“a time of deep research and creativity”

The directors of Scrap Myra Bazell and Madison Cario are driven by their relationship to each other and hope that a marriage between movement, space, sound, spoken language and light can somehow reflect their own marriage - an agreement and sensibility that is challenged by discord as much as it celebrates it own cohesion and harmony.

Tide explores concepts of ecopsychosis; the deterioration of the soul caused by humans’ detachment from the earth. Family scrapbooks, ancestral songs, and contact improvisation contribute to original movement vocabulary that re-sensitizes viewers to their own questioning.

Scrap Performance Group’s new work TIDEwas presented at the 2009 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. And will  be presented at the LaMaMa ETC in NY in June 2010.

TIDE has been created through out the past two years through workshops, residencies and “works in progress” performances with the support of The University of the Arts and The Philadelphia Magic Gardens and Scrap's Generous Board. 

Between the Pages - Three sisters, a winged boy and a lighthouse Scrap Performance Group moves between the pages to illuminate the lives of three sisters whose simple love for each other changes when the lighthouse keeper dies. Once you step through the doors sound dances, light sings, images seep through the walls and the sisters' obsessions bring their fate to an unthinkable end.

Le Foulard Orange was presented by the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in 2005. This cross media installation looks at the way we maintain our balance between joy and sorrow. Within this multi-layered orchestration of movement, sound, light and language are stories performed by thirteen performance artists with an urgent desire to create an experience wherein the audience can feel, for one moment , all that is truly moving. Le Foulard is four concurrent stories: A naked nerve on a train track stretching time, a minuet out of which sexual perversion, revolution and twisted imagination erupt, a girl hanging, writing on walls caged by doubt and a marriage between joy and sorrow.

Blood Line featured six of Philadelphia’s strongest dance artists with text by designer and dramaturge Madison Cario. This work was inspired by the myth of Adriadne’s Thread and was performed at The Live Arts Festival 2003, Lincoln Center Out of Doors in 2004 and Presented by Scrap Performance Group for The Philadelphia Fringe Festival 2004.

This Is Funked Up is a hybrid of post modern movement styles and the early roots Hip Hop. This political journey rides the axis between the voices of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. with input by Black Panther Party’s Hewey Newton and activist Angela Davis. “This Is Funked Up” was commissioned by Dance Celebration at the Annenberg Center of Philadelphia and explores the lyrics and rhythms of soul music of the 60s and 70s. James Brown, Gladys Night and the Pips, Gil Scott-Heron, Chaka Khan and Sly and the Family Stone create the sound scape for this timeless reminder that our struggle is not over.

MELT was premiered at the Rockies, Philadelphia’s Dance Awards, performed at the Painted Bride Arts center and Bryn Mawr College. Danced by John Luna and Ben Wegman, this piece was created to illuminate the disruption to relationships caused by environmental distress.