2011 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival Line-up Announced

From September 2 - 17, the annual Philadelphia Live Arts Festival will celebrate its 15th Festival year with 16-days of nonstop groundbreaking performances and wild creativity. The Festival features cutting-edge dance, theater, music, and interdisciplinary works by renowned artists from the U.S. and international contemporary arts scene. A platform for daring, innovative, and highly interdisciplinary artists, the 2011 lineup emphasizes the Festival's continued commitment to the development of new work with 9 World premieres, while also bringing leaders of the contemporary art world to Philadelphia stages with 3 U.S. and 3 Philadelphia premieres.

Alongside artists from Philadelphia and New York, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival will host internationally acclaimed artists from Austria, Belgium, Canada, England, India, and France, making the city an unparalleled place to experience great art from the region and around the world.

"The centerpiece of this year's Festival is a series celebrating intercultural practice, as different worlds and dance traditions meet on the Contemporary Stage," says Producing Artistic Director Nick Stuccio. "The series features the work of Shantala Shivalingappa and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, two dancers not often presented in the U.S. Our programming offers audiences the opportunity to experience the only U.S. engagement of their high-spirited performance Play, alongside the Philadelphia premiere of Namasya which features solo works choreographed expressly for Shivalingappa by dance titans Pina Bausch and Ushio Amagatsu, among others."

"As we move into our 15th year as a performing arts presenter, we're beyond excited to bring the spectacular acrobatic show Traces by Montreal's 7 Fingers to The Merriam Theater stage in our largest presentation to date," continued Stuccio, "while also presenting intimate works of experimental theater, like Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental's WHaLE OPTICS and The Devil and Mister Punch by the UK theater company Improbable."

Live Arts Festival performances take place at venues throughout the city of Philadelphia from the streets of Old City's historic district to the Merriam Theater on Philadelphia's the Avenue of the Arts. Additional spaces include Christ Church Neighborhood House; Arts Bank at The University of the Arts; Suzanne Roberts Theatre, home of Philadelphia Theatre Company; Prince Music Theater; The Wilma Theater; the Zellerbach Theatre at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts; and the Festival's own Live Arts Studio, with more traditional and unusual performance sites to be announced.

Together, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe draw tens of thousands of people who come to be a part of "Festival time" in the city - to see innovative work, meet new people, and interact with over 2,000 artists performing in over 1,200 performances. Founded in 1997 as the Philly Fringe, the Festival, now in its 15th year, has developed into an internationally recognized presenting organization and performing arts destination, garnering critical praise, national grants, and numerous awards.

Tickets to the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival will go on sale beginning in mid-June at www.livearts-fringe.org. A full schedule and tickets for the Philly Fringe, the unfiltered festival where new and established artists of all disciplines produce their own work, will be available in July. Single tickets to Traces, a co-presentation of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, will be available mid-June at www.kimmelcenter.org, by phone at (215) 893-1999, or at the Kimmel Center Box Office, located at Broad and Spruce Streets (open daily 10am to 6pm).

CENTERPIECE SERIES CELEBRATES INTERCULTURAL PRACTICE
The centerpiece series of the 2011 Festival features the U.S. premiere of Play, a duet commissioned by Live Arts, created and performed by celebrated French choreographer Shantala Shivalingappa and Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (in its only U.S. engagement), the Philadelphia premiere of Shivalingappa's contemporary solo Namasya, the multimedia dance-inspired art installation Zon-Mai, and a selection of related film screenings, workshops, and symposia.

Born in Chennai, India and raised in Paris, Shantala Shivalingappa is the child of east and west and a master of Kuchipudi, a classical dance form of South India. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was born in Antwerp, Belgium of a Moroccan father and Flemish mother. The late, great German choreographer Pina Bausch suggested that the two work together. Play is an intercultural dance dialogue, a celebration of aesthetic and form. The performance features a live ensemble and interaction with musicians and other theatrical elements, as Shivalingappa and Larbi discover one another by playing through dance.

Namasya, Sanskrit for "reverence" or "to pay homage", will showcase Shantala Shivalingappa in a solo in four parts, with pieces choreographed by Pina Bausch, Ushio Amagatsu, Shivalingappa and the dancer's mother, the acclaimed choreographer Savitry Nair. Namasya is presented in association with the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts where Shivalingappa will perform a traditional Kuchipudi piece in the Fall.

