We are pleased to announce programming for a new FringeArts festival! High Pressure Fire Service will run from March through June 2019 and feature six new productions—five world premieres and one expanded remount—from some of Philadelphia’s preeminent performers.

High Pressure Fire Service takes its name from FringeArts’ historic building, the first high pressure pump house in the country. Starting in 1903, the station pumped water from the Delaware River to fire hydrants across Philadelphia, connecting the city and helping it grow and thrive. This history of creativity and connectivity is at the very heart of the High Pressure Fire Service festival, reflected in the artists’ innovative practice and uniquely relevant work that exemplifies why Philadelphia has remained such a hotbed for excellence and experimentation in contemporary performance.

For the inaugural series, FringeArts commissioned works from Lightning Rod Special; Pig Iron Theatre Company’s Jess Conda, Jenn Kidwell, and Mel Krodman; The Berserker Residents; Suli Holum, David Bradley, and the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University; Moor Mother; and Team Sunshine Performance Corporation. Addressing issues of representation, gender, accessibility, reproductive justice, and more through devised theater, comedy, and participatory play, these new productions embody the vast range and exceptional talent of Philadelphia’s rich performing arts community.

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HIGH PRESSURE FIRE SERVICE

March 1—June 22, 2019 at FringeArts

 

A Fierce Kind of Love by Suli Holum

Directed by David Bradley

Produced by the Institute on Disabilities, Temple University

March 1—3, 2019

A cast of artists with and without disabilities chronicles the largely untold story of Pennsylvania’s Intellectual Disability Rights Movement in a remount of this deeply poignant work. Drawing from years of research and the performers’ lived experiences, A Fierce Kind of Love combines text, movement, and song to chart the Movement’s remarkable history and celebrate the struggle, activism, and fierce love that fuels the desire for dignity. This new iteration of the piece expands on the interviews and research conducted for the 2016 premiere, adding insight to the persistent issues in the disability community. The show, set, and theatrical environment for A Fierce Kind of Love are completely accessible; ASL interpretation and open captioning are directly integrated into the piece; all performances will be sensory-friendly, audio described and programs will be available in alternate formats. A Fierce Kind of Love was made possible with major support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

The Institute on Disabilities is Pennsylvania’s University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD) at Temple University. Since its inception, the Institute has continued to innovate and serve in four core areas: pre-professional training, community training and technical assistance, research and information dissemination. Located within Temple University’s College of Education, the Institute addresses disability as a valued aspect of diversity throughout civic life. They learn from and work with people with disabilities and their families in diverse communities across Pennsylvania to create and share knowledge, change systems and society, and promote self-determined lives so that disability is recognized as a natural part of the human experience.

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The Appointment

Lightning Rod Special

March 20—31, 2019

World Premiere

Alice Yorke and Lightning Rod Special (Sans Everything, Underground Railroad Game) address the misogyny, hypocrisy, and absurdity surrounding the abortion debate in America in this musical satire. Following women at a clinic seeking to terminate their pregnancies, this timely new work uses a pop-musical format to ask tough, important questions about bodily autonomy, race, and who gets to have access. As hilarious as it is incisive.

Lightning Rod Special (LRS) makes live performance from the ground up. Raucous, contemplative, and highly collaborative, LRS uses theatre as a provocative tool to ask questions of ourselves, our audience, and the world at large. Since 2012 they have made six full length shows that have performed in 11 US cities and internationally. Underground Railroad Game, made by Jenn Kidwell and Scott Sheppard with Lightning Rod Special, received the OBIE for Best New American Theater Work and was listed among The New York Times’ 25 best plays of the last 25 years. Lightning Rod Special is Co-Directors Alice Yorke, Scott Sheppard, Mason Rosenthal, and company members Alex Bechtel, Oona Curley, Katie Gould, Rebecca Kanach, and Jenn Kidwell.

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Broccoli, Roosevelt and Mr. House!

