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             You say I’m a dreamer, we’re two of a kind,
             Both of us searching for some perfect world we know we’ll never find.
             So perhaps I should leave here, yeah yeah go far away,
             But you know that there’s no where that I’d rather be than with you here today.

~ Hold Me Now, The Thompson Twins

Rarely do I allow my screed to touch on family as the taint is perhaps too much for all sides of the equation to bear.  However, forgive me this one trespass as I must share with you, dear reader, some of the magic that is my Aunt Adler A.F., the Trash Queen of Munich, Performance Artist and Activist Extraordinaire .  Albeit distant, the Bellmans have blood ties in Bavaria thus aligning me with the scion of Royal Garbage.  My sovereign Auntie Adler came to town a month ago and she always leaves magical traces in her wake.  Consider if you yourself had a relative that dresses like Refrigerator Dyke- cum- Used Car Salesman or who wore dresses made entirely of plastic lobster bibs and shopping bags you might tend to get a tad embarrassed, especially around the holicraze.  Not me.  Not Adler.  She was telling Wall Street and Lehman Brothers to stick it where the sun don’t shine long before the bathroom at Starbucks was the only public amenity being perpetually occupied by dirty homeless hippies and proto-revolutionaries alike.  And yet she has certain genetic traits that I did not quite manage to retain i.e. cops love Trash Queen—Ivan Bellman notsomuch.

When not painting the town black n’ blue or shacking up with the art world elite, TQ stays with me in the TriBeCa Projects.  Everyone in my building knows and loves Auntie Adler especially my African-American and West Indian doormen.  These instances sometimes require me to run interference (read: cock-block) owing to the fact that Trash Queen has gone black and will never go back.  I have no problem for her preference for dark meat… Hell, it’s only in the Philippines am I considered a white-boy myself!  But I draw the line at Interracial Teutonic Pornography in my one bedroom-and-a-half apartment. My Stone Age pullout-sofa just wouldn’t be able to take it!

I am sad to report that as much as I love TQ, we have not gotten to kick it so much on the social tip this go around.  She is mad busy working and I am busy being mad about not working.  So when Zack Glass (the son of my ersatz fairy-godmother, JoAnne Akabooboo)  informed me via JUNK MAIL e-mail he was gigging at the TRASH BAR with a band called the ROYAL SEMI QUARTET my ears pricked up (as opposed to pricking up your ears, the gay allusions of which I hope are not lost . These portentous signs enhanced by promises of PBR drink specials and my Auntie’s namesake pub as photo-op backdrop drew us like moths to cashmere or, in this case, yuppies to Billyburg.  Best of all I was going to clock in some QT with the TQ.

Zack was in rare form last Monday although I do miss the Brazilian standards he played from time to time afore to now. The batch of songs he is currently perfecting sound more like pre-célèbre Talking Heads, when David Byrne’s ego was a bit more fragile—more nascent RISD rockband, less post-Psycho Killer fah-fah-fah-fah-fah franchise. The Royal Semi Quartet came next consisting of a cellist and acoustic guitarist both also singing vocals .  Um.  Duh.  I am indeed mathematically challenged but even I know there are three players in a quartet.  Sheesh!  Who do you think I be? I didn’t go to Juilliard for nothing.  Or wait maybe I did?  Anyway maybe the duo’s moniker stems from them both playing instruments and singing… Two times two equals… uh, equals….  Or they’re doing some Thompson Twins type-thing… like in reverse…. or something….Whatever!  The guitarist was this long-haired Serbian dude who’s chunky Gyspy rhythms were a welcome bit of all right.  But OMFG the cellist of RSQ blew my mind and several other of my favorite organs.  She ratcheted up ballads with a lyric falsetto that emanated from her Asian babydoll painted and pursed lipsticked lips that would make Nagisa Ōshima blush.  Of their classical fusion pieces, one Dvořák inspired number required the songstress with the over-sized violin between her legs to shred the fretboard with a pinky that seemed to operate with a will and dexterity independent of the other digits let alone the person wielding them.  (With all this talk of sex, pinkies and rock n’ roll, I know what you are asking yourself… the answer is a resounding Yes—if you let your girlfriend stick a finger in your ass then yes, you are a gay homosexual.  Even a pinky, even only up to the first knuckle… Yup, you’re a Fanny Farmer.  Might as well come out of the closet and join Act Up now!)
Queer tangents aside, let us regress back to that plum evening after the music where TQ and IB frolicked in the autumnal mist of the Trash Bar.  The photos posted here are by yours truly and, as a matter of course, Trash Queen wooed the local thuggery into posing with her.  By this time our coach had turned back into a pumpkin just as Adler’s gown transformed back into a undefined mass of plastic and duct tape.  So we trundled off to the J-train stopping to take more stills of graffiti that stuck our trashy aesthetic as well as junk food in the form of fully-loaded cheddar-chili-fries from Checkers.  Perhaps it was my fixation on digging into our take-away that’s spurned me to snub a cute but befuddled pair of Europeans as they tried in vain to negotiate their expired metrocards.  The MTA apparently is doing away with human ticket sellers in addition to the automated ones as neither were to be found at this remote subway juncture.