Zon-Mai, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival's first-ever large-scale visual art presentation is an installation in motion by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Gilles Delmas. Zon-Mai will be erected during the Festival in a Philadelphia warehouse. At the crossroads between architecture, art, and dance, Zon-Mai - which translates to "at home, elsewhere" - is a giant house of screens featuring projections of 21 dancers performing inside their own bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, and living rooms around the world.

MULTIDISCIPLINARY
The Live Arts Festival's largest presentation to date is the Philadelphia premiere of Traces, by the high-energy urban acrobatic troupe 7 Fingers, at the 1,842-seat Merriam Theater, in a co-presentation with the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts. The Montreal-based contemporary circus troupe threads a narrative through circus arts by integrating every mode of expression into performances, from theater, music, song, dance, speech, and high-risk acrobatics.

In a co-presentation with bowerbird, the Festival will present the U.S. premiere of French choreographer Xavier Le Roy's expressive multi-disciplinary work More Mouvements für Lachenmann based on the music of contemporary German composer Helmut Lachenmann. The performance features members of the Austrian new music ensemble Klangforum Wien in a hybrid musician-dancer role, performing both the music and the physical and visual action of "sound making" as Le Roy stages the relationships between what can be heard, seen, gesticulated, moved, and imagined around the bodies of musicians and their music.

The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival will continue to investigate alternative performance spaces with a theatrical experience that begins entirely online. New Paradise Laboratories (FREEDOM CLUB, in collaboration with Riot Group, '10; FATEBOOK, '09; BATCH, '07) will present Act 1 of Extremely Public Displays of Privacy, a World premiere exploring online public life, which will unfold during the Festival, blurring the lines between real-world and online experiences.

DANCE
The 2011 Live Arts Festival brings world-class contemporary dance to Philadelphia. Acclaimed American choreographer John Jasperse will offer the World premiere of the new evening length work Canyon, currently in development.

Austria's Cie. Willi Dorner returns to the Live Arts Festival for the World premiere of a new untitled participatory work commissioned by Live Arts and made possible through support from PNC Arts Alive. The creator of above under inbetween ('09) and the wildly popular bodies in urban spaces ('08) will bring a free outdoor performance to the Old City neighborhood of Philadelphia. Guided by a map, audiences will choose their own path, following the movements of fifteen Philadelphia dancers, amidst a cast of 50 pedestrians involved in the site-specific performance.

The site-specific Red Rovers by the imaginative Philadelphia-based Headlong Dance Theater (More, '09; Cell, '07; Hotel Pool, '04), in collaboration with visual artist Chris Doyle, explores the lives of robots on Mars and the scientists who created them. In the participatory performance, the audience will interact with scientists of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Radio Show, a Philadelphia premiere, by New York-based choreographer Kyle Abraham is a dance narrative investigating the effects of the abrupt discontinuation of a black radio station on a community and the lingering impact of Alzheimer's and aphasia on a family. Performed by Abraham.In.Motion, the 2010 Bessie Award-winning dance evokes memory and a passion for what is lost, mixing an eclectic score of classical soul and hip-hop with contemporary classical compositions. The Radio Show is presented in association with the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

THEATER
2011 marks another important year for innovative contemporary theater at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Actors, musicians, puppeteers, and video artists are collaborating across disciplines to create some of their most imaginative and provocative work to-date.

The centerpiece theater work of the Live Arts Festival is the World premiere of the darkly funny The Devil and Mister Punch by London's Improbable, the company behind the international smash-hit Shockheaded Peter. This co-commission of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and the Walker Arts Center is inspired by the iconic and perversely violent English puppet show Punch and Judy, the highly visual production features a company of actors, musicians, and wooden and papier mâché players, exploring the familiar tale of the mischievous Punch, while simultaneously leading the audience on an unexpected detour into the complex and dark world of Punch's manipulators, the puppeteers themselves.

The 2011 theater lineup features two very different takes on Shakespearean classics. In a World premiere production, Festival veterans Pig Iron Theatre Company (Welcome to Yuba City, '09; Isabella, '07) present an exuberant staging of Twelfth Night. Dueling musicians, wine-drenched debauchery, gender confusion, erotic misunderstandings, and practical jokes are mixed into a new visual and aural approach to Shakespeare. With a gypsy-rock score by Rosie Langabeer (Cankerblossom, '10), Twelfth Night welcomes a cast of familiar Pig Iron faces (Sarah Sanford, James Sugg, Alex Torra, and Isabella's Birgit Huppuch) and the Philadelphia favorite, Barrymore Award-winning actor Scott Greer (making his company debut).

