By Lisa Kraus
Some think September’s too busy a time for a festival. But in the residential streets near the Italian Market, with flowers spilling over the rims of their pots and neighbors spilling out onto the streets, there’s no better time for an outdoor Fringe performance.
To make their travelling suite of dances around Bardascino Park, Colleen Hooper, Frances Gremillion and Saroya Corbett spent the summer months getting to know its denizens – talking, observing movement, and even playing bocce.
The resulting work features plenty of supportive partnering (a quality of the locals, according to Hooper), dashes into new territory, and sinuous, graceful interactions. The score includes original music performed live by wind and percussion players and vocalists, interspersed with text about the area, past and present.
The work’s high notes include a moment with all five dancers, wearing different solid colors, perched atop separate equidistant pylons, ruffled by the breeze, and a Mardi Gras-type procession with the audience as celebrants. When asked how she enjoyed witnessing the repeating performance, a resident said “What’s not to love?”
$12. 5:30, 6:30 and 7:30 p.m. 9/11. Bardascino Park, 10th and Carpenter streets
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.
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 been writing 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 also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at 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 a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.
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