It’s a makeover, not a takeover. The takeover happens in September, at the festivals. In the meantime, send good vibes to our awesome web production team for making a beautiful, highly navigable web home for this year’s Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe.

And hello, ticket buyers, it’s nice to see you again! We’re very pleased to announce that seats to all of this year’s Live Arts shows are now on sale. Fringe will come soon, we promise!

After the jump: quickie descriptions of this year’s Live Arts offerings:

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Cie. Willi Dorner
World Premiere!

In this free outdoor show, Austrian choreographer Willi Dorner is unleashing 65 dancers throughout Old City, sending them down narrow lanes, over archways and support beams, up walls, and falling out of windows, and throwing enormous film projections upon abandoned buildings. From the creator of the immensely popular bodies in urban spaces (2008).

Canyon
John Jasperse
World Premiere!

From groundbreaking New York choreographer John Jasperse comes a collaborative new work that captures the wonder of the ineffable. Six dancers, including Jasperse, play with engineered disorientation, sensory overload, spaciousness, fractured connectivity, and rapture.

Elephant Room
Dennis Diamond / Louie Magic / Daryl Hannah
World Premiere!

You are cordially invited to a clandestine place. Your hosts are three world-class semi-pro conjurors Dennis Diamond, Daryl Hannah, and Louie Magic take you on a journey behind the smoke and mirrors to a secret society, the Elephant Room. Welcome to an experience you weren’t even aware existed.

Extremely Public Acts of Privacy, Act 1: Extremely Public
New Paradise Laboratories
World Premiere!

Part musical, part novel, part real life drama, Extremely Public Displays Of Privacy, Act 1 is a show that’s entirely unique and entirely online. A customized experience for the viewer, you investigate a story between two women caught in an online war of daring.

Lady M
Swim Pony Performing Arts
World Premiere!

Lady M highlights its demented anti-heroine, played by Barrymore Award winning Catharine Slusar, by heightening the text of Macbeth with voice and movement that is equally extreme. An all-female chorus of ten witches, like a hive of bees, alternately serve and overtake their queen.

More Mouvements für Lachenmann
Xavier Le Roy
A co-presentation with bowerbird
US premiere!

Experience a hidden world outside of sound, but within music. More Mouvements für Lachenmann is French choreographer Xavier Le Roy’s poetic and fascinating version of a contemporary music concert from the point of view of someone obsessed with movement. Musicians include members of the Austrian new music ensemble Klangforum Wien.

Namasya
Shantala Shivalingappa

From the classical Indian dance form Kuchipudi to contemporary movement, Namasya is a virtuosic and very personal dance work from a dancer at the top of her form. The evening is made up of four solos choreographed by Ushio Amagatsu, Pina Bausch, Shivalingappa, and Savitry Nair (Shivalingappa’s mother).

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Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Shantala Shivalingappa
U.S. Premiere!

Welcome to a place for experiments between two riveting performers with seemingly opposing styles: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the sinuous western contemporary dancer whose movements ride a wave of chaos, and the Indian dancer Shantala Shivalingappa, whose exquisite control of movement comes from her mastery of the classical Indian form Kuchipudi.

Red Rovers
Headlong Dance Company and Chris Doyle
World Premiere!

Join Headlong and visual artist Chris Doyle on a trip to the red planet. Two robotic explorers. One lonely landscape. Combining dance theater, art installation, silent films, vintage Donkey Kong, and Mars, Red Rovers is a show about scientific searching, comical mishaps, and the impossibility of connection across vast distances.

The Devil and Mister Punch
Improbable
World Premiere!

Journey into the dark world of Punch and Judy shows to the iconic Punch’s manipulators, the puppeteers themselves and the shenanigans of Hovey and Hovey, the stage producers whose dwindling careers have bottomed out to producing puppet shows. This shadowy, magical world features actors, musicians, player pianos, and wooden and papier-mâché players.

The Method Gun
Rude Mechs

This theatrical exploration about the ecstasy and excesses of performing is based on the methods of Stella Burden, the 60s and 70s actor-training guru who disappeared in 1972 under mysterious circumstances. Burden created what became known as the most dangerous acting technique in the world, The Approach.

The Radio Show
Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion
Bessie Award Winner!

The Radio Show is a high energy dance performance about the effects of the disappearance of a black radio on a community and the effects of Alzheimer’s on a family. The cast of seven includes Abraham, one of the most captivating movers dancing today, and a musical score mixes classic soul, hip-hop, and classical compositions.

Traces
7 Fingers
Presented in association with the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

Traces is high-energy urban acrobatics–poetic and explosive, humorous and thoughtful–from 7 Fingers, a Montreal-based circus arts company founded with the goal of presenting circus on a human scale. Traditional circus feats combine with skateboarding and parkour, and mix with theater and contemporary dance.

Twelfth Night, or What You Will
Pig Iron Theatre Company
World Premiere!

It’s one of Shakespeare’s most wicked comedies, Pig Iron style. Welcome to an uproarious world of drunkards and wine-drenched parties, depressive noblemen and dueling musicians, idiots and veteran jesters, religious zealots and erotic misunderstandings, all set to a live gypsy-rock score.

WhaLE OPTICS
Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental
World Premiere!

From the mind of Thaddeus Phillips comes an equally grand and hilarious theatrical epic that connects worldwide telecommunications systems, humpback whales, Carl Sagan, and dinner at Applebee’s. Performed by and made in collaboration with Brian Osborne, Makoto Hirano, Lee Ann Etzold, James Ijames, and Emily Letts.

Zon-Mai
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Gilles Delmas
Gallery Opening!

Opposite the Race Street Pier, inside a former pumping station, is a house of screens some 20 feet high and wide, which you walk around looking at films of dancers performing in their homes–in bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, under and above their furniture, by their windows, playing with notions of what home life means to them.