“Allo. My ticket is finished. Where may we buy? “

“Sorry buddy, can’t help ya,” I grumbled as I swiped my own card, thus bringing me closer to inhaling my late night snack smothered in synthetic bacon bits.  As the dejected couple began to walk away they spoke French.   I am a sucker for all things Francophone as it is the only foreign language in which I can attempt getting laid.  The Queen of Trash also caught my eye with just enough eurofag empathy to make me second guess my decision to leave the stranded Frogs to Brooklyn’s cruel inanimate and monolingual turnstile devices.  I doubled back to fling open the emergency gate thus triggering the alarm while shouting “Hey! Allons-y… le métro est gratuit après minuit.”  Sure it was illegal but as a New Yorker I feel obliged to do these type of things so foreigners don’t go back home and tell their friends we’re all a bunch of assholes.  We have enough problems abroad these days.

But alas, alack!  The door alarm went on too long and just before we were to board the beloved J-train two uniformed cops were on us like white on rice.  Of course they did not hassle Adler but rather apologized to her more than once for the delay.  Whereas they took me and the Frenchies ID’s and ran them to make sure weren’t wanted for anything.  As I said before cops love Trash Queen, which actually made me that much less belligerent.  Also the recent trend of pepper spraying uppity white people as well as shooting UC students probably contributed to my toned down disposition. I contented myself by grumbling  in my co-conspirators’ native tongue.

“Très stupide. Moi,  pas les flics. Les flics sont juste travailler. Mais je suis a fucking New Yorker. Je connais mieux. Stupide.”

For those of you dear readers who know me, you probably expect me to presently wax about some night in jail or some ferocious fine I had to fight in court owing to me being joke as a dyslexic broke.  But not only did the cops find my record clean, return our IDs and send us away disabused of our law enforcement prejudices but it turns out that my newfangled Frenchy friends run a independent film festival in Barcelona.  Did I mention that I loooooove Barcelona and will be sending them a copy of X-TINA, my underground cult film starring none other than Bob Wonder of the Collaps(ed) Giraffe.  Perhaps Ivan is growing up.  Or maybe I just got lucky.  Gratitude abounds regardless.

Sadly Trash Queen will be leaving town soon but you can catch her tonight, Tuesday November 29th at 7pm in Dumbo in her work performance piece entitled, “All is fine – keep shopping!”
68 Jay St Brooklyn, NY 11201 (F Train to York/ A Train to High)
See show card below.

Zack Glass will be gigging again soon as he is promoting his new album Southern Skies, downloadable on the ubiquitous iTunes.
Links also below.

