Yarn-bombing Broad Street!: UArts students assist in PIFA's 'Knitting Peace' at Merriam Theater

Broad Street has been yarn-bombed! Perfect timing! With unseasonable snow in the forecast, the big concrete planters in front of the Merriam Theater are wearing sweaters, and the orange tulips are looking cozy as well as very pretty.

It's a lovely installation created by University of the Arts students in conjunction with Knitting Peace, the first show of PIFA (Philadelphia Festival of the Arts) playing through Sunday at the Merriam Theater.

The yarn-bombing UArts students are part of a remarkable interdisciplinary course. The University Common Core course (team-taught by Mi-Kyoung Lee and Andrew Dahlgren) put out a call and were surprised that so many signed on. Students from departments as far-ranging as sculpture, graphic design, industrial design, musical theater, and fibers joined to create the installation, which extends all the way to the Merriam marquee. With the irrepressible imagination of UArts, these former non-knitters tried knitting with everything from needles to broomsticks.

Look up and see, all in shades of white and cream, a cathedral-like ceiling, all knitted. Now go inside. The lobby is hung and draped with cream and white knitting: long scarves, leafy wall decorations, baby jackets, and ropy bench covers, all contributed over the past years by people in Scandinavia, Argentina, Ireland - and now Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. There is a charming yarn SHALOM from a group of second-graders in New York who wanted to add their voices to the mission of Knitting Peace but didn't know how to knit.

Knitting Peace itself is performed by a touring circus from Sweden called Cirkus Cirkör Knitting Peace, five astonishing performers - also multinational. They work in a strange and magical set with trapezes and tightropes seemingly made of cream and white yarn. This is high-risk nouveau circus, but performed without hype and gaudy colors. Uncanny slowness and sinuous delicacy is the style.

Huge and small balls of yarn move of their own accord across the stage. Yarn dolls are born. Feet appear beneath a giant ball of yarn and it walks away. The effects are surreal, especially accompanied by eerie wailing and incantatory, repetitive music, live and recorded.

Knitting Peace was conceived and directed by Tilde Bjorfors to contribute to a worldwide peace movement through knitting. Ask any knitter (me, for instance) and they'll tell you how peaceful, how quieting, focusing, and comforting knitting can be.

Through Sunday, April 10. PIFA (Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts 2016) at the Merriam Theatre, 250 S. Broad St. Tickets: $19-$60. Information: 215-893-1999, kimmelcenter.org/pifa