We Have Gone As Far As We Can Together is an expansive sonic conversation inspired by the sonic and spiritual resonance of artists like Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra; traditions that hold music in community like Vedic kirtan and Sufi kourel; collective compositional practices from visionary composers like Butch Morris and Pauline Oliveros.

EPSG:4326

We Have Gone As Far As We Can Together

FringeArts

“ Extraordinary, Suspenseful, Mesmerizing” – “Shterna and the Lost Voice” transports audiences into the rich world of Yiddish folklore. This immersive storytelling production follows Shterna on an epic hero’s journey, accompanied by live original klezmer music and an exquisite papercut crankie.

Shterna and the Lost Voice: A New Yiddish Folktale

Studio 34 Yoga Healing Arts

Production: Entwined Elysium showcases shibari, the Japanese art of rope bondage, through mesmerizing performances that blend intricate rope techniques with graceful movement. These artistic displays emphasize the beauty of human connection, trust, and vulnerability, transforming rope into a medium for artistic expression and emotional storytelling. Each performance weaves together elements of tradition, creativity, and intimacy, creating a captivating and serene atmosphere for the audience.

Entwined Elysium: Anansi the Spider (Live Shibari Performance)

The Nest

From a pit of welled sadness and anger, 'Sanctuary' delves into the story of what it means to grapple with the pain that resides in systemic dysfunction. It chronicles the process of finding comfort in the bodily self after traumas, tragedies, and struggles a person experiences in dysfunctional family systems.

Sanctuary

CHI Movement Arts Dance Center

We've been waiting for this special moment, and we are all finally together. But we've waited too long to face you. You're not ready. Are we? We need you to come with us. We can't do it without you. We need you to believe it. What do you say? FUZZY BULLDOZER is a selves portrait in an evening-length experimental dance. It is (im)patiently waiting, optimistic, cushily pushing because it wants what it wants. And it wants you to be part of that, so we ask without asking; we wile with smiles. It's not nearly as fun alone. In coming together, we collectively have the opportunity to consider our own actions, reactions, and associations to these asks for help when we don't need it and help when we do. But maybe it's too much.

Fuzzy Bulldozer

Christ Church

Harrell is known for his ability to deconstruct and reimagine dance forms ranging from voguing and runway to postmodern dance and Butoh, creating a singular style infused with humor and poignancy. Returning to FringeArts, Harrell performs alongside six members of his company, the Zürich Dance Ensemble. With precise movements and deep feelings, the dancers find resonances between Michell’s lyrical tracks and Jarrett’s gospel- fused improvisations. At turns statuesque
and playful, the international cast delivers a moving exploration of human vulnerability.

The Koln Concert

Far Edge of Blue began as an improvisational practice using 45 body landmarks called The Blue Road. The title references Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. In his travelogue, Least Heat Moon navigates the backroads of America in his converted camper van. On old atlases, central highways were demarcated in red, less convenient highways colored blue. Stone Depot’s navigation of less obvious pathways through the body mirrors Least Heat Moon’s purposeful navigation of less obvious but more rewarding paths through America. Support from a Stockton University Research Grant allowed Stone Depot to work with filmmaker Tori Lawrence on film studies of the Blue Road score resulting in a 16mm dance short A Place Called Lost. They continued their Blue Road investigations as artists-in-residence at the Subcircle Residency space in Biddeford, Maine. This culminating iteration, Far Edge of Blue, features music created for the work by experimental composer Benoit Pioulard.

Far Edge of Blue

Crane Arts

Brother Love and Sister Alice are here to save souls, sing songs, and raise money for Brother Love's 501c3. In this bawdy tent revival satire, you're given a tambourine at the door and asked to clap along as Brother Love and Sister Alice sing and preach about the sexiness of Jesus, the spiritual power of narcotics, and the importance of Christian-themed adult entertainment. They'll be miracles, they'll be healings, and of course they'll be donations because Brother Love needs that new Learjet. A sellout show at the Rogue Festival and the Edmonton Fringe Festival, come on out and get saved!

Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour

The 1990s saw a future that was ahead of time. A highspeed world that was driven by innovation and forward progress; all problems were solved and pieces of history floated in front of a white background ready for us to dissect. Meanwhile, tech companies were developing ways to monetize the free spaces of our minds, inventing things like infinite scroll, and games within ads within ads. Inspired by utopian scholastic design, house dance, and surveillance capitalism, FutureJam '94 asks us "wait, what was I just doing?" and pulses and grooves its way back to a place of mind wandering, connection, and imagination.