See you there, unless I see you first!
~IB

Zack’s Links:

www.zackglass.com

www.thesoundcloud.com/zozemusic

www.youtube.com/zackglasschannel

Adler’s Gig:

TQ in Dumbo~Nov 29, 2011

Her teachers were her friends, lovers and fellow urban travelers. And her graduate school was the Hotel Chelsea, the raffish refuge of bleary-eyed poets and half-mad artists that she moved into with [Robert] Mapplethorpe [Patti's "artistic soul mate"] in 1969.

Drool.

McNulty then contrasts Smith’s “eluding pigeon-holes” and her wild, artistically fruitful relationships with collaborators and audiences with, among other “professionalized” suffocations, “the plight of contemporary playwrights fresh out of top-flight universities and searching frantically for arable soil for their theatrical endeavors.”

This we can all agree with, as we can with the undeniable advantages of the American arts-academia marriage (the piece points out a protective aspect). But McNulty takes the conversation a step further: Could the new, more community-aware attitude he detects in young students and artists—fueled in part, he hypothesizes, by the economic and environmental crises—pick up or be picking up on Patti’s vibe? He suggests they start by reading the book.

I posted recently about “dirty” performance training in Philadelphia; I think the artists I mentioned are working with these very questions. Andy also posted yesterday about what makes good playwrighting. What relationship do the “distrust,” “vengeance,” and “truth” he mentions have to community? McNulty may have named something we can all feel in the air. What do you think?

NEW YORK SUMMERSTAGE
East River Band Shell
WEDNESDAY Aug. 25th 8pm
THURSDAY Aug. 26th 8pm
FRIDAY Aug. 27th 8pm

Joe’s Pub NYC
SATURDAY Aug. 28th 11.30pm
THURSDAY Sept. 2nd 9.30pm
SATURDAY Sept. 4th 7pm

Club Oberon
A.R.T, Boston
SUNDAY Sept. 5th 8pm
MONDAY Sept. 6th 8pm

Les Escales Improbables
Montreal
THURSDAY September 9th 8pm

The Little Foxes
Written by Lillian Hellman
Directed by Ivo Van Hove
Previews September 10; opens September 21; closes October 31
The notoriously provocative director Ivo van Hove returns to NYTW to take on The Little Foxes, one of Lillian Hellman’s most well-known plays, starring his frequent collaborator Elizabeth Marvel. A startlingly original play (also known from the Hollywood film starring Bette Davis), The Little Foxes is a timely study of greed, dishonesty, and one generation’s unstoppable drive to ruthlessly exploit the resources of a previous generation. This is the sixth collaboration between NYTW and Flemish director Ivo van Hove—past collaborations have included Eugene O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Molière’s The Misanthrope.

The cast of The Little Foxes is Tina Benko, Marton Csokas, Sanjit De Silva, Lynda Gravatt, Elizabeth Marvel, Cristin Milioti, Thomas Jay Ryan, Grieg Sargeant, Christopher Evan Welch, and Nick Westrate.

Three Pianos
Written, arranged, and performed by Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy, and Dave Malloy
Directed by Rachel Chavkin
Opens December 19
Three Pianos—the hit music-theater event that wowed audiences and critics alike in its sold-out run at the Ontological Theater in March—is a theatrical explosion of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle. Filled with fantastical touches and inventive arrangements, Three Pianos is a colorful and imaginative evening of chaos that explores Schubert’s music, life, and times. Written, arranged, and performed by Rick Burkhardt (Nonsense Company), Alec Duffy (Hoi Polloi) and Dave Malloy (Banana Bag & Bodice), the play is set in a rustic cabin on a blustery winter night where three friends—each manning a piano—lead the audience through their respective passions for Winterreise, Schubert’s famous song cycle on winter heartbreak – performing the songs, grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of music, slipping into the skins of Schubert and friends during one of their famous “Schubertiads,” and drinking way too much. Compositional mayhem, shifting rivalries, and some unfortunate butchery of the German language ensue.

