Fringe for the fledglings
If ever there were a time and place for children to explore the performing arts, the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe offers those moments.
The festival's sheer breadth of dance and theater offerings is enough to guarantee that any mini-Merce Cunningham or mini-Meryl Streep will find something to discuss over strawberry steamers on their next playdate. And since so many Live Arts/Fringe shows are experimental in nature, they're sure to challenge young minds already primed for the offbeat by SpongeBob's surrealist antics.
Live Arts Festival
Live Arts favorite Cie. Willi Dorner returns with above under inbetween. Last year, in bodies in urban spaces, the Austrian company allowed its audience to follow it through Center City's streets as the dancers wedged themselves into various crevices. This year, audiences will follow them around one space, as they dance to a new original score by composer Bernhard Lang.Nascent hipsters can impress classmates with their brand-new knowledge of the original YouTuber, Andy Warhol, after seeing 13 Most Beautiful. Velvet Underground chanteurs Nico and Lou Reed and scenemaker Edie Sedgwick all make four-minute appearances in Warhol's screen tests, serenaded with live original music by Dean and Britta (both you and your kids may already know Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips from the band Luna). And just in case those kids give you any trouble afterward about moving to New York to triple-major in dilettantism, eyeliner and Gauloise-smoking, let them know Wareham was a graduate of Harvard University, not the Factory, Warhol's original New York City studio in the 1960s.
Philly Fringe
Very young audiences (and their thrifty parents) will enjoy theater from Ombelico Mask Ensemble, which returns to the Fringe with a new pay-what-you-can show, The Power of Magic, a zany commedia dell'arte spectacle in the Betsy Ross House courtyard. In addition, B. Someday makes magic in Fishtown with its $5 Fractured Fairytales, a two-actor, whiplash show that might be Grimm, but is never grim.Small dance enthusiasts can check out Fusion Dance Company's genre-defying Fusion, what the company calls a "collage of dance." For inspiration and education, there's Music and Motion Dance Productions' The 9 Muses, created by an all-teen, all-girl modern dance company, celebrating the muses of ancient Greece.
With age comes sophistication, and the Fringe offers older children theater choices for picky palates in every stage of development. Cross-Cultural Theater Initiative presents its walk-through version of Everyman, with an original score and choreography. Melissa Dunphy's The Gonzales Cantata is a choral work based on the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Keyspeak's Pumpernickel and Marmalade, with its slapstick, pantomime and live vaudeville-style piano accompaniment, will appeal to your home's Keaton/Chaplin enthusiast - or possibly create one.
As is customary in Fringe shows, one genre often isn't enough. Under the interdisciplinary heading is T Lawrence-Simon's Insomnaeria, a work of theater performed as aerial circus. Lawrence-Simon worked with Headlong Dance Theater on this piece. He promises it won't go over kids' heads, even if it is literally going on over their heads.
