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'Loop' circles, goes nowhere

Loop, Tangle Movement Arts' 2014 FringeArts offering, takes to the air to explore themes of identity and sexuality amid an eye-pleasing display of aerial rigging and string sculptures by Julia Wilson.

Tiffany Holder in "Loop," by Tangle Movement Arts. Eight members of the all-female aerial troupe perform on silk ribbons, trapezes, and ropes.
Tiffany Holder in "Loop," by Tangle Movement Arts. Eight members of the all-female aerial troupe perform on silk ribbons, trapezes, and ropes.Read moreANNE SAINT PETER

Loop, Tangle Movement Arts' 2014 FringeArts offering, takes to the air to explore themes of identity and sexuality amid an eye-pleasing display of aerial rigging and string sculptures by Julia Wilson.

Eight members of the all-female troupe, which describes itself as a "circus arts company," performed with sufficient proficiency on silk ribbons, trapezes, and ropes above a floor coved to the walls in a great white space at Philadelphia Soundstages on Thursday night.

Loop is supposed to be about a single woman (Lauren Rile Smith, company founder), carrying a backpack and wending her way through the group, an adventurer trying to decide whether to continue on or stay with this group.

But Loop's main themes of sexuality and identity hung by a thread, connected by nothing much but the program notes.

Absent dramaturgy and stagecraft to link the oddly paced episodes, save on the shallowest level, the action dragged. After each section, the stage darkened and grew silent while the silks were rearranged. Professional lighting could have smoothed Loop, casting those sections in darkness while the action continued nonstop in a spot. Strangely, when the performers had barely worked up a sweat, a needless intermission only 20 minutes into the show ate up 10 minutes of the slow-as-molasses 90-minute performance.

Two performers identified as "The Muses" revealed no stage presence, awkwardly posing on a pair of Windsor chairs so inappropriate in the otherwise circusy scene. "The Daring, Diving Darlings," three bathing-capped beauties, had more flair, but their virtual repetition of their first-act routine in the triple looped silks showed no imagination or theatrical sensibility at work.

The program did not list a sound designer and one was sorely needed. The selections of '50s themes, folksy new-age guitar, even Chopin were cringe-worthy.

Smith, who works at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Pennsylvania and moonlights as a trainer in aerial acrobatics, is a 2008 Swarthmore College English literature and philosophy alum. "Philosophers," a philosophy professor once told me, "can go anywhere."

Loop went nowhere. It just threw me for one.