Peter and the Starcatcher
Written by Rick Elice
Directed by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers
Based upon the novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
February – March 2011

Rick Elice, co-writer of the Tony® Award-winning Jersey Boys and The Addams Family, along with actor/director/author Roger Rees, probably best known for his Tony® Award-winning performance in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, and OBIE Award-winning director Alex Timbers, founder and artistic director of Les Freres Corbusier and director of the highly-acclaimed Public Theater production of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, have created an imaginative new play based on the New York Times best-selling novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, Peter and the Starcatcher. In it a company of twelve actors plays some 50 characters—all on a journey to answer the century-old question: How did Peter become The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up?

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World
Book by Joy Gregory; music by Gunnar Madsen; lyrics by Ms. Gregory and Mr. Madsen; story by Ms. Gregory, Mr. Madsen and John Langs.
Directed by John Langs
Spring 2011
A co-production with Playwrights Horizons presented at Playwrights Horizons

Set in Fremont, New Hampshire in the early ’70s, The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World is based on the true story of a working class dad who has a vision of rock n’ roll destiny for his three talentless daughters, convinced they’re his family’s one-way ticket out of hardship and obscurity. But the girls have ideas of their own – and as their father’s ambition turns to obsession, the price of familial obligation becomes all too clear.

HAMLET SHUT UP is classic “fringe” theater – very DIY and seat of the pants, irreverent and loose. The acting is broad and high-energy and the show pretty much races through HAMLET at full speed. And yes, there is a shark. Almost hidden in all the hi-jinks and madcap mishegos is a beautiful little puppet show put on by the now-mad Ophelia, where she enacts her drowning. This moment hints at the tragic dimensions of the play and suggests that there is more here than just full-throttle comedy.

I find the Fringe to be generally overwhelming and usually I get frustrated by all the silly schtick, but HAMLET SHUT UP is clever and fun and Fringe at its messy best.

WHAT: “Hamlet Shut Up” at the New York International Fringe Festival

WHEN:
SAT 8/14 @ 8:30pm
MON 8/16 @ 2:30pm
WED 8/18 @ 9:45pm
FRI 8/20 @ 8:15pm
SAT 8/21 @ 2:30pm

WHERE: The First Floor Theatre @ LA MAMA, 74A East 4th St., New York, 10003

TICKETS & INFO: fringenyc.org, 866.468.7619, hamletshutup.com

More info at http://hamletshutup.com/.

________________________________________________________________________

What can you tell us about Jackalope Theatre Company?

We got started almost three years ago me, Gus Menary and Keiser Ahmed took this class in theatre management and the final project was to create a theatre company with a three year plan – and while we were doing it, we realized at the end that we really loved this idea that we had come up with and wanted to give it a shot. So we hooked up with our friend Andrew Swanson and produced one of his plays entitled, “The Last Exodus of American Men” (and that one was only okay). And second of his that we did was called “Moonshiner” and it was something we were really proud of. So the creation of Jackalope was kind of accidental. I don’t think that any of us ever thought that we were going to start a theatre company based on the American mythos, but now that we have…it feels really great and it’s given all of us something to explore that we didn’t even know we were interested in as much as we are.

Have you ever written or adapted a script before?

Nope. So here’s hoping it doesn’t suck.

Why did you choose to adapt Charles Mee?

I don’t know, I’ve always loved Charles Mee. But why do you love Charles Mee? Because he’s magical! And somehow, even though he doesn’t “write” anything, his voice is so strong and speaks to a lot of 20something artists. I did a play of his in Houston called “Full Circle” and that’s what really sparked my interest in him. And I love the idea that you can do whatever you want with his work.

Define “do whatever you want”.

I’ll try…but in a round about way. When I was younger, I loved “alternative” playwrights and theatre, like Brecht and Beckett, but I could never verbalize why. So when I moved to Chicago four years ago and started to find my own voice as an artist, I started to discover why I wanted to do theatre and why it’s important for me to story-tell in this way. This kind of experience is exactly what attracted me to Charles Mee. He gives me a jumping off point while allowing me my own voice.