The Berserker Residents

April 12—14, 2019

World Premiere

The Berserker Residents are asking the big questions: can broccoli make you giggle? How much dance is too much dance? And does your house have feelings? The trio has whipped up a comedy for all ages that’s unpredictable, original, fun and vibrant. The three wacky title characters serve up unique impishness, snazzy games, silly sounds, physical flights of fancy that encourage interaction and elicit pure joy.

Founded in 2007, The Berserker Residents are an ensemble dedicated to creating original works of alternative comedy with a focus on parody, absurdism, and subverting theatrical conventions. They are a team of three Philadelphia-based wizards of imagination—Justin Jain, David Johnson, and Bradley K. Wrenn—who aim to plow the depths of the ludicrous and downright silly with one hand, while making a firm connection to their audiences with the other. They have been hailed as “daft, ephemeral and joyous” by The Scotsman and praised for their “refusal to relinquish that unrefined creative spirit” by The New York Times. The Berserkers’ work has been presented at Abrons Art Center, The San Francisco Mime Troupe, The Annenberg Center, FringeArts, Arcadia University, Swarthmore College, Theatre Horizon, University of the Arts, The Community Education Center, and The Assembly in Edinburgh, Scotland. They have been residents at FringeArts, White Pines Productions, University of the Arts, and Ars Nova NYC.

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A Hard Time

Pig Iron Theatre Company

May 1—12, 2019

World Premiere

Jess Conda, Jenn Kidwell, and Mel Krodman want to give you A Hard Time—an outrageous alt-comedy and futurist cabaret. Enter a boozy watering hole, where three dynamic performers play men, women, and everything in between for your entertainment, blowing farewell kisses to the patriarchy amid the absurdities and violence of gender expectations.

Founded in 1995 as an interdisciplinary ensemble, Pig Iron Theatre Company is dedicated to the creation of new and exuberant performance works that defy easy categorization.
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The Sincerity Project #3

Team Sunshine Performance Corporation

June 6—8, 2019

World Premiere

Team Sunshine Performance Corporation reunites The Sincerity Project cast for the third installment in an ambitious 24-year experiment that offers a new devised theater work every two years. A meditation on the passage of time that draws from the real lives of its creators, The Sincerity Project #3 explores the implications and challenges of aging, shifting expectations and identities, and how we all—as individuals and a culture—change, respond, evolve, and fail.

Since its founding in 2010, Team Sunshine Performance Corporation has created an eclectic array of performance works and interactive community-gathering events. Ranging from theatrical duets to massive, outdoor spectacles, the company’s body of work blends the social with the artistic, creating opportunities for people to come together and revel in the pleasures and difficulties of our collective contemporary experience. Team Sunshine returns to FringeArts after last spring’s hit ¡BIENVENIDOS BLANCOS! or WELCOME WHITE PEOPLE!

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Circuit City

Written by Camae Ayewa

Music by Moor Mother

June 20—22, 2019

World Premiere

Poet and noise musician Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) presents her first theatrical work, a futuristic exploration—part musical, part choreopoem, part play—of public/private ownership, housing, and technology set in a living room in a corporate-owned apartment complex. Framed by Ayewa’s bold poetry and bolstered by new Moor Mother music performed live by Irreversible Entanglements and the Circuit City Band, Circuit City is an afrofuturist song cycle for our current climate.

A prolific voice in the Philadelphia arts community, Camae Ayewa has released more than a dozen EPs as Moor Mother and Moor Mother Goddess since 2012. She has performed in the punk band The Mighty Paradocs and is also the co-founder of Rockers! Philly, an event series and festival focused on marginalized artists, and Black Quantum Futurism Collective, a literary and artistic collaboration with Rasheedah Philips (The Afrofuturist Affair).

 

High Pressure Fire Service performances take place in the FringeArts theater at 140 N. Columbus Blvd. Tickets go on sale Tuesday, December 4 (Thursday, November 29 for FringeArts members).

Support for High Pressure Fire Service has been provided by Wyncote Foundation.