into a fire escape, scaling a wall or hiding under otherwise unremarkable park benches, creating human sculptures that'll crowd your space in a whole new way. Which makes them appropriate ambassadors: With 22 Live Arts performances — half of them international — and a whopping 172 Fringe happenings, there are literally thousands of creative bodies descending on Philadelphia and brightening up our urban spaces. Even if it means lying facedown in the middle of the sidewalk, playing dead.

'In these pages you'll find Deni Kasrel's take on the fests' weirdest performance locations; Mark Cofta's "Six Degrees of Pig Iron"; features on 'Store', 'The European Lesson','FLUXTask', 'Louder', 'A Cabinet of Photographic Curiosities' and RA Friedman's ; plus more than 30 picks for shows we think you should see (A-H, I-Z). Our coverage extends online and into the next two weeks, too, so keep reading.

'As usual we'll be hitting the town — taking in as much art in the urban spaces as our bodies will allow — and reviewing it all at citypaper.net/fringe. Check it out before you buy those tickets: Every day at noon, we'll post the latest scene reports and ground-floor critiquing. Then come back to the site after the show to join the conversation. Or to rip into our critics for not warning you about the thing that happened at the end of that one show about the lobster.

(carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net)

All The World's a Stage
Six Degrees of Pig Iron
Pop Shop
Have It Norway
What's My Line?
Along Came a Giant Spider
Of a Certain Age
Fest Bets (A-H)
Fest Bets (I-Z)