What did this particular script have that other’s didn’t?

“Under Construction” started because I loved the visual concept and had been stewing with the idea of “ideal” childhoods for a long time. Having reached an age where all of a sudden I came to relate to my family and to my parents in this way that explains a lot of who I am and where I come from. Having this realization that I’m not an angsty teenager anymore and care very deeply about these people I am related to by blood but maybe have nothing else in common with – which was something that was once a problem but is very special now. And for me, this play became about that.

What drew you to create an adaptation?

It started all thematic. The play deals with a found object art work (Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving Dinner) and the text is found text, at least 85% of it. We’ve kept two scenes from the original Mee script but found the majority of the script (in our adaptation) on the internet or books or movies. And then, we started thinking about the brain and memory and how our memories work, in that we don’t remember an event as it happened. We remember the last time we remembered it and contextualize it with who we are now. So, truly, we can’t remember who we really are. We’re pieces. We’re fragments. And like this, our adaptation is created as such. Tiny things becoming big things.

What was the most challenging part of the co-adaptation process (emphasis on the “co”)?

Learning to not treat things as precious.

What do you hope to accomplish in the final product?

I want people to feel good. I want them to leave the theatre and feel good about themselves. I hope that it strikes a chord. I hope that they can relate.

*adaptation by AJ Ware,

For more information on Jackalope Theatre Company go to: http://www.jackalopetheatre.org/

The City of Brotherly Love has long suffered a reputation as, put bluntly, “philthy.” A ride down the antiquated Broad Street Line (token, please) might convince you there’s some truth to the tale—but artistically speaking, the dirt here is fertile.

Headlong Dance Theater, known for its choreographic innovation and elucidations of pop culture, and Pig Iron Theatre Company, category-shrugging makers of “dance-clown-theatre,” are the earliest tillers of the city’s hybrid dance-theater scene. Combined, they’ve premiered over 60 pieces on Philly soil since the mid-’90s, many of which have toured nationally and internationally. Besides teaching and workshop gigs across the country, these works have yielded a healthy crop of recognition for the two companies, including a Bessie for Headlong; two Obies, an Edinburgh Total Theatre Award, and a FOX News jab for Pig Iron; and Pew Fellowships in the Arts for all of the two companies’ co-directors (Amy Smith, Andrew Simonet, and David Brick of Headlong; Quinn Bauriedel, Dan Rothenberg, and Dito Van Reigersberg of Pig Iron).

What do you do with all that rich soil?

Grow gardens, of course: In 2008, Headlong founded Headlong Performance Institute, a fall semester-away program for undergraduate and recently graduated student artists, in collaboration with four other Philadelphia artists (Aaron Cromie; Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey; Headlong’s Dramaturg, Mark Lord; and Pig Iron Co-Director Quinn Bauriedel) and nearby Bryn Mawr College (where Mark Lord is also Professor and Chair of Theater). Housed in South Philly’s Arts Parlor, a former mortuary that’s functioned as a grassroots arts space under dancer-choreographer Lorin Lyle for over a decade, HPI will enter its third year this fall. Meanwhile, in the fall of 2011, the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training will kick off a two-year postgraduate certificate program, followed by the opportunity for a third-year fellowship with the company. The program will be housed in a 19^th-century schoolhouse currently under development by Crane Arts in the city’s Kensington District.

Quinn, who will serve as the school’s director, still remembers Philly when it was grungier—when historic Old City was still just a twinkle in realtors’ eyes, and a new frontier for experimental artists. A young Pig Iron, composed of a group of Swarthmore College alumni, had moved into town following a successful run of an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey at the Edinburgh Fringe. They’d caught wind of Philadelphia’s first, five-day Fringe Festival (13 years later, it’s the renowned, 18-day Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe), and while hanging up posters for their show, “I think I sort of dreamed a memory of being on about Third and Market and seeing a large piece of tumbleweed roll across the street,” says Quinn. “It felt like a good kind of wasteland—like the sky’s the limit.”

