Performance Group
SCRAP Performance Group is about to mount another production, and if past presentations are any indicator this means we're in for a primal, edgy, intense and wild display of theatrical dance. The collaborative ensemble, headed up by local dancers Myra Bazell, Katharine Livingston and Eric Schoefer, plus technical director Conrad Bender, debuted in November 1995 with performers crafting a surreal urban dreamscape, climbing, dnagling and slinking bout a huge grid-like scaffold. The grid scenario was reprised in a second SCRAP program, but is absent in their upcoming presentation, Side Show .
This one spins off a solo piece called Ballyhoo , a work of Schoefer's
that's been shown several times in Philadelphia and was refined this past
summer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In Ballyhoo , Schoefer
appears in the guise of three characters: a juggler, doubting scientist
and ringmaster. The latter figure leads a flea circus in which the tiny
invisible acts fail and disappear out of a sense of mutiny. In SCRAP's expansion
on Ballyhoo , a host of other performers step in to help save the
day. "It's a crazy mad interaction between a cast of actors in sideshows
and the ringmaster. You don't quite know if we are the figments of his imagination,"
states Bazell. As is usual for a SCRAP production, Side Show has guest performers. Among the vignettes interspersing the flea circus motif are Asimina Chremos as a bird woman in a suspended cage, Billy Ehret creating a performance painting while hovering in a huge clear bubble, Tony Agostinelli leading a group work probing the trickster archetype, and Livingston doing a solo designed to represent a body in dialogue with its motor.
Looks to be an off-the-wall evening of high entertainment. That's what SCRAP is all about. Says Schoefer: "The things we share are a friendship, a common strong physical background and a desire to take dance where it hasn't been before."
Side Show , by SCRAP Performance Group, Oct. 9-12, 8 p.m., Philadelphia Arts Bank, Broad & South Streets, 893-1145.
--Deni Kasrel