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Live Arts Festival Tickets On Sale Now!
The wait is over! Live Arts Festival tickets are now on sale. A couple of months ago, Canary issued a press release announcing the programming for the 15th annual Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. With 16-days of nonstop cutting-edge performances and wild creativity, the Festival features dance, theater, music, and interdisciplinary works by renowned artists from the U.S. and international arts scene. Celebrating 9 world premieres with 3 U.S and 3 Philadelphia premieres, the lineup is sure to satisfy any arts lover’s taste for the innovative and the inspirational. Many shows sell out every year, so get your tickets early online at livearts-fringe.org. (Tickets for the Philly Fringe will also go online soon.)
What We’re Looking Forward To:
Play: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Shantala Shivalingappa
Play is a vast playground, a place for experiments between two riveting performers with seemingly opposing techniques and styles: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the sinuous western contemporary dancer whose movements ride a wave of chaos, and the Indian dancer Shantala Shivalingappa, whose masterly control of movement comes from her training in the classical Indian form Kuchipudi. Play portrays the teasing, playful games they engage in to form a world of their own. Role-play, seduction, imitation, human-sized puppets, blindfolds, masks, music: all are employed to win the other over, to test boundaries, and finally to express the joy of communicating through dance.
Traces: 7 Fingers
Traces is high-energy urban acrobatics—poetic and explosive, humorous and thoughtful—from 7 Fingers, a Montreal-based circus arts company founded with the goal to present circus on a human scale. Circus feats—including traditional Chinese acrobatics, tumbling through hoops, leaping between giant poles—combine with skateboarding and parkour, and mix with theater, music, and contemporary dance. Traces celebrates the individuals on stage, their bond and talents; their risk-taking; and their unbridled energy.
The Devil and Mister Punch: Improbable
The iconic Mr. Punch (of Punch and Judy fame) murders his way through life’s inconveniences, and yet his story has been the basis for beloved family entertainment for centuries. Unsatisfied with mere murder, The Devil and Mister Punch delves into the even darker world of Punch’s manipulators, the puppeteers themselves, and a pair of down-on-their-luck vaudeville-era theater producers. A stage like a giant Victorian armoire has secret openings, a piano, and multiple performances areas. This shadowy, magical world features transatlantic wooden and papier-mâché players, music of the jug band era, a steaming crocodile, a parade of elephants, hangings, beatings, the devil, and—of course—sausages.
FREE SHOWS!
blank: Cie. Willi Dorner
Within a seven block radius within Old City, Willi Dorner is unleashing 65 performers down narrow lanes, over archways and support beams, walking up walls where there once were steps, falling out of windows, and stacked below I-95, and generally playing with your perception by reconstituting the spaces and people you take for granted. In this free, outdoor show from the creator of the immensely popular bodies in urban spaces (Live Arts Festival, 2008), audiences roam the streets and side alleys, open spaces, passageways, and empty lots to discover wild formations of bodies, like anonymous inhabitants, using the city’s buildings and spaces for their own expression.
Extremely Public Displays of Privacy:New Paradise Laboratories
Part musical, part illusion, part real-life drama, Extremely Public Displays of Privacy is a performance adventure in three acts. Experience and interact with the story the way it unfolds for the characters. Follow Act 1, Extremely Public, wherever you are (for free) – at home, at work, in a coffee shop, on a train, anywhere you have internet access. Get to know Fess and Beatrix as they get to know each other. Then take the free walking tour of Act 2, Displays and discover the secret location of Act 3, Privacy, in the Philly Fringe.