Not far from the tumbleweed in question was the studio and home of Amy, David, and Andrew of Headlong, friends from Wesleyan who had been living and working together in Philadelphia since 1993. Quinn remembers recognizing Headlong as “kindred spirits” at a time when, generally speaking, “theater was either very traditional or extremely Fringe-y, with nothing really in between. It felt like there was a big gap.” That gap, it turned out, was one Philly performers and audiences were hungry to see filled.

After moving to Old City from a South Philly studio with no heat, Headlong had started a free weekly class in hopes of drawing in more of those kindred spirits. “We attracted a group of people who took class with us every week,” recalls David Brick, who, at the time, was still also dancing with Richard Bull Dance Theater in New York. “We wanted to use the class as a way to explore our ideas.” Headlong also began performing at Old City’s First Fridays, a monthly, open-studio event (also still going). “We saw that there was this big street festival going on, so we put a sandwich board out and people would pour into the studio,” David explains. “We would do two or three performances a night. And the late show,” which would regularly devolve into an all-night dance party, “was always the most fun.”

To find more time to focus on dancemaking and research between the co-directors’ various day jobs, Headlong had also started their free, month-long Dance Camp in 1995. “People would sleep all over the studio, and we all took turns teaching classes and leading workshops to everyone else,” David remembers. “We cooked meals together and pooled our money for food, and would work our day jobs for about one or two days a week during that time.” As the company evolved, so did Dance Camp—into Dance Theater Camp, which it is still called today, and which has taken various organizational structures over the years, from a grant-funded residency at Earthdance in the Berkshires to a series of short classes with sign-up sheets.

While Headlong and Pig Iron have thrived as not-for-profit collectives in Philadelphia, thanks in large part to the city’s relative lack of commercial pressures, the basis of their work, their training, is all imported—for the most part from Europe. Of Pig Iron’s three co-directors, two received training at the Jacques Lecoq International Theater School in Paris, as have several company members. Amy and Andrew of Headlong studied at the School for New Dance Development in Arnherm, Holland. In a 2008 essay in Dance Insider, just before Headlong Performance Institute came to fruition after years of talking and planning within the community, Amy looked back on her training at NDD:

Andrew and I jokingly and lovingly called our cohorts there ‘the dirt eaters.’ These artists were not concerned with pirouettes and jumps. They wanted supple spines. They wanted to yell about injustice in their native tongues and call it a dance. They wanted to eat dirt on stage and roll around in it.

Amy fondly titled her essay “Dancing With The Dirt Eaters,” but within it, decried the lack of such irreverent, holistic training in the United States. She also lamented the loss of American teachers to such foreign institutions, wondering if “these boundary-blurring artists have often been denied the respect they deserve by pedagogical dance institutions in the United States.” Questioning the separation of dance and theater within university departments in particular, she closed with a challenge:

Come on, university dance programs. [...] You know who you are. We need to be figuring out how to train the next generation of dancers and choreographers right here in the United States. Yes, they need to know how to jump and turn. But they also need to know how to eat dirt.

Headlong’s Institute grew from this challenge and out of the development of its 13-year Strategic Plan. It opened its doors to its first group of sixteen students in 2008. And as far as the program’s evolution to date, HPI students don’t just eat dirt, but also learn to grow their own stuff in it. In addition to training and creating work, students investigate and plan how to make lives as artists, drawing inspiration and insight from Headlong’s self-described role as “artist-citizens” in the Philadelphia community over the past seventeen years.

“Each generation of artists, especially in America, kind of reinvent how they survive,” explains Headlong Co-Director Andrew Simonet, who also created Artists U, a professional development and mentoring program for working artists in Philadelphia. While HPI gives a kind of up-close “tour” of the worlds of its faculty artists, “it’s also an invitation to change it.” Andrew sees HPI’s message as: “Here’s what the house looks like now—so now, you guys can tear it down and make it look different, or put a little addition on the side.” Three years in, the challenge for the artists who built the program, Andrew says, is tied to that of its students, and young artists in our culture in general: “It’s not like becoming a lawyer. You can try to borrow the thinking or the approach, but not the actual steps. There’s a thing about how to pass on a way of thinking without passing on a set of actions to be imitated.”