FutureJam ’94

Urban Movement Arts

Aperture: an opening or gap, the space through which light passes. Where inspiration strikes. Join Tangle's acrobats in the urban forest at Circus Forge, Germantown's newest trapezium, for an evening of aerial circus-theater and topsy-turvy storytelling that's as intimate as a shared dream.

Aperture

Circus Forge

Two dancers, two dances: Far Edge of Blue navigates less obvious but potentially more rewarding pathways through the body; That's Us is a moving celebration of the music of Arthur Russell.

Hacia la luz is a dance journey into the many worlds I have inhabited. This work is the culmination of an intensive exploration into my Andean ancestry through extensive travels and studies with gifted Shamans coupled with my lifelong passion and commitment to my beloved flamenco.

Hacia La Luz- (Towards The Light)

Rittenhouse Filmworks

Of Fiercer Origins: An Operatic Double-Bill features the Philadelphia Premiere of A PREGNANT PAUSE, the opera & further reflection through song: Two World Premiere songs set to poems by Adrienne Rich, and a set of songs from Libby Larsen's The Birth Project. Music for A PREGNANT PAUSE is by Garth Baxter, with Libretto by Alize Francheska Rozsnyai. Music for "What Is Possible” is written by Philly-based Cerulan S. Payne-Passmore, and “Heroines” is by LA-based composer Tori Lavan. Both works are from Adrienne Rich's "A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far."

Of Fiercer Origins: An Operatic Double-Bill

MacGuffin Theatre and Film Company

Fleabag is a play about one woman's exploration with grief and how she uses her sexuality to navigate her way through the world after the death of her mother, and then her friend Boo. Her morals come into question when the true cause of Boo's death is revealed. This is an adaptation of the one-woman Pheobe Waller-Bridge play of the same name. 

Fleabag

Philly Fringe favorite Jennifer Blaine, known for her hysterical characters & transformational solo shows, breaks the 4th wall to boost y/our CREATIVITY. Through topical stand-up, interactive fun & coaching -- she partners w/ the audience to “keep this show funny & touching throughout.” TimeOut NY

Getting Creative with Jennifer Blaine

Mister John's Music

An immersive, interactive dating social experiment for the sake of the future's futur!e("loop(swipe right))"FIND[libido]69((("til death d7({heavy pett//big natu("select)){love/"))COMEDY[[laugh,laugh]]

Love Lab

Queen Memorial Building Studios

WITS is a musical that explores the anxieties of two groups of Black folks at the cusp of adulthood, segregated from one another along class lines. As their disquiet reaches a fever pitch brought on by their encounters with racial subjugation and classism, they are offered an escape from the crippling limitations of society: an opportunity to travel the stars with an extraterrestrial being. This dynamic, dance-driven narrative invites audiences to bear witness to a depth of soul and spirit that characterizes so many Black people in vibrant communities of color. The fears, hopes, and dreams of these young Black artists soar through an infectious, otherworldly pop score, revealing a tomorrow of possibility and promise, their futures written in the stars.

WITS

Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist classic premiered in Paris in May 1944, near the World War II apex of Germany's occupation. This spring, off-off-Broadway veteran Alice Camarota realized her longtime dream of directing the play, with a successful two-week run at The NuBox in Hell's Kitchen, NY City. Now, the same cast and creative team again bring the play to life for Philly Fringe at Yellow Bicycle Theater, across the street from Love Park in the very heart of Philadelphia.

No Exit

Yellow Bicycle Theater

Step into a time-bending, emotionally charged, and humor-laced theater experience with *Where Sunflowers Dance*. In the year 2074, Grandaddy Malik, a crotchety old gay painter, writer, and retired professor, finds himself unexpectedly pulled back to present-day Philadelphia. His mission? To confront some of his deepest regrets, particularly the irreparable rift with his parents after he came out through his first collection of published poems.

Where Sunflowers Dance

Community Education Center (CEC)

Every night Laura goes to bed and dreams of a beautiful woman crawling into her bedroom. When Carmilla arrives on her doorstep after a freak accident, Laura and her Father uncover the truth about the intoxicating stranger.

