Dance competition engages, but misses a big opportunity

A.W.A.R.D. Show! (Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance).

Nichole Canuso danced off with the $10,000 prize in the final round of the A.W.A.R.D. Show! (Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance) Saturday night for "Parallel You," a duet she choreographed and performed with David Brick.

Her piece was a modern-dance exploration of a close relationship, where even tiny details are manipulated by one's partner. But it also had her usual humor; Canuso has such an expressive deadpan that she says volumes with a subtle look.

The A.W.A.R.D. Show! featured three initial rounds judged by the audience. The winning choreographer each night took home $1,000. Those three competed Saturday for the top prize. All money was furnished by the Boeing Co. The show began in 2006 at New York's Joyce Theater and has expanded to four cities, including Chicago and Seattle.

Unlike the initial rounds, the audience's vote counted for only one-fifth of the final score Saturday. A panel of four professional judges each cast a vote. But the show missed an opportunity here to educate audiences. Before Live Arts/Fringe began, the festival's producing director Nick Stuccio spoke about the A.W.A.R.D. Show! as an opportunity to attract people who might not normally go to dance. But this was no American Idol. The judges sat anonymously among the audience and did not offer opinions or insight. The winner was unceremoniously announced during a post-show reception.

Ultimately, the format itself was disappointing, too. The final round of choreographers did not represent the very best of Philly, as the process suggests. Instead, it seemed to be more of a popularity contest.

The other finalists were Jenn Rose, who presented the modern-dance-and-tap piece "Way Up High," and Braham Logan Crane, with "Ghosts of Things to Come," a modern dance that included strong balletic and jazz elements.

The A.W.A.R.D. Show! offered an opportunity to see many kinds of dance, and presumably, this is not the last we've heard of it. But the details should be refined before it is performed again.

- Ellen Dunkel

13 Most Beautiful . . . Songs For Andy Warhol's Screen Tests.

Going back to his 1980s days in Galaxie 500, Dean Wareham has taken musical cues from the Velvet Underground, the quintessential New York art band of the 1960s that began as denizens of Andy Warhol's Factory.

So it makes perfect sense that the singer and guitarist, who performs with his keyboard- and bass-playing wife, Britta Phillips, snagged the commission from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to pair music with the rarely seen, soundless, black-and-white Screen Tests that Warhol shot between 1964-66.

In the first of two sold-out Friday night shows at the Arts Bank on the final weekend of the Philly Fringe fest, Wareham and Phillips, with the assistance of drummer Lee Waters and keyboard player Matt Sumrow, performed a mix of originals and covers while 13 films - that took 2 minutes and 45 seconds to shoot and were slowed to last 4 minutes each - were projected behind them.

The music was well-matched: Phillips cooed Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep It With Mine," while German beauty Nico read a magazine and showed off her impressive cheekbones; Wareham sang Lou Reed's chugging "I'm Not A Young Man Anymore," which was written in 1966, the same year Reed used a Coke bottle as a prop as he mugged for Warhol's camera.

And, wisely, Wareham and Phillips followed Warhol's approach in keeping a cool distance from their subjects, as the doe-eyed and eerily composed Edie Sedgwick, mischievously charismatic Dennis Hopper, and picture-perfect Jane Holzer (who spends her screen time brushing her teeth) let Warhol's camera turn them into art-world superstars. - Dan DeLuca