Following the work of Annie Wilson shows the horizon of dance at Fringearts from fall 2016 with Melissa Krodman, Faye Driscoll, Jerome Bel, and Orbitor 3 production of “The Brownings”.
In 2016, I returned to Philadelphia from a tour of Eastern Europe and stopping at the Edinburgh International Festival. The Fringearts presented a program of dance that questioned the boundaries of performance art, and theater that would inform the future of my work in sketching performances. Beginning with Annie Wilson, whose current piece, “Always the Hour,”(2023) we will see, gives us a look back into the development of theater artists, drama, and body art into immersive art.
These select artists at the Fringearts will continue to reference the festival, and the importance of the human experience in existentialist fashion. For the very first time, Wilson’s clarity has brought us the chance to bring new research of phenomonology and new plays to critique and question what dictates how we evaluate the elements of a play, or any art at that matter.
Jean & Terry: Your Guides Through Dark, Light, and Nebulous (2016) by Mel Krodman + Kelly Bond
What are we looking at here are projections of meditation and external stimuli for the mind’s eye. In a dialogue on stage that makes this dance especially communicative of aesthetics on screen and in physical space. The time traveling, and trust of leading an audience to transcendental landscapes was through provoking as well as, visually pulling from chromatic backdrops and synthetic soundscapes. The following of meditation and self care continues to build on this type of interactive art between audiences and participatory performances. Presumably, minimal backgrounds contemporary dimensions, and what seems to bring the two together for a conceptual art.
Thank You For Coming (2016) by Faye Driscoll
The exciting work of Faye Driscoll at the Fringearts Fall 2016 programming showed the pageantry and imaginative, with mythologically creative choreography.
Where as, in recent news, Driscoll staged, “Weathering” at New York Live Arts 2023. In the same terms as geological formations, and art historical references to The Raft of Medusa, by Theodore Géricault , multi-sensory and erotic, unexamined environmental shifts in movement and with ever-present stage hands to rotate the stage, the performers were in the elements. Though, I was unable to attend this event, the acknowledgement by the Dance-Enthusiast made it possible to contribute “Thank You For Coming” Fringearts program to an important contemporary movement artist.
Jérôme Bel(2016)
Jérôme Bel will also become an ongoing subject of artists creating extraordinary connections between the body and art making. Leading us to the contemporary dance companies from modern dance with Graham, Ailey, and Paul Taylor.
The Brownings
by Sam Henderson
Orbiter 3
THE BROWNINGS was a testament to their alternative lifestyles. It is the kind of environment and emotion that poets and musicians thrive to capture. Their interest in each other was fueled by the poetic medium. Robert showed bursts of inspiration as he read his poem and Elizabeth divulged anything that came to her mind. The combination of poetry and music constructed a considerate thought about being at a loss of words like a poet trig to capture the feeling of love. Their hot and cold feelings for one another were genuine, but not exactly healthy. During the post-show talk with Ariana Zena, it was mentioned that mental illness as a factor in intimate relationships could lead to “other centeredness through self abandonment.” The art world can be as small as one makes it, and the codependent relationship in THE BROWNINGS begins to shut out the rest of the world.
There was a third part to this grudge match: a friend of the Brownings, Robert Schumann, played by James Ijames.
In most scenes he was off to the side playing the piano. The love triangle eased the competitiveness between the two poets. Schumann’s music teased the seriousness of poetry while thickening the lovely, yet tragic addiction to the creative process. The melodramatic piano music gave a feeling of encouragement in the Browning’s relationship with poetry. The music showed an appreciation for this unconditional love. Schumann, dressed in black, gave us relief from the monotony of fighting, and music can do this for humanity during adversity.
Immersive theater takes us on a tour of a space exemplary of a social pathos. Trends on the subjective, and new offerings into deeper connections between people and our pasts. Participatory performances evoke a kind of welcoming of thoughtfulness and allows for the weird to become natural.
“Always the Hour”(2023) is a determined sequel of events that invite the energy from the underworld to participate with the shenanigans of performers. The collaboration that filled the Ice Box Space with brown butcher paper and hung Christmas trees upside down, and with a bee hive of sand that continually dropped an hourglass stream of sand onto the floor. The many factors of guide and medium with the undead proposed a phenomenological theory. A reality that philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, calls nothingness, is the matter in which we cannot see, but has everything to do with the forces of abstract ontology that describes the being and nonbeing in terms of anticipation before we walk into a crowded room, and we hope to see someone we love. The influence of, “Always the Hour,” is a sequel to, “At Home with the Humorless Bastard,” and it comes at much surprise to include the audience in a gathering around the family history of alcohol abuse and the liver is the star. A struggle occurs between actors, as a collaborator recites that she is not giving up, and just going to dissolve because the body wants it to. In other scenes we see the cast sitting with a patient under a rubble of butcher paper. At other points in the event long performance we are sitting under a canopy together reminiscing the feeling of being a part of the universe. The battle that takes place is a climatic approach to the exploration of spirits called upon during the duration of the event.
Awakening the presence of our past ancestors is common for those that have felt a loss. The feeling of which nothingness describes in the philosophy of, “Being and Nothingness.” How to describe the sense of something that is not there takes a deep connection with the words that we attribute to what is actually there and what being is in theoretical terms. The gathering of audiences for the immersive account of, “Always the Hour,” took three hours in full to come to the realization that the show was summoning a séance of our own interconnections to the underworld. And we asked them to come home. The culmination of hours, always feeling the grief, and thus addressing that feeling of loss takes a team of artists to guide us to comfortably lay around to watch ourselves in an out of body experience. These creatives, indicative of responding to the nuance movement of the environment, and knowing the shared experience of loss among a large group of people is common attributed to the sense of trigger that Annie Wilson wills for the subject of talking about the dead, dying, and an after life.