Carmilla: A Dance with Death

The Drake

After award-winning runs in the Nordic Fringe Circuit, "Do You See What I Hear?" is returning to tour in 2024! A dramatic conversation between music and spoken word, hailed as "Incredibly modern and inventive" by Edinburgh Guide (Edinburgh Fringe 2018) and “The reason festivals like ours exist” by the Atlanta Fringe Board (2022). Internationally acclaimed composer James Wright Glasgow performs the music he has composed for the new poems of Mario Moroni (winner of the Lorenzo Montano Poetry Prize) as Moroni recites his works. “Do You See What I Hear?” has been performed at festivals in Brazil, Italy, London, Scotland, Iceland, Sweden, and in major cities across the United States. The poetry is atmospheric and immersive, and the music is haunting and beautiful. The music is performed on an electric cello with an adjoined pocket-sized drum synthesizer and ranges from a modern take on orchestral impressionism to experimental usage of a looping pedal, creating a dynamic back and forth with Moroni's words. In addition to video images generated live by the music, the production features new methods of graphical musical notation based on recursive algorithms and the symbol language Blissym, mimicking themes of Moroni's works, dancing between the rational and irrational.

Do You See What I Hear?

Philly PACK

The Trash Somms are drinking tea at the garbage dump at the end of the universe when they happen upon a piece of trash that smells like possibility. Could this be a timeline where there is still hope to change hearts and minds, and transform perceptions of trash to prevent the world’s decay? Equipped only with a trash cart/miniature laboratory/hybrid rocket vehicle, these determined drag clowns Excess and Sir will enroll the audience to donate their so-called trash, play in the trash orchestra, and perhaps even join the secret society of timeline interventionists. As the Trash Sommeliers, Excess and Sir are Victorian era alchemists, inter-dimensional activists, hapless bureaucrats, and wise fools.

The Trash Sommeliers

The MAAS Building

In 'Island,' the Cherry Street Pier serves as both backdrop and participant in a public performance. Dancers make permeable the boundary between observer and performer, embodying the spontaneity of their environment. An immersive interplay between architecture and movement infuses the mundane with the extraordinary, inviting audiences to witness the beauty of our everyday spaces and the social and biological impact of them. With human form as a living bridge between constructed realms of urban landscapes and the evocations of our natural world, this work underscores built architecture as both immersive art spaces and interlopers of nature. ‘Island’ moves us into a state of reciprocity and fertilization, offering the dance to the earth all the while moving from within the paradox of destruction and creation. Through movement, dancers engage with a range of Philadelphia architecture as a catalyst for generating and building danced connections with one another. Likewise, artists source the natural occurring designs and geometry of water, plants, root systems, and soil, connecting built and natural landscapes to the nuanced construction of human relationship.

Island

Cherry Street Pier

The Zoe Dixon Show is a late-night show hosted by the dynamic Zoe Dixon. Zoe kicks off the night with a comedy monologue and some interactive crowd work before the featured comedian takes center stage for a set, bringing their unique humor to the audience. After that, Zoe sits down for what is sure to be a hilariously engaging interview with the comedian. Don't miss out on this amazing blend of stand-up comedy, audience interaction and conversation.

The Zoe Dixon Show

Sawubona Creativity Project

Free Range is a monthly concert series on the last Thursday of each month. This series is curated by guitarist and composer, Eric McGarry. Throughout the year, Free Range presents a wide variety of music and artists, across genres and styles. Free Range is made possible with assistance from Urban Movement Arts, Philly Music Factory, Love City Brewing, and The First Unitarian Church.

Free Range

First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia

Composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Varek follow up on their acclaimed 2016 world premiere Breaking the Waves. The Listeners examines the lengths to which we, as Americans, are willing to go to find a sense of place and purpose, and the ways in which charming leaders can exploit these needs to their own ends.

The Listeners

Academy of Music

Desert Turtle is a multimedia solo performance piece that looks at ideas of shelter, landscapes, and migration, drawing from family history, voice, and geology. Mitsu's mother arrived from the wet and dense city of Yokohama, Japan, to the vast and dry Mojave desert. She related to the turtles she found in the landscape, hiding in their shells and traveling with their home on their back. In Japan, a turtle was a symbol of longevity, and in the expanse of the Mojave desert, she felt a sense of infiniteness. This piece indulges in the beauty of the landscape but also acknowledges its complex history. Additionally, the work parallels Mitsu's mother migrating to the desert, as Mitsu herself becomes a mother in the desert. The piece interweaves music, dance, video, and non-linear storytelling.

Desert Turtle

The album series focuses on highlighting and enjoying the music artists so carefully create for us. But the act of listening to one album and appreciating the story and curation has been lost. This series will highlight a new album every show. Each show will run through one album from beginning to end without interuption as you take part in an experience full of music and dance. 

