Philly Fringe nears end with stars foreign, local

This year's Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe enters its final innings with bases loaded and a roster of international and local all-stars - often playing on the same team. The festival's last weekend is the fruit of months, and sometimes years, of work by director Nick Stuccio to bring the local arts community together with its overseas counterparts.

"This has been another fantastic festival," Stuccio said this week. "We have an amazing intersection of work between European and Asian artists brushing up against or working with our Philly artists. I'm very proud of the way it all came together and want to keep helping to make these connections."

Some great collaborations already have come and gone, among them Bodies in Urban Spaces by Austrian choreographer Willi Dorner, who filled every Center City crack and corner with local dancers, and The European Lesson, by Norwegian director/choreographer Jo Strømgren, who worked with four local actors.

"This initiative is all about exchange," Stuccio said. "Jo took away as much as he brought. He said the opportunity to work with Philly actors changed him."

But much of the best of this explosion of collaborative dance and theater work is yet to come.

Last weekend, French choreographer Jerome Bel performed with Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun; this weekend, Bel's The Show Must Go On, which has played many of the world's major art houses, opens in yet another - the Kimmel Center. In the piece, Bel has 21 local dancers interpreting 20 American songs - with no dancing at all for the first 20 minutes.

"At first, it's pretty shocking," said Stuccio, "But then it becomes a beautiful human dance that is a deeply emotional experience you wouldn't get at Swan Lake."

Stuccio travels the globe making curatorial decisions influenced by fellow presenters from Seattle to Hong Kong, as well as by the artists at home who feed him ideas about people they'd like to work with.

They clamored for Bel, and for Belgian choreographer Jan Fabre, whose company came to Philadelphia in January to do workshops with the dance community. The Fabre work in the festival, however, is Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day, a solo by Croatian dancer Ivana Jozic. Inspired by Bobby Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe," it is Fabre's look at death and passion.

"Having Jan here from Belgium at the new Suzanne Roberts Theater is such a great opportunity," said Stuccio. "We co-commissioned it with the festival in Avignon where it just premiered." The Philadelphia show is its only U.S. appearance; then the production - which requires some elaborate props to pull off - will head for Zagreb.

"We had 12 male canaries singing in our office all week," Stuccio said with a laugh, "until they went to join the model trains shipped from Antwerp and two tons of coal at the theater."

The Norwegian performance group Verdensteatret, also featured this weekend, defines interdisciplinary. This collective contains people from all fields; its show, Louder, combines theater, visual arts, electronic music, robotics and 32 enormous amplifiers. You'll get earplugs with your program.

"Everything is analog," said Stuccio. "When they turn it on they put two wires together - it's an anti-digital giant installation that is performed for an hour."

Thaddeus Phillips lives in South Philly but traipses the world with his Colombian wife, actor/director Tatiana Mellarino, to research material for their shows. The Melting Bridge is the final piece in his Americas Trilogy, which began with ¡El Conquistador! and last year's festival hit Flamingo/Winnebago. He makes brilliantly simple sets that, like Rubik's cubes, he turns this way or that to change a scene.

There have been grumblings, mainly from local artists not chosen for the limited number of Live Arts Festival slots, that the same people appear year after year. But Stuccio argues that when you have artists like Phillips, Pig Iron, Leah Stein or Geoff Sobelle right in your backyard, why not present them often? "It gives our most creative people a laboratory to experiment in," he says, "and a chance for others to gain experience with them."

Sobelle's Live Arts show last year, Amnesia Curiosa, may not have achieved the critical success of his first one, 2003's All Wear Bowlers, but there's no denying he's one of the city's theatrical luminaries. This year, he's working with another, Charlotte Ford, in Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl, which Stuccio describes as "a wacky, great farce, a character-driven piece of highly physical theater of the absurd," adding, "it gets increasingly more bizarre and abstract when the taxidermied animals come to life."

Like Sobelle, Myra Bazell and Scrap have been festival fixtures too. This year they're in the wide-open Fringe segment, performing Tide at Isaiah Zagar's Magic Garden on South Street. "We are working with Myra for a Live Arts show, possibly next year," said Stuccio.

Newer to the Fringe scene is Pink Hair Affair, a too-adorable gaggle of nine girly-girls, who prove they have brains under those hot-pink wigs when each takes a turn with the choreography. The letter o and the number 0 sponsor their Fringe show oOOoOoOo this weekend - which also offers last chances to see such other festival standouts as Urban Echo: Circle Told, Car, Flushdance and Sweet By-and-By, coproduced by Pig Iron Theater Company and Sweden's Teater Slava.

Stuccio's efforts over the last 12 years have put Philadelphia in the major leagues in international performing arts, even as they highlight the richness here at home. Go see why.