Two worthy new dances made locally

8: Olive Prince and Shavon Norris. Olive Prince, a delightful dancer, choreographed quite a good piece Thursday evening with I Desire, one of eight new works by local choreographers for the Live Arts Festival. The pieces are being presented in four sets of two.

Marie Brown, Lindsay Browning, and Nora Gibson joined Prince onstage for I Desire, while Christopher B. Farrell's compelling score moved them through with conviction. The dancers entwined themselves by turns in root-brown vines that hung from above. Prince repeated a motif using one vine for a support for deep back-bends and later did a little aerial work with it. This was not your girly maypole dance; all four attacked the meaty choreography with gusto. While Gibson brought her purposeful presence to the piece, Prince gave it its grace.

Dancers Mina Estrada, C. Kemal Nance, and Les Rivera inhabited the second work, Shavon Norris' The Body in Lines, so well I was less disappointed that Norris wasn't dancing. While I Desire explored what people really want from life, Norris focused on how people label each other and their lineage.

Nance played the role of what the narration called the "scary, big black man," who is actually a dancer and educator (as Nance is in reality). Estrada, not the kind of dancer one would expect to find in a kick line, amusingly marched the three to the opening steps of A Chorus Line. Rivera slyly snorted and loped in apelike fashion through a dance meant to mock racial stereotyping.

The two simple, yet terrific dance concepts of I Desire and The Body in Lines are good examples of how dance transfixes audiences even when they don't quite know what they are seeing.

- Merilyn Jackson

Read additional coverage of the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe at www.philly.com/fringe. Follow Inquirer critics on Twitter at #philastage.

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Romeo and Juliet. There's a lot to remember about Romeo and Juliet. The warring houses, the nurse, friar, cousins, friends, soliloquies, the part where "Romeo gets in a fight with some guy with a very . . . flourish-y name." That last recollection comes courtesy of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, whose production is based not on Shakespeare's actual work, but rather on friends' and acquaintances' faulty memories.

Anne Gridley and Robert M. Johanson perform with unabashed over-articulation (poison becomes "poi-see-OHN," Juliet's balcony, her "bal-CON-y"). Their respective Wonderbra-revealing frock and tights hint at the young couple's, um, deeper motivations while trying to pinpoint the play's slippery facts, or its greater sociological meaning ("It's like Anna Nicole. . . . And 9/11."). The pair alternate monologues taken from some clearly frustrated recorded subjects, and if after a while it all gets a bit repetitive, themes do emerge, and each contains at least one nugget worth waiting for.

Until, that is, Gridley and Johanson meet in a final extended discussion about needy actors that takes the production in a bafflingly dull direction. Oh, and sometimes someone appears to gyrate in a furry chicken suit. The main problem here is that the show gives a really excellent idea a really lazy execution. At least, once all the slackers-quoting-slackers ends, we get to hear the real play's balcony scene, which, sadly, sounds great.

- Wendy Rosenfield

7 Sins in 60 Minutes. Old joke: interviewer asks Homer if he wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey alone; he replies, "Here's what you get from a committee: 'Nothing could be finer than to be in Asia Minor in the morning.' "

7 Sins was written by a committee of seven playwrights, each contributing a scene and a sin. The results are deadly. Add to this whispering-down-the-lane approach to playwriting the fact that the cast quit. So Melanie Sutherland twisted some local arms and four actors - good sports all - read through. Each night will feature a different cast.

The narrative makes no sense. Amadea (Christie Parker, the group's standout), the only one of the four with any sense, is a "corporate bitch." Mike (Eric Rolland) is a dropout homeless poet, former lover of Amadea. Limo driver and wannabe rich guy Dante (David Millstone) picks up Willow (Marla Burkholder), a new-agey lab technician who reads palms.

There is a living but plucked chicken. There is a stupid sex scene that suggests that unprotected sex with a stranger is a way to embrace Life. Dreadful poems are recited. The dialogue is beyond awful.

- Toby Zinman