The Album Series: Dreamland

Prism Arts Philadelphia

In a free showing TRILATERAL Exchange Artists will show a sampling of their work. TAMARA ZSÓFIA VADAS from Budapest, SILVIA CHERNEVA from Sofia and CHRISTINA GESUALDI and GABRIELLE REVLOCK from Philadelphia. Peer artists' demonstrate their personal creative styles, subtle, elusive, direct and astute....

TRILATERAL Dance Exchange

Born in Russia in 1891, Sami Silverstein joined a wave of turn-of-the-century immigrants who came to America seeking a better life. Growing up in Brooklyn, he took an interest in mechanics and became a test pilot during the early days of aviation. After a near-death experience, he returned to his love of building bicycles which eventually landed him on a vaudeville stage as Sam Barton of the Barton Bros. act. Marriage, family and an international career all come careening towards a spectacular yet tragic ending as he dies backstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York on the eve of World War II.

My Uncle Sam

unbearable lightness is a series of reflections and a sonic love letter to the lightness of being alive. It begins as an exploration of breath with a lightweight object: a latex balloon. As the balloon gives shape to breath, playful opportunities emerge for breath to give shape to the body and for the body to find its dance.

unbearable lightness

William Morris Burrison is a three time Pennsylvania Arts Council fellowship recipient for playwriting. Burrison has worked as a community newspaper journalist for the University City Review and its Center City "Free Press" edition. His poetry has been published in the Overbrook Poets "MORE VOICES IN THE STREAM, " Volume II. He is still working on a short story collection, unpublished, entitled "IN UNIVERSITY CITY."

The Freud Trilogy

University of Pennsylvania

At the Classical Open Mic Matinee, we begin with some incredible professional musicians as guest artists, and then anyone can get up and perform up to 5 min of classical music. Pianist provided, no need to sign up. You never know what you'll see at the Classical Open Mic Matinee! Come join the fun!

Classical Open Mic Matinee

The Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion

An immersive occasion in which sensuous DJed and live music, scents, and colorful flags shape a sensorial experience in which guests can interact, dance, and simply co-exist with the woods and creek. The environment heightens sensory perception and in turn responds to the energy of the guests. The piece offers a re-weaving of community, as part of a search for new ways of being with each other and the natural world that sustains us.

Reverie/Revelry

Hidden Creek Community Center

After YES is a group performance experiment. After YES foregrounds the individual dancer’s desire as a product and a force.  After YES questions how community is created in the present moment, and asks ‘what is togetherness?’. After YES relieves the dancer of the responsibility of making sense, while demanding her complete attention and embodied sensitivity. After YES is an improvisational score, plus framing elements like costumes, sound, set, entrances, exits etc... After YES (almost) never changes, but the framing elements do. After YES reads Foucault’s disciplined body, through André Lepecki’s body as archive, in order to arrive at José Munoz’s world building. After YES is a practice that reveals itself as a practice as it gets deeper over time. After YES excavates meaning as a process. After YES is a rejection of some of the improvisational ideas that have been normalized in western experimental dance (prediction, justification, latent visions of what is good, telegraphing complicity) in order to dive deeper into others of these ideas (desire, training, the present moment, saying YES). After YES removes success and failure but also wonders ‘why is this a show?’. After YES is sort of about the apocalypse. After YES wants to help. After YES invites dancers and audience to become more human but also more-than-human. 

After YES

This ‘dramedic’ one-person show explores the grief, wisdom, and humor of rejection through sketches, monologues, parody, and characters. Inspired by the works of comedic geniuses like Mike Birbiglia, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Abbi Jacobson, and Amy Poehler, “okay, bye!” covers romantic heartbreak, bad friends, therapists who’ve ghosted, an exploration of gender identity and sexuality, and one irritated cat. In a show that’s equal parts clever comedy and sincere search for meaning, Kaila asks themself: “Who am I really, and what am I looking for?”

okay, bye!

The Painted Mug Cafe

Being Jewish right now is really hard and complicated. Being queer is also really hard and complicated. Mix a little Jew and a little bisexual together and infuse for 32 years in the melting pot of Philadelphia and you get a lot of captivating stories. So why not sing about them?

Bluebird: A Cabaret

WORKINONIT is one of UMA's signature performance series, entering its 6th year of operation. WORKINONIT unites dancemakers and performers of all levels. There are pieces presented by local professionals, pieces choreographed onto students and pieces made by emerging artists. It is a street dance focused dance salon. Expect more than just performance. Since UMA is a hub for street danc culture, the party is just as critical as the performance. Audience members are invited to groove and celebrate with the performers in between performance sets. The dance ciphers (i.e. freestyle circles) are often a breathtaking spectacle in their own right. We invite you to witness and share with the UMA community in the Philadelphia Fringe edition of WORKINONIT.