Swim Pony Performing Arts' Lady M, directed by Live Arts Brewery Fellow Adrienne Mackey in a World premiere, employs the vocal acrobatics of Roy Hart to place a 180º spin on the story of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Using extreme sound and the play's supernatural underbelly to turn this classic story on its head. Lady M stars veteran actress Catharine Slusar as the violent heroine Lady Macbeth, alongside an all-female chorus of ten Philadelphia actors.

The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival continues to expand and enhance its mission to support the development of new work by local artists. In early 2011, the Festival announced the launch of a new Production Residency program providing expanded production resources to artists moving works-in-progress from the studio toward full-scale Live Arts Festival productions. Geoff Sobelle and Thaddeus Phillips, both Philadelphia-based artists and long-time Live Arts Festival participants, were named as the first two Production Residency artists. The results from the series include the World premiere Live Arts Festival presentations of Elephant Room and WHaLE OPTICS.

In the fantastical Elephant Room, illusionists Dennis Diamond, Louie Magic and Darryl Hannah invite audiences into a most secret society, a realm where mind and sense part ways. The trio promises to entertain, distract, confuse, confound, amaze and mystify in a World premiere production directed by Paul Lazar and written by Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle (Amnesia Curiosa, '06; all wear bowlers, '03), with Steve Cuiffo.

An epic homage to exploration and adventure, Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental's WHaLE OPTICS, directed by Thaddeus Phillips (¡El Conquistador!, '10; Flamingo/Winnebago, '07), takes audiences on a journey through big city libraries to the Colombian Pacific and back, and to the white ice of Antarctica in an examination of worldwide communication systems and dinner at Applebee's.

FEASTIVAL
The Second Annual FEASTIVAL, a benefit for the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe, will be held on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 from 6 - 9 p.m. (VIP hour at 5 p.m.) at a waterfront warehouse located on Pier 9, 121 N Columbus Boulevard in Philadelphia. The inaugural event last year was a sold-out, culinary and artistic success, raising $235,000 for the Festival.

The 2011 FEASTIVAL will feature a culinary feast from the city's top chefs, including FEASTIVAL presenters Audrey Claire Taichman, Michael Solomonov, and Stephen Starr, live performances by Festival artists, and silent and live auctions. The event will also honor Former Governor Ed Rendell for his pivotal role in supporting Philadelphia's arts scene, as well as his significant city and statewide contributions. All FEASTIVAL proceeds benefit the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe. Tickets will go on sale this summer. Visit www.phillyfeastival.com for announcements, invitations, and other updates.

PROGRAM INFO/TICKETS
The Philadelphia Live Arts and Philly Fringe Festival runs from September 2 - 17, 2011. Tickets for most shows are priced between $10 and $30. Some shows are free. Students and Festival goers 25 and younger pay $15 for Live Arts Festival tickets and receive $5 off Philly Fringe tickets which are priced above $10. Discounted tickets are available to Festival Members. Festival Members save 20% on all shows plus 10% at top Philadelphia restaurants. A Festival All-Access Pass ($400 for a one-person pass, or $800 for a two-person pass) grants admission to every Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe show, 20% for up to 3 additional tickets per performance, and ticket exchange service up to 48 hours prior to show time. Groups of 10+ save 25%.

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival tickets will be available for online purchase beginning in mid-June at www.livearts-fringe.org, or after Monday, August 22 for phone and walk-up sales at the Box Office at (215) 413-1318. Philly Fringe tickets will go on sale online in July. The 2011 Festival Box Office will be located at the Prince Music Theater at 1412 Chestnut Street. The Festival Guide, which includes descriptions of each performance, in addition to dates, times, locations, and other Festival information, will be widely available throughout the city beginning the first week of August. Tickets to Traces, a co-presentation of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts will be available mid-June at www.kimmelcenter.org.

A full schedule of additional festival events, performance dates, times, and locations will be announced soon. Visit www.livearts-fringe.org for up-to-date Festival announcements.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival features performances by renowned contemporary performing artists from the U.S. and around the world who are selected and invited to the Festival by Producing Director, Nick Stuccio. The Philly Fringe is an unfiltered Festival, where new and established artists of all kinds present their own work, free of a selection process. Together, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe establish Philadelphia as a city bursting with wild creativity, bringing audiences sixteen days of the most stimulating, provocative new art being created in Philadelphia, across the U.S., and around the world.

PNC Arts Alive is the 2011 Presenting Sponsor of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe.

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