Dancers go off the deep end (figuratively)

Labor Day is late this year. Let's go to the pool!

Except that the pool at the Gershman Y doesn't have water, and it hasn't for 15 years. Instead, it's serving as the theater for Brian Sanders/JUNK's latest Live Arts Festival dance, Urban Scuba.

Sanders, a former dancer with Momix, is witty, deadpan and a master of the absurd – but he also remembers the dance element. In previous performances, he Flashdance-d his way into Flushdance (think toilet) and used plastic water slides and pogo sticks at a former movie theater.

The photos for Urban Scuba show Sanders in a Speedo and flippers, balancing on his head in a bucket. Perspective comes into play in this show: The deep end of the pool minus the water is said to look very, very deep.

The Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe has always specialized in site-specific pieces, especially for dance, and this year is no different. Kate Watson-Wallace is using an abandoned Rite Aid for her work, Store, the last part of her American Space trilogy, which included the 2008 Car and 2006 House.

Willi Dorner, from Vienna, Austria, uses space as though it's a new concept. Photos of his above under inbetween show dancers stacked on top of one another and crammed into a space between a bed and a wall, folded onto a shelf, and perched above a door, building structures with their bodies.

Merián Soto isn't so much incorporating a space into her dance as transforming it. ICE BOX Projects Space is home to Postcards From the Woods, Soto's latest chapter in her exploration of nature, developed through a series of performances at Wissahickon Park. Snowstorms and pools of water will be projected on the walls, sounds of nature will fill the air, and the performers will dance with long branches, all in an attempt to bring the outside in.

ICE BOX is also the scene of TIDE – SCRAP Performance Group's third piece of the same name. Here, cocreators Myra Bazell and Madison Cario are taking advantage of the space's white walls as a canvas. "If the natural world no longer existed," they ask, "what would you think of? What would you want to say?"

Movement is everything for the Australian troupe Chunky Move. In their collaboration between dance and technology, Mortal Engine, the dancers control all the elements of the show - sound, video, lights, laser images - via sensors on their bodies.

Headlong Dance Theater is taking more in the opposite direction, exploring what sort of dance they'd make if they didn't have their bodies.

If all this is a bit much, audience members can vote to knock dancers off in Melanie Stewart Dance Theater's Kill Me Now, a comedically cruel – and fictional - twist on the reality show.

Or, for real reality, you can vote for a dance troupe that will win $1,000 in a playoff round or $10,000 in the finals in The A.W.A.R.D. Show.