Uwishunu.com

It’s almost time for the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe. If you’re not familiar with the event, it’s sixteen days (Aug. 29 – Sept. 13) of original and innovative live performances from Philadelphia and around the world. This year’s festival will incorporate the work of almost 200 artists over the course of 16 days of performances, which will be seen by over 45,000 people.

The distinction between the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly fringe is that Live Arts performers are selected and invited to the festival, while Philly Fringe is “unfiltered,” and established artists of all kinds can present their own work, free of a selection process. Most Philly Fringe artists live and work in Philadelphia.

You can experience shows like:

Lights Out (theater), a physical comedy filled with bizarre characters and their zany ideas about the meaning of showbiz success.

THE MeLTING BRiDgE (theater), which uses shadows, object transformations, Mexican wrestling, and Mesoamerican concepts of time to explore the questionable future of life on earth.

The European Lesson (theater), which takes the form of a comedic lecture featuring an American anthropologist and four Europeans, supposedly imported from Slovakia. Through scenes from authentic Slovakian daily life with simultaneous language translation and in-depth anthropological explanations, your desire to visit Europe will be guaranteed to vanish forever.

Everyone, (dance), a playful, warm-blooded work of dance that indulges in the simultaneous wonder and banality of being alive and realizing that you are one among many.

This festival is just the sort of thing that uwishunu can get behind, so we’ll be whetting your appetite with artist profiles leading up to the event. Meanwhile, you can explore the festival’s official site and blog to learn more about the event.

Photo: Mascher Space Cooperative (IN FLUX); image by Steve Weinik