Workinonit

Each show starts with taking an audience suggestion based on the month’s theme to inspire a simple, grounded scene. Themes emerge that are explored, pulled apart, and twisted around as the show ramps up into near-frenzied fast-paced scenes barreling to the end.

Keystone Improv

An evening of contemporary dance presented by Mijkalena Smith (Philadelphia), Jessica Warchal-King/JCWK Dance Lab (Reading), Karen Fox/Bella Deluxe Entertainment (Bethlehem), and Malcolm Shute/Human Landscape Dance (Washington DC). Our work explores opposing forces, social systems, nature, grief, and how those forces tear us apart, but sometimes reveal hidden strengths. In “Curtains in the Wind,” Malcolm Shute and Katie Sopoci Drake whip, sway, and twist in a storm. “Burden of Two Souls,” by Mijkalena Smith, depicts an alternately supportive and toxic intimacy. In Fox’s “Voices of the Mer,” mermaids navigate the land, voicing ancient wisdom. Warchal-King’s “Eroded” explores how grief impacts the body: wind and water tearing like sharp claws. In “It’s Complicated,” Shute and Alexander Short are drawn together and drawn apart, depicting love at a certain age. When we ride the timeless wave of circumstance, our tears swell the ocean.

Tears in the Waves

Aqua Connection is a 60 minute mixed media production that uses silk, rope, net, trapeze, and modern dance to explore a symbolic connection between humans and water. Once the artists finish, an open dialogue with the audience will explore exactly how we interact with the most important resource on our planet. The intention is to bring attention, inquiry and awe to the community, as we share emotions & thoughts linked to the duality of our experience and wellbeing with nature as a whole.

AQUA Connection

Circadium - School of Contemporary Circus

This rarely staged one-act monodrama for soprano follows The Woman, agitated and disoriented, searching for her lover in an eerily dense wood. Schoenberg’s chilling psychological drama aims “to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement.” Erwartung is a pinnacle of modernism and an early example of Schoenberg’s use of expressionism in music. Like many of his own expressionist paintings, he layers notes to create a lush orchestration. Marie Pappenheim’s libretto is void of typical plot devices and instead the drama is expressed through The Woman’s inner turmoil. This stream of consciousness style is reflected in the athematic score. As The Woman’s mental state quickly dissolves, the audience begins to question her reliability as a narrator and are left in suspense with ultimately more questions than answers.

Liberty City Arts Presents – Erwartung by Arnold Schoenberg

Crane Old School

THE DICS ARE MISSING! All of the private eyes have disappeared, in SMOOTH, Fringie Award Winner Dan Kitrosser's new queer musical send-up (and take down) of the Film Noir. Mildred Von Der Fulpuss is nervous but hiding something when she knocks on the door of the last private dic in the seedy neighborhood of Skidmarcke to try and track down her husband. But you see, PI WIlly Blough hasn't taken a case in years (his shins hurt!), but there's something about Miss Von Der Fulpuss that pulls back him in, down into the underbelly of Skidmarcke, to find out where all the dics went. Come see last year's Fringie Winner for Best Cabaret Dan Kitrosser as he inhabits all of the roles in this mystery that will keep your head spinning, as he puts the ME in FemME fatale.

SMOOTH, a solo queer noir musical, bitch

Did you know there was a Shaker community led by a free Black woman in Philadelphia in 1859? Folding his research of Shakers into this history, Wilson gives his perspective on what the community of Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson may have looked like.

POWER

Thrumming drums and circuit-drench strings swirl with howling winds. A journey through immersive, experimental soundscapes with electronic augmentation, The Future Ghosts Ensemble will premiere "My Skin Is Not My Own" by Joshua Marquez in addition to a cacophony of collaborative improvisations.

Future Ghosts Ensemble

Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Atonement (ELCA)

UNDERESTIMATED is a choreographed dance piece that encompasses the strength, power, diligence, and confidence of a woman. Throughout the production, stories of women adversity are depicted. These stories are reflective of the specific emotions felt when a woman or those around her face confrontation. The dancers represent this through athletic ability, movement, and emotion.

