Highlights: Philadelphia Live Arts Festival 2010 (Philadelphia, USA)

About:

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival 2010 September 3-18, 2010

A collection of the world’s best contemporary performing artists energize Philadelphia audiences each year during the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Selected by Nick Stuccio, the Festival’s Producing Director, about half of these artists are based in Philadelphia, while others come in from across the globe. In 2010, 15 Live Arts Festival shows will be presented.

The mission of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival is to commission, develop, and present a wide range of the latest cutting-edge, high-quality performance.

Hightlights:

Cédric Andrieux
Jérôme Bel
September 14-16, 2009

Whether you’ve danced professionally, taken a dance class, or frankly worked any job in your life, you can’t help but empathize with the gloriously unglamorous details of the everyday existence of a dancer. In Cédric Andrieux, a touching and humorous examination of the life of a dancer, Cédric himself narrates and dances his way through his training as a contemporary dancer in the city of Brest (France), as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York, and his recent work at the Lyon Opera Ballet.

By isolating moments in his career by performing his former parts, or demonstrating his daily regimen at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, Cédric provides a close up on the individual experience of what audiences normally only view as a group endeavor. With excerpts from Trisha Brown’s Newark, Merce Cunningham’s Biped and Suite for 5, Philippe Tréhet’s Nuit Fragile, and Jérôme Bel’s The show must go on.

CHICKEN
Charlotte Ford
September 3 -6, 2010

Deep beneath the icy swells, a nuclear powered submarine carries three imbeciles in charge of a highly classified mission. A buzz-cut she-beast, a Casper Milquetoast somnambulist cross-dresser, and a passive-aggressive Elvis devotee vie for bunk beds, safety goggles, and poopie suits. Perhaps it’s the recycled air that has pushed them to pursue each other’s destruction through laced grape drink, human Tetris, and the tweezing of nose hairs.

In this microcosm of intense anxiety, petty hatreds are exploited with gleeful abandon, order and ethics have been left behind with the Dramamine, and devising absurd plots of revenge has become their greatest amusement. CHICKEN is an expressionistic clown play that magnifies our most intimate fears into coliseum-sized spectacles: molehills become mountains, kitchen sink drama becomes gladiatorial bloodbath.

Dance
Lucinda Childs with music by Philip Glass and film by Sol LeWitt
Septmebr 10-12, 2010

Three masters of minimalism, choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Philip Glass, and conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, collaborated to construct this seminal work of dance—one of the purest examples of interdisciplinary art-making ever created. An exploration of musical movement, rhythm, and harmony, Dance is a bold statement on the very nature of movement.

A vast, transparent scrim stretches across the front of the stage. Projected upon it is LeWitt’s 35mm black-and-white film of the original dancers from 1979, including Childs, performing Dance on a white grid floor that seems to float in darkness. Concurrently, the work is performed on stage by a new cast and in time with the film’s close-ups, diagonal views, overhead shots, split screens, and freeze-frames. Surrounding this visual experience is Philip Glass’s score, a masterwork of modular patterns that form the perfect counterpoint to Childs’s choreography.

Decasia
Bill Morrison
September 25, 2010

Bill Morrison’s Decasia was created from his discovery of a trove of old, decaying film stock. Scored by Michael Gordon of Bang on a Can, the movie is an expressionist collage of past images—of dreams, romance, drama, exotic locales and mythic cinema—that have become subverted by the striking visual consequences of the decomposing film: melting, rusted, warped, disintegrating. Perhaps this is really what happened after they rode off into the sunset.

The Sun Also Rises (The Select) based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
Elevator Repair Service
September 15-18, 2010

A stage littered with liquor bottles and cafe chairs seamlessly transforms itself from the bistros of Paris to the banks of the Irati River; a long bar table roars to life and charges a champion matador; an out of control dance party takes off during a night of nonstop revelry. As The Sun Also Rises (The Select) winds its way through France and Spain and lands in Pamplona where bullfighting and the fiesta rage in the streets, Hemingway’s narrator carries the heavy burdens of a war injury and his inability to have the woman he loves; a woman whose amorous escapades he follows with bemused but painful fatalism.