Urban Echo: Circle Told. This is inveterate space-invader Leah Stein's 2008 venue takeover. The choreographer takes on some mighty, if little known, buildings around the city to make her site-specific dance. Together with the Mendelssohn Club, she tackled the Girard College Chapel for their Carmina Burana two years ago. Teamed up again, as well as with composer/accordionist Pauline Oliveros, she created a stirring sound and movement-scape at West Philly's Rotunda.

Philadelphia audiences have known Oliveros' music since the 1980s, when she composed her landmark piece The Well for the Relâche Ensemble. In large group work, her style is to give the performers a cue and let them do what they will.

Though Stein used only seven dancers, Mendelssohn music director Alan Harler had his nearly 100 singers to help fill the large space. Milling around the center, sometimes like sleepwalkers, sometimes more purposefully, they eventually perched around the perimeter, vocalizing in rounds.

During a miraculous lull in Tropical Storm Hanna, a large contingent left the building and surrounded the audience with unamplified sound that came gusting in through the open windows. Though Stein's veteran dancers provided movement cues, they mostly got lost in the crowd and we got lost in the spectacle.

- Merilyn Jackson

Manic Swell. We critics endure so much - head-banging music, late starts, strobe lights, unwelcome nudity, cell phones dropped in torrential rain, late nights in dangerous neighborhoods, hunger, thirst, deadlines - yet, despite the fact we are paid less than postal workers, we deliver. Why?

Because we're always mining for wonderful work and finding it is like tripping over a gold nugget. Two pieces on Manic Swell's program at Mandell Theater on Saturday made it worth braving Tropical Storm Hanna, uncannily alluded to in the Fringe blurb.

Lauren Mandilian choreographed Information Overload to first-rate music by John Avarese and Matthew Baker. She also created splendid animation with letters falling like rain down the screen and architectural lines intersecting each other. Five dancers did their turns nicely until a fatal error message appeared on the screen. In this dance there were no errors.

Regrettably, we don't see enough of choreographer Stephen Welsh's delightfully inventive work. His Phantom Troops deftly evoked the story of the U.S. Army's 23 Special Unit, made up of artists who created fake battlefield decoys and other deceptive maneuvers during World War II. Welsh, a master at using props, had dancers Ray McCue rolling a tire and Joanna Wright exploring a vertical cargo net.

- M.J.

Who Made You Boss? So they think they can dance. Who Made You Boss? is listed as dance in the festival bulletin, but dance is definitely not what makes this show special. It is more musical comedy, and a timely, amusing 40-minute interlude.

A cross between American Idol and the presidential elections, Who Made You Boss? makes references to everything from Sarah Palin to political sexcapades to spouses running for office after the candidates die. Movement-wise, it incorporates bits of hula, tai chi, karate, acrobatics, ballroom and, of course, modern dance. One of the Foursome even quotes a line from A Chorus Line.

This is what one hopes for from the Fringe: High-quality entertainment in unexpected places. Unfortunately, that unexpected place is in Fishtown - far from most of the other venues - or it would be a great show to pop into in during a day of Fringing.

- Ellen Dunkel

Friday and Saturday.

Angler Movement Arts Center,

1550 E. Montgomery Ave.

Accidens. A silent Rodrigo García, a former butcher from Argentina and now a theater artist in Spain, suspends a lobster from a metal rope with a microphone and considers it while he smokes a cigarette. We hear crunches and knocks as it moves about. García removes it, positions it on a table, and with a large knife he kills it with the same dispatch you'll see on the Food Network or in any number of restaurant kitchens. (Dropping lobsters in boiling water is more prevalent here).

He then puts the pieces on a portable oven-top to saute, pours a glass of white wine and looks on as "What a Wonderful World" plays while words different from the lyrics project behind him. They're about his accident in a Ford, and how lucky he is to be alive, and think of that while you eat from your can of meatballs. It all takes a stupefying 25 minutes, which includes time for García to begin eating his costar.

Most of Saturday's audience stayed for a group discussion. I didn't. If Accidens needs a formal discussion to explain itself, it's not a performance, it's a workshop activity. Accidens could have a number of meanings, all vacuous statements of the obvious. García lived, the lobster didn't, fate is a fickle notion. And there's a reason we never order steer, we order beef; we don't wrap the food chain around our heads when we eat. Humans have the capacity to rationalize. Call it hypocrisy, call it irony. As for Accidens, I call it nonsense as theater and no better as performance art.

- Howard Shapiro

In Conflict. Temple University is presenting In Conflict, a collection of former Philadelphia Daily News writer Yvonne Latty's interviews with Iraq war veterans that first appeared in book form and has been adapted for the stage by Douglas C. Wager, artistic director for Temple Theaters. The production premiered last season at Temple, won a prestigious award last month at the original Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, and moves to Off-Broadway's Barrow Street Theatre Sept. 18.

Here is an excerpt from Wendy Rosenfield's review, which appeared last fall:

"There are many triumphs in the piece, not the least of which is the sheer variety of vets and war experiences represented, 19 in total: a Vietnam-vet officer who 'bleeds red, white and blue'; an unabashed liberal enlistee who says he was sent to Iraq to be a 'bullet catcher'; a triple amputee who shyly admits, 'I miss my body'; a lost 26-year-old who spits, 'I gave up my soul - can't nobody give me a prosthetic soul.' Each story is fascinating, heartbreaking, heroic or all three. . .

"It is remarkable that with such a wide range of voices, the same themes emerge in most of their testimonies. They want the Veterans Administration to help care for their wounds, both physical and psychic, but tragically, they have mostly been abandoned.. . .

"Latty recalls, in one of the filmed segments that appear between monologues, the disorientation she felt upon entering Walter Reed Medical Center and seeing men and women . . . wearing the same baseball caps with shredded brims, the same T-shirts that declared their affiliations, but all missing limbs or faces. It is a similar feeling watching these uniformly excellent Temple students reciting the soldiers' tales. . .