Underestimated

Performance Garage

(((pomegranate))) is a dance ritual and performance by choreographer sarah ingel + collaborators. Exploring contemporary rituals of care and mourning and of assembly and aliveness through an emotionally virtuosic choreographed ceremony. In this queer investigation of theatricality, alchemy, and grief, themes of memory + mythology, anatomy + architecture, capitalism + consumption intertwine with vibrant and symbolic fruits: mangos, grapefruits, watermelons... pomegranate: 1. a fruit the size of the heart 2. the etymological root for the word grenade With choreographed + improvised movement set to a text/music soundscape (a new collaboration with composer Dylan Gilbert), this performance serves as an invitation to dive deep into our own mythologies of grief. A mess of fruit, flowers, dance and dirt, together, we create an altar, a table, a memory, a ritual to hold us as we process complexities of loss and love. The action of cutting into a pomegranate is bloody and requires a delicate hand if you are to yield any fruit. The ritual demands urgency towards care. This duet nourishes, even inside the grief and gratitude that comes with cutting and consuming. What are the residues, the traces, the stains left behind as we are left bereft? Through our materializations and manifestations of assembly and aliveness, whether dance, performance, funeral, or feast: Can we consider how we might be forever changed by this encounter? Our grief knows no bounds, yet ritual requires endurance and endurance requires ritual.

pomegranate

Teresa – a former Catholic turned atheist – digs for the truth of her estranged father's last days by playing a game of cat and mouse with the priest who took her father's final confession. Father Daniel's unconventional approach to church ideology expands Teresa's perspective just as her irreverence for church doctrine shakes his foundation. An improbable, seductive, and altogether forbidden romance blossoms as the two heal each other's wounds and challenge each other's conceptions of faith, love, and forgiveness. Prepare yourself for a hilarious and heartbreaking grapple with orthodoxy, religion, patriarchy, and, ultimately, hope.

Without God As My Lover

Who pays the price when men at the top declare war? Humble Materials presents a new adaptation of Erich M. Remarque's 1928 novel. Set to original music, the play reframes Remarque's central narrator to introduce five new characters who each have their own side of this classic story.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Based on author Evie Klein's childhood around her clown brother, A Circus in Two Acts looks at the greatest show on earth through the lives of its performers. This surrealist look under the big top will ask audiences when performing stops and ends. The two one acts can be described as follows.

A Circus in Two Acts

St Mary's Church, Hamilton Village

Holland Andrews is a vocalist, composer, producer, and performer whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build cathartic and dissonant soundscapes. In a two-night engagement at Solar Myth, they will perform their original compositions for voice, clarinet, and electronics.

Holland Andrews

Solar Myth

Tina Bararian, Avery Gerhardt, and Sacha Vega collectively devised and perform PINCH. Invested in probing their learnings around emergency responses, the performers turned to and pushed back against safety drills enacted at corporate, educational, and governmental levels. When does choreography enter or avoid the audacious hustle of embodying readiness? Out of their friction emerged this evening-length piece, which contains improvisational scores, safety simulations, piles of bodies, wigs, and warnings to tell a tale of shock and awe.

PINCH

Dark & Sweet is a showcase that highlights Black women in comedy! Dark & Sweet gives black women a chance to make some extra cash while pursuing their performance dreams. Get your tickets now for an outrages night of comedy, you won't want to miss!

Dark & Sweet

In 1985, MTV played the hottest music videos in Power Rotation—once an hour, day and night. Viewers were "obsessed" with Bill Wadhams of the synth-pop band, Animotion as he sang, who do you want me to be, to make you sleep with me, dressed in a Roman warrior’s breastplate and helmet in front of the Hollywood sign. Up In The Air traces one man's musical journey as he rockets to international fame and seeks to find his true voice, family, redemption, and home.

Up In The Air

Opera on Tap Philadelphia is proud to present Opera Shots, a collection of four short, one-act operas featuring local Philly talent. These modern, English-language operas are perfect for opera lovers and newcomers alike. Step into an exclusive speakeasy setting and explore the complexities of human emotion through music.

Opera Shots

The Velvet Whip

Dive beneath the surface of a decade of political chaos and uncover a riveting tale of principle versus power. In For Love of Country, meet an aging American patriot, his cunning spokesperson, and a mysterious Russian "graduate student." Join them on an epic journey across land, sea, and a rally ground, filled with desperation, victory, and betrayal as they plot against enemies and each other. Whose principles will triumph? Will they survive? And will America emerge unscathed? In a single hour, this three-act modern opera captures the rise of a political movement, and the betrayal that leads to its fall. Set to the backdrop of the house and grounds of Glen Foerd, there will be time before and after the show to mingle and explore.

