June 8–15, 2000
cover story|ultimate summer fun 2000

Labor Days

Kids menu: Madi Distefano is chewing on "family theater" for this year’s Fringe.
For these Fringe artists, summer is one long rehearsal.
by David Warner

The Fringe? Doesn’t Old City’s arts orgy land in the category of Fall, not Summer, Fun?

Well, yes and no. This year’s festival (Sept. 1-16) begins on Labor Day weekend, the very tail end of summer, and Fringe organizers hope the timing will attract new audiences looking for something festive to do. It’s the inauguration of a "not-so-traditional Tradition" for Labor Day, says the Fringe newsletter. "No more burnt weenies and horseshoes with Uncle Stanley."

A total of 115 performing and visual arts proposals were accepted for this year’s Fringe, some coming from as far away as the U.K. Plus, the Fringe commissioned works by several artists, and there’s a still undetermined number who’ll be part of what’s known as the Unfiltered Fringe, producing their work outside the curatorial auspices of the festival.
For all of these artists, summer is prep time, which can mean anything from filmmaking in Old City to learning the moves of The Eight Drunken Immortals (no, that’s not a nickname for the Fringe staff). I caught up with a few local talents to see how they’ll be spending their so-called summer vacations.

"I’m questioning the existence of rest," says Myra Bazell.

No kidding. For Quiescence, her multidisciplinary piece for the Fringe, she’s not only making a dance, she’s making a dance movie. That’s why you may have seen the beautiful buff bald one hauling camera equipment around Old City of late. And why she and her dancers destroyed Brian Dennis’ Radio Cradle installation at Vox Populi last month (it was all part of the movie). She’ll eventually incorporate live music into the piece, which she hopes will be "interestingly site-specific." And even though she lives with Fringe technical director Conrad Bender, she’s not counting on high-tech production values: "According to Conrad, I get squat."

Myra’s also busy putting Tony Lawton through his paces. The chameleonic actor returns to the work of British novelist and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis with an adaptation of Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Though the book is written as a correspondence between two devils, don’t expect Lawton just to stand there reading "Dear Screwtape…." He’s physicalizing the piece with martial arts moves, and there’ll also be intervals of dance performed by Monica Moran and choreographed by Bazell. During his downtime at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, where he’s playing Feste in Twelfth Night and Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons, he’ll be studying up on a kung fu form called The Eight Drunken Immortals, its postures inspired by classical paintings of fat drunken gods. So if you see him stumbling around the grounds of Allentown College looking snockered, he says you shouldn’t assume anything: "That might just be artistry."
Madi Distefano could have been among the locals who did "Penn Shakes" this summer, too. (Besides Lawton, they include Sally Mercer, Grace Gonglewski, Greg Wood and Distefano’s mate, Bill Zielinski.) But she opted to take a key role in 1812 Productions’ upcoming Private Eyes and take some time planning the future of her company, Brat Productions. Brat is literally a Fringe baby: The success of its Eye-95 and 24-hour Bald Soprano at the Philly and NY festivals laid the groundwork for a move into year-round nonprofit status. Now, with a full three-play season ahead, Brat’s using the Fringe as a chance to try "a big experiment… our first family theater show." Max in Hollywood, based on the children’s book by Maira Kalman, follows the adventures of an indie film director who happens to be a dog (played by Brat producing director Greg Gephart). It will be performed outdoors for free, and Distefano promises it will be "tongue in cheek and campy and madcap… very Brat."

Nichole Canuso is traveling down Inner State Thirteen. That’s not a highway; it’s the "inner state of being 13." She and seven other women dancers will be exploring "the transparency of emotions at that age… when you’re learning that you have power and you don’t know what to do with it yet."

A dancer/choreographer with a unique combination of innocence and theatrical savvy (maybe it has something to do with her father being actor/director Joe Canuso), she’ll be showing excerpts in progress from her Fringe-bound Inner State June 16 and 17 at The Parlor as part of a Moxie dance collective showcase. Then in August she’s off to camp: Dance Camp, Headlong Dance Company’s annual retreat, which begins with two weeks in the Massachusetts woods at a rented studio/lodge complex followed by two weeks back in Philly.

Robin Moore is in retreat of sorts, too. He makes his Fringe debut in September with fellow storyteller (and Fringe returnee) Ted Fink in Vietnam: How They Got There, which has already been presented at venues as disparate as Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery and the Jenkintown restaurant Stazi Milano. But right now he’s at home in Spring House, PA, focusing his attention on another project: finishing his latest novel, The Man with the Silver Oar, due next year from Avon/HarperCollins. Moore spends six months of the year storytelling (he’s been at it professionally for 19 years) and six months "making books" (he’s written 14) and finds unexpected parallels between his two creative realms. In Vietnam, for instance, he talks about how a veteran soldier named Billy saved his life during the war; in Oar, a historical fiction about piracy off the Jersey coast in 1713, a Quaker boy is befriended by an old salt on a pirate ship.
Mark Lord, mastermind of Big House plays & spectacles, is known for luring audiences into prison cells and dank basements (1996’s Nothing at Eastern State Penitentiary and Endgame in the 1998 Fringe, both of which this writer acted in). This year he plans to send people on "near-miss history" tours down Old City’s back streets, with multiple guides leading the way in multiple directions ("very Web-ish"), each guide searching for… something. He’s thinking big: He’ll need some 50 to 75 actors, ushers and auxiliary personnel. This weekend he’s meeting in Old City with his core artistic team to scavenge for likely nooks, crannies and plotlines.

Wherever you wander during Fringe 2000, you’re likely to see the handiwork of Dissentia Curatorial Services. Artists Nick Cassway and Chris Wilson, who like to encourage "public interaction with art in unusual venues," hung a show in a U-Haul during one First Friday and commissioned "100 paintings for 100 bathrooms" during last year’s Fringe. Now they’ve come up with the brilliant idea of curating artwork for the Fringe buttons that patrons wear to gain entry to shows. Ten artists were asked to create button-sized artworks — about an inch and a half in diameter — and this week Cassway and Wilson will make the final selections. Among the possible images: a "40" in a paper bag, intricate drawings of insects, and a photo of a nipple (guess where that button gets placed). "We want them to be this year’s hot item," says Cassway, "like Olympic pins." He’ll also be preparing for another big summer event: the Republican National Convention. A member of Nexus, he’s making a slide presentation of work by the gallery’s artists to be projected onto Nexus’ window during the convention, with statistics about how much it costs to stage a show and, he hopes, the subliminal message that "Art is good, Republican people."

This is, of course, only a sample of the pre-Fringe frenzies sure to be burbling up among local, national and international artists in the next few months. We’ll keep you posted.