While many of HPI’s students take their skills learned in Philadelphia back to various home institutions at the semester’s close, Pig Iron’s two-year structure—at times cloistered for development, at times open to the public—will ask its students to truly plant roots here. And for good reason: The school’s stated mission is “to develop the next generations of theatre artists who will change the face of world theatre,” while altering the “character and tone” of the American theatrical landscape. That takes time. Co-Director Dan Rothenberg, who points out that none of Pig Iron’s members are Philly natives, says that “the hope is that people will find like-minded collaborators” in the program, “and make something of their own. I don’t think we expect it all to look like Pig Iron work, but that people will start a process of working and asking questions together.” While he admits that students will come to and leave the program with a variety of goals, Dan would be “pretty excited if ensembles came out of it.”

While HPI welcomes a new round of seventeen artists to Philly this fall, Pig Iron has already run an intensive summer session in preparation for the school’s opening, and the company’s co-directors are busy recruiting students for the program’s pilot phase. Both programs will continue to invite artists from around the country and from within Philadelphia’s community to connect with its students, and both programs are also in the process of securing the ability to host international students.

You might be harder-pressed to find a tumbleweed where artists roam in Philly today, or in the city as a whole: According to recent census data, the city’s population is steadily increasing, and the famed, NYC-based real estate blog Brownstoner has even launched a Philly version, a sign of the (gentrifying) times. And hey, even bona fide urban gardening is on the rise. But while Philly as a city may be cleaning up, the performance scene, it seems, is about to get a lot dirtier.

The 2010 Festival features 363 performances of 31 shows. Among them are several major new Irish productions. Tony Award winner Garry Hynes (Druid will direct Seán O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie for the first time. Rough Magic will present a highly anticipated new version of Phaedra, by Hilary Fannin and Ellen Cranitch, directed by Lynne Parker with live music from some of Ireland’s foremost musicians. Pan Pan will perform the world premiere of the Gavin Quinn-directed The Rehearsal, Playing The Dane, a purgatorial iteration of Shakespeare’s classic. The Gate will present a season of Beckett, Pinter and Mamet; the Abbey will present Frank McGuinness’s new version of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, featuring Alan Rickman and Fiona Shaw; and the Peacock will present Carmel Winters’ B for Baby.

Furthermore, in a program called ReViewed, the Festival, in partnership with Culture Ireland and the Irish Theatre Institute, will revive three highly successful Irish productions: Una Santa Oscura (Playgroup and Ian Wilson in association with Project Arts Centre), Act Without Words II (Company SJ) and The Girl Who Forgot To Sing Badly (The Ark in association with Theatre Lovett).

This year’s Festival also features a major showcase, three years in the making, of contemporary Polish work. With significant assistance from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland, this segment of the programming includes the great Krystian Lupa, who brings his epic,  7.5-hour production Factory 2, which recreates Andy Warhol’s milieu and legendary loft on Manhattan’s 47th Street. The Polski Teatr portion of the Festival also includes productions from two of Lupa’ss disciples: Grzegorz Jarzyna’s hypnotic and moving T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T., inspired by the Pasolini cult film Teorema, and infant terrible Jan Klata’s anarchic The Danton Case, which adapts a renowned Polish play set in the French Revolution and has won a staggering 25 awards worldwide.