For Love of Country

Glen Foerd

Theatrical luminary and MENSA August Strindberg will be giving a brief lecture preceding a production of his landmark play, Miss Julie. Topics will include the future of theatre, the nature of men and women, class, mathematics, and cats.

An Evening with August Strindberg: Followed by a Perfectly Normal Performance of Miss Julie

Plays & Players Theatre

Percussionist Steven Perry and Dancer Vince Johnson present a performance/workshop based on their unique approach to Music and Dance Collaboration. NOIZE FREAK started as a dance party aiming to create an open environment for Musicians and Dancers while improvising, but has slowly turned into much more. As time has gone on, we’ve started to see patterns and develop processes that not only inspire new ideas, but challenge the dancers and musicians to open their minds to a deeper study of rhythm and break out of their comfort zones. This presentation will feature short performances, accompanied by lectures explaining the thought process/conception behind them, with space for the audience to have some input/questions as well.

NOIZE FREAK: A Study in the Collaboration of Music and Dance

A woman inherits her husband’s vast fortune after he passes away under suspicious circumstances. His prized possession was a solid-gold, hand-sculpted piece of scrap metal art worth millions of dollars. His final wish was to be buried with the sculpture, but of course, everyone wants it for themselves. Rumor has it, the old man put a “curse” on it so if he wasn’t buried with it, anyone who touched it would end up buried themselves. Everyone tries to steal the “Majorcan Monkey,” but whoever touches it ends up dead...and the audience decides who gets the Monkey in the end!

And Then They Were Dead

The Curtis Publishing Company

This piece is an interrogative: a construction that conveys the force of the questions that we face every day upon clocking in, or upon cogging in, as part of THE MACHINE:

Phone Claw for Mister

2024 Hollywood Fringe Winner of Best Solo Performance Award, Handala is a show written and performed by Myriam Ali-Ahmad. After interviewing Palestinians, Myriam has compiled their stories into a solo show that honors and celebrates Palestinian life, with the direction of Becca Khalil and Mahmoud AboBaker.

Handala

Self Help explores mental health through the lens of a relationship between a therapist and patient using Movenglish® – a movement language in progress that directly corresponds to English. The translation of spoken conversations is complemented by fragmented and deconstructed phrases that represent what happens between the lines and inside the mind, embodying a ceaseless yet hopeful striving toward balance between thought and feeling, mind and body, self and other.

Self Help | PANOPTICON

“Emotional, passionate, artistic and breath-taking, Soul Penny Circus gives us an incredible circus/physical theatre piece that stays with you for a long time.”

Dreams of a Clown

Variance, Ritual for a Home: A video projection experience, considering the life and rituals that belong to a home, allowing the viewer to see through walls and share in the interior expression of a Black family as they navigate an often hostile exterior world. The Colored Girls Museum is the architectural site and spiritual home of the ritual performance, which combines AR Portraits to enliven the garden, video projection onto the building's facade, live performance and the kind of warm hospitality common to the Black household.

Museum of Black Joy Presents: Variance, Ritual for A Home

The Colored Girls Museum

The South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)’s First Days Project interviews asks Indian

We Dance At Home, Alone

We will showcase Rainey’s Building, Ma’s 24 Solar Terms, and Hunter’s Prelude: Site of Becoming. From backgrounds as diverse as the Martha Graham Company, to China’s Beijing People’s Republic Arts Academy, to the Philadelphia Ballet, this collection of choreographers has created work on a variety of dance companies locally, nationally, and internationally.

Full Circle

Join us for a dramatic concert of befores and afters, as The Publick Pleasure explores changes in Philadelphia's musical landscape caused by the city's Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793. Concert life, performers, impresarios and musical tastes in Philadelphia underwent profound shifts as the population fled the city, and ordinary life ground to a halt. The city's own soundscape changed, with church bells silenced and gunpowder exploded in the streets. This concert will include texts from period newspapers and personal accounts of 1793 as companions to musical compositions from before and after Philadelphia's "unhappy calamity.” Music will be performed on instruments of the period.

Stop the Bells Tolling

Gloria Dei Old Swedes Episcopal Church

Special Topics is a site-specific experiential performance that bridges culture, history, and experimental contemporary performance art. This iteration is part of a two-year project between AniMalayaWorks and Marcel Santiago Marcelino, a MAPfund 2022-supported project called Primx (a non-gendered word for cousins), celebrating a shared culture between the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

Special Topics

Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews and Mason Rosenthal have been collaborating since 2012 as the Medium Theater Company, directing each others solo shows "Nobodys Home" (2013) and "Cones" (2015) and making many site-specific plays and interactive experiences. Check out their quirky Q&A podcast "Nobody Knows" (2018) where listeners send in questions and Nobody answers. Mason Rosenthal and Benjamin Rosenthal have been collaborating since 1987. They are brothers.

