WHEN:             Friday, May 21, 2010 from 10 – 10:30 PM

WHERE:           Woodland Walk, 34th & Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA

WHO:               Swim Pony Performing Arts, Drexel’s Urban Playground, and welcome participants. Participants are encouraged to bring glowing objects such as glowsticks, flashlights and cell phones.

INFO:                This event is free and open to the public. For more information call (215) 665-9226 or visit www.swimpony.org.

WHAT:              Swim Pony Performing Arts joins forces with Drexel University’s Urban Playground, the group credited with the recent “30th Street Station Freeze,” to host Glowstick Milky Way Galaxy, Philadelphia’s next large-scale improvisational event. The event will be held on Friday, May 21 from 10 – 10:30 PM at Woodland Walk, located at 34th and Chestnut Street in University City. Participants are instructed to wear a black shirt and bring glowing objects such as glowsticks, flashlights, and cell phones, to create a living, breathing, and spinning representation of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Glowstick Milky Way Galaxy is inspired by Swim Pony Performing Arts’ upcoming World Premiere of SURVIVE! – a site-specific performance and interactive theater experience exploring science, humanity, and the Universe. SURVIVE! willtransform The Wolf Building, located at 340 North 12th Street in Philadelphia, from June 4 – 20, 2010. Under the guidance of a “10th dimensional narrator”, the cast of SURVIVE! will lead audiences through a maze-like installation covering over 20,000 square feet as audiences travel through a walkway to space, visit a biotic terrarium, the living room of a gentle scientist, and more to uncover the meaning of human existence. All tickets are $20 and are available for advance purchase online via Brown Paper Tickets or by calling the ticket sales hotline at 1-800-838-3006. Visit www.swimpony.org for updates.

The newly-formed Swim Pony Performing Arts is an independent Philadelphia-based theater collective dedicated to producing entirely new work that is original, strange and loud. The company is led by an energetic group of emerging Philadelphia-based theater and performance artists, including many of the artists behind such Philly Fringe hits Purr, Pull, Reign: A Litigious Fantasy in D (’09), The Giant Squid (’08) and The Ballad of Joe Hill (‘06).

Drexel’s Urban Playground is a student-run group organized as an offshoot of the larger urban playground movement. The group is inspired by Improv Everywhere who have been doing purposely-awkward performance based “missions” promoting outbursts of organized fun since 2001, taking YouTube by storm. Urban Playground’s “30th Street Station Freeze” on April 1st, invited participants to descend on Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station in a peaceful ‘flash mob’ and simultaneously freeze in place at the station for a three full minutes. The stunt attracted large crowds and gained wide media attention.

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