Money, the root of much current brooding, can also be a spark plug for artistic thought, and our relationship with it turns out to be a persistent thread running through this year's Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe.

No one assigns a theme for the festival, whose 13th edition begins this week and runs until Sept. 19 all over the city. But it's obvious that artists are considering the global financial crisis from many angles.

Among the Fringe shows - from the more anarchic side of the festival - Salesmanship for Life & Limb, by Tall Grass Productions, asks how much personal risk you would take to earn a bonus. Other People's Money, a production of Wellbilt Theater Factory (and a phrase that loomed large in the trial of former State Sen. Vincent Fumo), is the tale of a Wall Street takeover artist named Larry the Liquidator. A group called Applied Mechanics is staging It's Hard Times at the Camera Blanca, about unemployed circus workers who repair to a bar when an economic collapse lays waste to their country.

"We never say we want this or that," says Nick Stuccio, the festival's producing director and cofounder. "These contemporary artists are all doing their own thing, and when a theme emerges it's without us asking for the connections."

The festival, now one of the nation's powerhouse arts events, has two components: Live Arts - invited performances backed by the festival administration - and the Philly Fringe, a free-for-all of artists who essentially invite themselves. Pretty much everyone collectively calls both parts "the Fringe."

With 16 Live Arts shows and a record 185 Fringe productions, it would be almost impossible, to say nothing of monotonous, to impose a single theme. But themes emerge nonetheless, particularly in the Live Arts shows.

Two years ago, several dance and theater pieces were about crossroads in the 20th century, "and we didn't manufacture that at all, it just came to us," Stuccio says. Last year's spontaneous theme emerged from the festival's choices, not the content: It was about pairing local artists with those from other countries to see what they'd come up with while working together.

The Fringe shows are all over the thematic landscape, which is to be expected in a lineup of many artists with different passions. But in the Live Arts part of the festival, which Stuccio and his staff spend much of the year nurturing, the number of artists exploring some facet of finance is striking.

"When they consider the value of things, artists are responding to contemporary life," Stuccio says.

So, in fact, is the festival, whose budget is tighter this year, given the general economic picture. At $1.7 million, it's down about $200,000 from last year. The result: Live Arts contains fewer different pieces than in years past, but with longer runs and in larger spaces.

For example, among last year's 21 Live Arts shows was choreographer Kate Watson-Wallace's bold Car, a dance inside and atop cars that moved on different levels of a University City parking garage. It was a hot ticket - not just for its bizarre setting, but because audience seating was limited to the rear of the cars.

This year, "we couldn't do works like Car," Stuccio says, but Watson-Wallace is again in Live Arts - and this time her troupe, Anonymous Bodies, is performing with plenty of seating in the spacious, defunct Rite Aid at 42d and Walnut Streets.

The theme of that show, called Store, is - money. The dance posits the mother of all recessions. "Imagine," says Stuccio, "if there were no goods anymore and we didn't have any money, yet we still wanted to shop."

In fact, one of monologist Mike Daisey's two shows, copresented with the Philadelphia Theatre Company, is The Last Cargo Cult - about people who do not use money. They live on the eastern side of the remote South Pacific island of Tanna, and Daisey lived with them. His story examines both their beliefs and the international financial crisis.

"It's about how we live in a world that's built on abstraction," says Daisey, "and the underpinnings of our own faith-based economy, built like any religion on absolute faith and trust. It's easy to forget that money is an invention, and we have to believe in it every day for it to have meaning."

In another Live Arts show, the Australian troupe Back to Back Theatre is performing small metal objects, in which the headset-equipped outdoor audience discovers two roaming characters who clearly have disabilities of some sort, and the well-to-do men who have pegged them as drug dealers and are looking to get high. "It's about marginalization and classism," says Stuccio.

Some Live Arts shows will touch on money or greed by exploring growing into adulthood and networking (New Paradise Laboratories' Fatebook), and battling for fame (Melanie Stewart Dance Theatre's Kill Me Now). An ambitious '60-era piece by Poland's Capitol Theatre called Operetta, about a woman whose desire to live naked sparks a revolution, is described by Stuccio as a metaphor for being "stripped of jewelry, dresses - status."

Pig Iron Theatre Company's show Welcome to Yuba City is not about money; it's set at a mythical desert truck stop. But in 2005, Pig Iron was ahead of the curve, producing the ur-money show, among the most popular (and up to the time, expensive) in the festival. Called Pay Up, it questioned the value of money by forcing audiences to decide how much scenes were worth to them, then making each audience member pay for individual choices.

Ironically, the festival this year has its own little money conundrum: In a copresentation with the Joyce Theater, a major Manhattan home for dance, Live Arts/Fringe has accepted money from the Boeing Co. to present 12 local choreographers, who will be winnowed to a single winner by audience vote over a four-night competition called The A.W.A.R.D. Show! In return, the festival keeps the income from tickets to the performances.

Boeing is sponsoring such shows in four cities. "The people at Boeing are sincere about helping the arts," says Stuccio, in the face of some artists' assertions that the show pits them against one another in a cheesy TV-type reality-show format. The winning choreographer gets $10,000, two runners-up win $1,000.

"I'll be totally transparent. I'm a little conflicted about it," Stuccio says. "Should I say to Boeing, no, I'm not going to give money out that way to this community, you keep it? No, I can't do that.

"And if I can get 25 people to come out who wouldn't otherwise come to see dance, because they get to vote, fine then. We've just built a new audience for dance. But the whole thing's very tricky."

As are all money matters, it seems. Stuccio says that it was a revelation when he discerned the pecuniary theme. "What's exciting is when we lay out these beautiful photos and note cards about the work people are doing, and think about how to make a festival, then step back. The overpowering realization of what artists are saying to us is much more powerful than us saying to them, 'I'd like you to contribute work about the financial world.'

"You just get out of their way and let them say what they say. That's when the puzzle comes together. That's the Sudoku of this thing."

Contact staff writer Howard Shapiro at 215-854-5727 or hshapiro@phillynews.com.