We’ve had one week of Fringe, how do you feel? FringeArts Blog is tired, hungry, happy, a little bit overwhelmed by all the great shows we’ve seen. But for many performers, Fringe is just getting started. The 2018 Fringe Festival enters its middle weekend with an unrivaled line-up of world-class contemporary performances.

Here’s some of the great work we’re trying to see this weekend.

Caen Amour
Trajall Harrell
Arising from performances at the World’s Fairs of 19th-century Europe and America, the hoochie-coochie presented bastardized, titillating versions of Middle Eastern dance. Informed by the ritualized moves of dance-floor voguing and the Japanese dance-theater tradition of butoh, Caen Amour explores the line between artistic and erotic dance of the past, and imagines how erotic dancing of previous eras would look today, exoticism and spectacle remaining intact. Choreographer Trajal Harrell returns to the Fringe Festival with a performance piece that invites the viewer to step into an unexplored historical imagination.
September 14 at 7pm + 9pm
September 15 at 5pm + 7pm
More info + tickets

The undergird
Meg Foley
Choreographer Meg Foley’s seven-year development of improvisational performance practice culminates in a viscerally affecting four-person work about death and grief as bodily experiences. The undergird is a love letter to what we think has been lost. It is a rhythmic and persistent celebration of where memory and imagination live inside the body and how they are remade real through moving ritual.
September 14 at 6pm + 9pm
September 15 at 3:30pm + 6pm
September 16 at 3:30pm
More info + tickets

Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd
Ishmael Houston-Jones and Miguel Gutierrez
Multidisciplinary choreographer John Bernd was a pioneer in the East Village experimental dance scene until his death from AIDS in 1988. Ishmael Houston Jones (a one-time collaborator with Bernd) and Miguel Gutierrez reconfigure excerpts from the last seven pieces that Bernd made to create a new vision of his work that captures the vitality of his vision, demonstrates how his influence lives in modern-day dance, and serves as a blueprint for what his work might have become if the gay/dance communities hadn’t lost a whole generation of creators to the epidemic.
September 14 + 15 at 8pm
September 16 at 2pm
More info + tickets

Of Arms and the Man
The Crossing
A quote from Virgil’s Aeneid serves as an apt title for an epic aural voyage that explores the timeless themes of nationalism and war while navigating personal stories of joy and despair. Grammy-winning 24-voice choir The Crossing brings to life music by twelve contemporary composers whose work examines victory and loss across national and personal borders.
September 16 at 8pm
More info + tickets

As Far As My Fingertips Take Me. Photo by

ear-whispered: works by Tania El Khoury
Tania El Khoury
Working between Lebanon and the United Kingdom, Tania El Khoury meticulously crafts innovative performances and installations that engage the audience in multi-sensory interaction. Unlike more conventional theater and performance, El Khoury’s live art work comes alive through the audience’s interaction with it. An extensive survey of El Khoury’s art, ear-whispered: works by Tania El Khoury presents five pieces at locations in Old City and at Bryn Mawr College, all of which have performances or gallery hours this weekend.
More info + tickets

This is just a sampling of the over 200 performances tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday. Give FringeArts Blog some candy and get us Fringing!