Other international shows include the Festival-opening CIRCA (Australia), a breathtaking new creation using acrobatic circus skills integrated with sound, light and projection; the Olivier Award-winning ENRON (UK), directly on the heels of an extended West End run; L’Effet de Serge (Phillippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio, France), charming, hilarious show about the wonder of the simple things in life; the OBIE award-winning American production No Child inspired by Nilaja Sun’s years as a teaching artist in high schools in the Bronx (Barrow Street Theatre/axis: Ballymun); Diciembre (Teatro en el Blanco, Chile) a politically charged, blackly comic, razor sharp family drama from the new shining light of Latin American theater; and The Wonderful World of Hugh Hughes (Hoipolloi, UK), a trilogy of the joyous emerging Welsh artist’s immensely acclaimed shows Floating, Story of a Rabbit and 360.

In another thematic program, the Festival looks at the changing role of the audience in contemporary theater. The centerpiece of this strand is the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed, who will present three immersive theatrical creations: The Smile Off Your Face, wherein one-by-one, each audience member sits in a wheelchair, puts on a blindfold and indulges in his/her imagination, pleasures and fears; the exceedingly intimate Internal, which is performed to just five people each time; and A Game of You, a new show in which seven strangers promise to spend time with the audience and get to know them better than they know themselves. In addition to the Ontroerend Goed shows, Tim Crouch will return to Dublin with The Author (News from Nowhere/A Royal Court Theatre Production), which is performed within the audience and tells the story of a shocking and abusive other play.

Finally, every year the Festival presents a series of talks and other events to that invite audiences to engage more deeply with the Festival programming. A full program of these events will be announced soon.

Of this year’s programming, Artistic Director Loughlin Deegan said “The Festival is delighted to present a significant program of major Irish and international work this year. The scale of brand new Irish work will undoubtedly prove the wealth of talent and vibrancy in Irish theatre; alongside the world’s biggest, and most ambitious international productions from Olivier Award winning sensations to a showcase of contemporary Polish work never presented in Ireland before.”

For complete information visit http://www.dublintheatrefestival.com

SNEAKY NIETZSCHE will open its portal to the public on Saturday evenings from August 21 – September 11, 2010, 9pm-Midnite. SNEAKY NIETZSCHE is an interactive theatrical party and musical experiment set deep in the underbelly of Downtown Los Angeles. The show is co-created by performance artist Sheila Vand and a collective of 25 emerging LA artists. Transforming a 6,000 square foot warehouse into a supernatural urban forest, SNEAKY NIETZSCHE will lead its visitors through an underworld Exploratorium of sound, lights, live music, dance, homemade brews and spirits, costumes and sensual charms. Tickets are $10.

SNEAKY NIETZSCHE strives to create a visceral experience that transcends conventional theatrics and concert displays by awakening the body and distorting the boundaries of imagination. Throughout the evening, hidden creatures encourage exaltation and primitive curiosity by leading visitors through narrative vignettes, environmental explorations, dancing and drinking. Both performers and audience members don handmade masks, blurring the lines of common perception. The evening’s centerpiece is a concept-driven, original live music set composed by Johann Carbajal and performed by a fictional band of real musicians. The haunting, 10-song musical voyage concludes in a giant waltz that visitors are expected to join, followed by a classy celebration that transports visitors back into the reality they came from.

THE CREATORS: Sheila Vand, Johann Carbajal, D’arcy French-Myerson, Alex Gaines, Dorothy Hoover, Alicia Peterson, Emett Casey, Emarie Kohlmoos, Ana Hernandez, Janelle Carbajal, Brit L Manor, Eliza Pastor, Ross Kolton, Darren Rezowalli, Neil Schultz, Justin Coleman, Will Sheehan, Alex Urbom, Ryan Glennan, Ted Jahng, Thomas Bailey, Mike Burrows, Nicholas Monsour, Lesley Fairman, Dago Perez, Grant Harrison, Lou Noble, Laura Taylor, Brianna Carbajal, Vincent Mazza, Star Mendoza, Roger Benford, Kael Sharp, Uncle Sam and maybe you.

SNEAKY NIETZSCHE | Aug 21–Sept 1, Saturdays @ 9pm-Midnite | $10 Tickets
799 Towne Ave, LA, CA 90021 | www.sneakynietzsche.com