By Lisa Kraus
The presence of Donna Faye Burchfield, installed last year as head of the School of Dance at University of the Arts, begins to ripple out into the wider Philly community with her curation of this series of four evenings of interconnected works. Drawing on a wide web of dance contacts from her years at Hollins University, the American Dance Festival and beyond, Burchfield brings us fresh voices and visions.
The first weekend’s show opens with Adrienne Westwood’s Record, a finely crafted progression of images layering shadow play and live-feed projection to make dancers lying on their sides appear to be "walking" upright, or dollhouse chairs on a turntable appear huge and whorling. Its two couples slip into cyclical phrases like music box figures.
Of the four works that follow, all share Record’s thoughtfulness and most share its dusky, hushed tone. Several employ a table and chair, hinting at notions of home. Kinetically, Dawn Springer’s quartet, Dreams of Flight, and Maria Urrutia’s solo, In Absence, grow the most surging and lush. Meredith Glisson’s solo, influenced by Lady Anne from Shakespeare’s Richard III, is the most diffuse, with its shreds of repeating text and intimations of distress. Jung-eun Kim echoes Shen Wei in her spatial calligraphies, but also narrows our focus to her simple, questioning presence. She’s Philly-based this year and is an artist to watch.
Featured in Weekend Two will be other artists-to-watch, including Meg Foley and Faye Driscoll, and, as a special coda on the final night, Bessie-winner Yvonne Meier’s Mad Heidi. All told, topos topio’s a perfect Fringe opportunity to open your eyes to the new.
$10, 8 pm 9/3, 16 and 17. The Drake, 1512 Spruce St. (entrance on Hicks).
- About Last Night
- American Theatre Critics Association
- Arden Theatre
- Culturebot
- Drama Queen
- Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals
- InterAct Theatre Company
- Live Arts & Fringe Festival
- Montgomery Theater
- Out There
- Parabasis
- People's Light & Theatre
- Peter Filichia's Diary
- Stage Directions
- StageGrade
- Stage Rush
- The Critical Condition
- The Playgoer
- The Theater Loop
- Theater Jones
- TheaterMania
- Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia
- Theatre Communications Group
- Theatre Exile
- Uwishunu
- Wilma Theater
- 2 AM Theatre
- February
- January
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011







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.
