Content area
Full Text
THE PHILADELPHIA FRINGE FESTIVAL. 30 August-14 September 2002.
Over the past six years the Philadelphia Fringe Festival has emerged as an important showcase and catalyst for the city's growing alternative performance scene. Nominally modeled on the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the annual Philadelphia event uses the city's historic center as a freewheeling, pedestrian-friendly platform for a spectrum of both local and visiting companies. Unlike Edinburgh, however, there is no well-funded main festival to play against, audiences are overwhelmingly local, and Philadelphia companies are very prominent in the program. In lieu of a main festival program, the Philadelphia Fringe has instead established a so-called "Spotlight" series of headlining events that includes commissions and a mix of Philadelphia, US, and world premieres. The scale of the festival has become remarkable, featuring roughly 250 different productions, half of which were by local artists.
This year's Spotlight scries included the US premieres of two Canadian performances (Cul-De-Sac, by the Obie Award-winning company da da kamera; Phon Tour, by the Vancouver-based percussion troupe Scrap Arts Music), the American debut of Britain's physical theatre company Protein Dance (performing Publife), and the belated North American premiere of Carmen Funebre, the renowned street theatre performance by Poland's Teatr Biuro Podrozy ("Travel Agency Theatre"). The Americans featured in the program included solo performances by Roger Guenveur Smith in Iceland and Danny Hoch in Jails, Hospitals, and HipHop (reviewed in theatre Journal 50.4: 523-25). Both Smith and Hoch were returning to Philadelphia after enjoying success at earlier editions of the Fringe Festival. Hoch's piece played to standingroom-only houses at the city's landmark Theatre of Living Arts on South Street, the site of Andre Gregory's historic, if short-lived, resident company in the city in the early 1970s and today (apart from the Fringe), a popular rock music venue. The enthusiastic crowd was young, energetic, and urbane-and in composition unlike any other theatre audience to be found in the city during the rest of the year. Another prominent American solo-performance artist appearing in the festival (though not as part of the Spotlight series) was Karen Finley in her meditation on the events of September 11 entitled Distribution of Empathy. Local productions in the Spotlight program consisted of Headlong Dance Theater's world premiere of Britney's Inferno (commissioned for the...