The Fluxus Brothers Present: Good Art Bad Art

Based on Lloyd Kaufman’s cult film and winner of an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Musical, The Toxic Avenger - The Musical is a charming love story and laugh-out-loud musical that has it all: an unlikely hero, his beautiful girlfriend, a corrupt New Jersey mayor and two guys who play... well, everyone else ... bullies, mobsters, old ladies and stiletto-wearing backup singers. With book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro and music and lyrics by David Bryan, the show also features the most memorable and unbelievable duet you’ll ever see on any stage.

The Toxic Avenger – The Musical

South Camden Theatre Company, Inc.

Monologist, English teacher, and writer Becky Bondurant threads her personal coming-of-middle-age narrative through a Freudian needle, weaving from eating disorders and female orgasms to circumcision and breastfeeding against the backdrop of a political crisis. Like a filthy and frank remix of "What the Constitution Means to Me," this monologue is an absurd tale of parenting in the post-truth era.

Penis Envy

The history you didn’t learn in school. Broken dreams. Deportation. Murder. Courage. Resilience. That Woman - The Monologue Show is a series of stories imagined from the perspectives of women involved with President John F. Kennedy — stories that in the past have often have been dismissed or deliberately silenced. The women whose stories are explored in this festival version of the full production include: Ellen Rometsch, Blaze Starr, Mimi Alford, Mary Meyer, Judith Exner and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

That Woman – The Monologue Show

Renowned storyteller and performance artist Denise McCormack invites you to delve into "Woven Worlds: Traditional Tales and Personal Threads," a thought-provoking and captivating solo show at The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, on Friday, September 13 at 7 PM. Tickets are PWYC. Suggested: $15/pp

Woven Worlds: Traditional Tales and Personal Threads

Clumbsy Theater presents a radical adaptation of this French classic in the American style. Two maids and their Madame. An eccentric gay writer gives an interview. Gloves for the fashion and the crime. A corded phone on the floor. A fat blunt flicking ash onto your bosss picture. A rehearsal to eat the rich and burn it down crossdressed to the nines. Gaming a plan or planning a game? Jean Genets maids smeared across the stage beyond recognition. Let's drink tea.

Maid Made Madame

Independence National Historical Park

Rennie Harris and Megan Bridge first worked on a version of this dance in 1999. 25 years later, this new work is a conversation about race, cultural appropriation, privilege, and the passage of time—choreographed by Harris and performed by Bridge.

Beautiful Human Lies: Chapter 4 (Work-in-Progress Showing)

Cindy of Arc is a comedy and rock music extravaganza about the problem men have with lying and where that's gotten the rest of us, particularly women. And Jews. Think American Utopia with expletives, politics, religion, dogs, cannibals, no David Byrne, and no Utopia. And it's a comedy. And we wear our shoes. Brought to you by award-winning writer, musician, and comedian Cynthia Kaplan and three musicians named Mike. Cindy of Arc was a finalist for the 2023 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater and opened Seattle's Intiman Theatre's 50th anniversary season. It has also been presented by NYC's Dixon Place, Baltimore Theatre Project, and The Bitter End.

Cindy of Arc

The Fire

Dreamed up by Philadelphia’s beloved Dito van Reigersberg, this live music mixtape is part Hollywood audition, part woeful tale of lost loves, and part spy story—all performed by a local supergroup of actor-musicians.

Poor Judge

The Wilma Theater

SMASH! returns, this time featuring eight intrepid Black Circus Artists from across the country. Paired as strangers during a micro-residency, SMASH! shows what happens when artists meet for the first time. Will seeds be planted for a future creative relationships, or will they resort to... juggling?

SMASH!: Black Circus Edition

Come join us for a remembrance tribute marking the anniversary of the attack on 9/11/01. There will be music, a moment of silence, and a time for you to share your stories from that day. Located at a memorial to those from Philadelphia in the World Trade Center at the time of the attack. Mark the morning with us.

Philadelphia Fringe Festival

1 - 9 Nov, 2024

We Have Gone As Far As We Can Together

Sep 30, 2024

Shterna and the Lost Voice: A New Yiddish Folktale

Philadelphia Fringe Festival