Breakups aren't easy. But for 26-year-old Sarah Lowry, a graduate of the inaugural semester of the Headlong Performance Institute and a co-creator of "The Breakup Booth," they can be fun.

In "The Breakup Booth" - a live theater piece in this year's Philly Fringe that is designed for an audience of one - an improvising performer initiates a breakup conversation with the solo audience member, who is expected to play along.

The Fringe, a freewheeling two-week-long arts festival entering its 13th year in Philadelphia, will feature 185 self-produced presentations that include dance, theater, comedy, music and more. Anyone can create a piece for the Fringe, so it is the perfect test bed for a new generation of experimental artists coming out of HPI, a semester-long performance training program for college students and recent graduates.

"The Breakup Booth" is representative of the kind of unconventional performance fostered at HPI, and Lowry credits her time there with helping her become more comfortable with such heady risk-taking.

"It enforced a sense of giving myself permission to push the boundaries of what is expected of an audience member and what is expected of a performer," she said.

HPI was founded by the co-directors of Headlong Dance Theater, a 16-year-old Philadelphia company known for raucously and inventively stretching the limits of contemporary dance. The teaching staff also includes members of the Pig Iron Theatre Company, another lauded local group that works squarely outside the lines of traditional performance.

Many faculty members will feature prominently in the Live Arts Festival, and the work of their first cohort of students is well-represented in this year's Fringe. The festival duo begins next Friday and continues through Sept. 19.

"We felt a lot of college programs were teaching dance and theater specifically, but not a lot were teaching the dance-theater hybrid that is so prominent in Philly," explained Amy Smith, one of the Headlong co-directors and an HPI faculty member.

With the founding members of Headlong and Pig Iron all out of their twenties and well into another phase of their lives, they were eager to help younger artists learn to create the kind of collaborative, hybrid work that has put Philadelphia on the vanguard of contemporary performance.

"We don't want people creating work that looks like our work," said Andrew Simonet, another Headlong co-director and HPI teacher. "We're trying to create an atmosphere where people can create their own work, but [we're] really challenging them and pushing them."

"I'm excited to see what they make," he added. "I think and believe they're going to make work that's going to blow my mind."

"Those are my heroes - the faculty members," said Lowry, whose company creates physical theater in outside-the-box spaces. "They taught us that you don't have to understand what it is that you're doing - you just have to know when it's working."

Sara Schmuckler, another 2008 HPI graduate, is one of two HPI performers in "Something With Wings," a multidisciplinary Fringe piece that aims - somewhat loftily - to explore the death of God.

Schmuckler described a highly open and collaborative creation and rehearsal process, in which the director gives cast members prompts like "What would you bring to the grave of God?" and asks them to generate interesting material to share. The final show will be woven together from many of the small pieces the performers have generated in response to prompts.

"One thing that makes me so comfortable with this work is that we did so much of this at Headlong," said Schmuckler, who had a mostly musical-theater background before coming to HPI. "We would get a prompt like 'Make a dance of the grotesque body,' and I would only have an hour - but it could be anything."

Schmuckler remembered an early exercise at HPI in which her initial reaction to a prompt seemed "so stupid" that she wanted to run it by her teacher before proceeding. His response surprised her.

"He said, 'I don't want to know,' " Schmuckler recalled. " 'Just imagine me in your head saying: It's perfect.' "

Although some entering HPI students, like Schmuckler, did not have much experience with HPI's brand of rabid artistic experimentation, the "anything goes" attitude created an environment in which challenging and strange work could thrive.

"It made me believe in myself a little more," said Schmuckler. "That's one of the hardest things to do - to believe in yourself and your art."

"HPI definitely changed the trajectory of me as a performer and creator of work," agreed Anne MacGillivray Wilson, another alumna. "I gained a million different strategies for how to make work."

Wilson is a cast member in FATEBOOK, a Live Arts show, and for the Fringe, her dance collective, Pink Hair Affair - so named for the pink wigs that feature prominently in every performance - will present an exploration of three different, somewhat radical perspectives on what Wilson calls "Disney-style fairytales."

"The Nutcracker" this is not.

"I was really inside this box of 'I just need to dance really hard and be technically excellent,' " said Wilson. "Going to HPI blew the top off that box, and expanded how I could define myself as a performer."

Lowry agreed. "There was never a wall, there was never a no," she said. "It was all: yes, yes, yes, yes, yes."

IF YOU GO

THE BREAKUP BOOTH, by The Missoula Oblongata, The Latvian Society, 531 N. 7th St., 9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Sept. 11, 12, 18, 19; Clark Park, 43rd St. & Baltimore Ave., 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. Sept. 12, free.

SOMETHING WITH WINGS, by Barracuda Carmela, Fishtown Collective, 1425 N. Front St., 8 p.m. Sept. 9, 10; 7 p.m. Sept. 6, 10; 7 & 9 p.m. Sept. 11; 8 & 10 p.m. Sept. 12; $15.

POOF! by Pink Hair Affair, The Fidget Space, 1714 N. Mascher St., 7 & 9 p.m. Sept. 4; 7 p.m. Sept. 5, 6; $15.

For exact showtimes, tickets and more information, visit

http://www.livearts-fringe.org

or call 215-413-1318.