Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe (review)

Since the creation of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1947, many imitators have arisen. Taking their cue from subsequent developments in Edinburgh, fringe festival leaders across the globe have tried to create events that maintain local flavor while showcasing genre-bending and challenging work from abroad. Much of this work is derived from historical avant-garde traditions. In Vienna, Austria, where I conduct fieldwork, artists who frequent the festival circuit are sometimes accused by their colleagues of skirting the more complex process of creating vibrant work for a local community, which often provides their initial funding, and instead develop art that showcases a sort of “generic cosmopolitan fringe.” The Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe (hereafter collectively referred to as the Fringe) is not wholly unlike its counterparts. Like many festivals that feature “innovative” genre-bending works, the Fringe has a small selection of juried pieces, lumped under the title Live Arts Festival, and a much larger, more expansive, and intentionally provocative selection of unjuried genre-bending pieces, presented under the title Philly Fringe. In total, over 400 artists and 180 companies (including companies that are officially recognized and ones that exist in name only, mainly for publicity purposes) presented work for the thirteenth annual Philly Fringe. Many of these productions have thematic links to the contemporary state of Philadelphia’s local community, including ties to the tough, underdog mentality of Philadelphians, which is exemplified in the news media, sports events, and the city’s cultural productions throughout the year.

In what follows, I will examine a few pieces from the Fringe in terms of their degree of success in connecting to local culture while simultaneously incorporating groundbreaking techniques in theatre presentation—thus fulfilling the true spirit of the Fringe. While I make passing references to several performances in order to illustrate overarching issues associated with the Fringe, I have chosen to focus on four specific works. When compiling a list of productions to examine for this review, I quickly realized that the Philadelphia-based representation was heavily weighted in the Philly Fringe and was less prevalent in the Live Arts Festival. Of the six Live Arts Festival pieces that may be categorized as text-based theatrical performances, two were exclusively the work of Philadelphia-based companies. These were the reality-television-esque, audience-interactive Fatebook by New Paradise Laboratories, and a narrative-fragmented and cartoon-like meditation on American Western stereotypes, Welcome to Yuba City, by Pig Iron Theatre Company. These two pieces captured aspects of the Philadelphia scene as it exists year-round, and not merely during the more cosmopolitan festival season.

James Sugg, Charlotte Ford, Geoff Sobelle, Sarah Sanford, and Alex Torra in Pig Iron Theatre Company’s Welcome to Yuba City. (Photo: © Jacques-Jean Tiziou.)

Fatebook was a multi-focus, total performance immersion experience which featured about a dozen large screens with projections and several actors who moved freely among audience members in a warehouse-like environment. The production relied heavily on audience familiarity with mediated culture and internet-based forms of social networking, like the site after which the piece is named. The work’s potential to revolutionize the performance scene in Philadelphia was demonstrated in its use of the actual Facebook site. Characters developed identities on Facebook and audience members could “friend” them and learn their secrets before and after the show. The Facebook convention could have been thought of anywhere in the United States, and indeed the world, but the intricate use of Philadelphia-based imagery and footage of familiar locations gave this piece a distinctively Philadelphian flavor. Fatebook also allowed for the OBIE Award–winning New Paradise Laboratories to expand its collaboration base to include an ethnically diverse cast of promising twenty-something Philadelphia actors. Indeed, this production truly possessed local and Fringe-worthy characteristics, even if its impact was hampered by an inconsequential who-done-it story arch that was divorced from a clearly identifiable cause-and-effect plot structure.

New Paradise...