My Summer on the Fringe

Week three! The festival is still a long way away (August 31-September 15!), but preparations are really picking up. Most of this week (and a bit of next) was/will be spent putting the final touches on the festival guide, which entails coordinating, verifying, and proofing information on every single act in both the LiveArts and Fringe festivals. This process has actually been a lot of fun -- it feels good to be working on a real, concrete product, and as a pleasant side effect, I've gotten to be a lot more familiar with the acts that will be involved in the festival, especially on the LiveArts side of things. One of the distinguishing features of many of this year's acts seems to be LENGTH -- there are quite a few shows that run 4+ hours, including:

-Festival of Lies/Le festival des mensonges, performed by Faustin Linyekula and dancers from Les Studios Kabako. The group will perform several standard-length (think: two hours or so)
evening performances, and then culminate their LiveArts run with a 6-hour, 11pm-5AM free-form collaboration with Philadelphia-area musicians, complete with food and drinks.

-Gatz, performed by Elevator Repair Service, a theater troupe from New York. This is one of the LiveArts acts that I'm most excited about -- Gatz is, essentially, a full reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, set in a modern-day office. The main character comes in to work one day, and begins reading the novel aloud -- as he gets deeper and deeper in, his coworkers begin transforming into the characters in the novel, and everyday office events into wild West Egg parties, etc. There will be a couple of two-night split performances (Part I one night, then Part II the next), but it will also be performed a couple of times in its full-length, 7-hour incarnation, complete with dinner break.

-No Dice, performed by Nature Theater of Oklahoma -- who are, ironically enough (or perhaps so ironically that it's not at all ironic anymore, hmmmm?), based in New York -- which is an original play composed of bits and pieces of telephone conversations held by members of the theater company, edited together into a 4-hour "exercise in 'non-literary' theater." This sounds really awesome to me, but that could be just because I'm so charmed by their faux-handmade website. Who knows?

There are many more festival acts that I'm excited about -- and I'm sure I'll be filling you in on them as weeks progress. In the meantime, you can check them all out at the LiveArts website.