Fringe: RUB
A Gentlemen's Club revue as performed by trained dancers.
Fringe: RUB
It was a darned shame RUB had to be moved from South Broad Street’s recently defunct Dolphin Tavern – where (full disclosure) I lasted two nights as a go-go dancer in 1969 before telling my agent not to send me there again – too skuzzy even then. But with only two days to load in, Gunnar Montana (Gunnar Clark in his real-life JUNK persona) did his darnedest to funk-up the Latvian Club’s side-room. Black spray-painted street detritus made for an interesting anti-Zagarian wall mosaic, but the narrow room’s low ceiling cramped the audience. The scaffolding and apparatus -- a six-foot tall furry penis on four stabilizing metal stands, a gurney, and a pink heart for aerial work were too big for the tiny space. I’m sure all this cramped the dancers’ style, though they gamely made the best of it.
Montana and his RUB collaborator Jasmine Zieroff also choreograph for the gentlemen’s club Delilah’s -- where (full disclosure) I was a judge three years’ running for the National Exotic Dancer of the Year Contest. They conceived of their four dancers as “post-apocalyptic android sex bots.”
In partial dis-clothesure, the brave beauties, Fatima Kargbo, Courtney Lapresi, Maureen Mo Lynch, and Ann Marie Gover were forced to dance so close to the audience, that by the end of the show we could see the Day-Glo paint that passed for pasties was cracking up. And often so nearly did they. Was Gover tangoing or tangling with the penis as it rebounded dangerously in her face? All four poured baby oil over each other and took to writhing on the floor in the oleaginous ending. I had a front row seat and was just glad they hadn’t chosen a jello-fight. They took a bruising just trying to walk off.
So did this show further the cause of feminism? Did it make you think of gender? Hell no, that’s why they call it the Fringe.
RUB, Gunnar Montana and Jazmin Zieroff. Latvian Society, 531 N. Seventh St. Sept. 13, 14, 15, 20, 21 at midnight, September 16, 20 at 10pm, http://livearts-fringe.ticketleap.com/rub/#view=calendar
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has written freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She serves on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, was a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop, a 2008 NEA/USC Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and twice was guest critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute. She received her B.A. from Bennington College and her M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and spends all her free time working out and driving people places. Follow her on Twitter @WendyRosenfield.
Jim Rutter has reviewed theater for The Inquirer since September, 2011. Since 2006, he covered dance, theater and opera for the Broad Street Review, and has also written for many suburban newspapers, including The Main Line Times. In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Fellowship in Arts Journalism. Thames & Hudson released his updated and revised version of Ballet and Modern Dance in June, 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he taught philosophy and logic at Drexel, and then Widener University. He also coaches Olympic Weightlifting for Liberty Barbell, and has competed at the national level in that sport since 2001.
Merilyn Jackson regularly writes on dance for The Inquirer and other publications. She specializes in the arts, literature, food, travel, and Eastern European culture and politics. In 2001, she was dance critic in residence at the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom, Poland; in 2005, she received an NEA Critics’ Fellowship to Duke University’s Institute for Dance Criticism. She likes to say that dance was her first love but that when she discovered writing she began to cheat on dance. Now that she writes about dance, she’s made an honest woman of herself, although she also writes poetry.
