Every Friday during this year’s Festival, we’re hosting workshops led by some of the artists behind Blank Placard Dance, Replay,Friday Night Rat Catchers, and Utopian Hotline. Join us on September 11, 18, and 25 from 1:30pm-3pm at Pig Iron Studio A. Workshops are $35 GA and FREE for 2026 Fringe Festival artists.

Workshop Schedule

PROTEAN PROGRESSIONS

Led by Sherwood Chen
Friday September 11th, 2026 from 1:30pm – 3:30pm

A relentless torrent of ever-shifting movement propositions across the floor will develop kinesthetic, rhythmic and motor awareness. These simple, challenging layers intend to defamiliarize our bodies in order to savor them as dynamic, transformative environments. Stripped of choreographic phrasing, the training is a sweaty inquiry—at once individual and collective—to un-master and to test limit, drive, scale, fun, rigor, interchange, imagery and rhythm.

For the 2026 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Sherwood Chen is the coordinator of choreography for Blank Placard Dance Replay, originally choreographed by Anna Halprin, recreated by Anne Collod.

Going Out on a Limb: Physicality and Risk

Led by Lisa Fagan & Lena Engelstein,
Choreographers and Performers of Friday Night Rat Catchers
Friday September 18th, 2026 from 1:30pm – 3:00pm

In this workshop participants will focus on the body as the motor inside performance, and experiment with one of Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein’s generative devices for creating physical performance material. Deep, intentional physical practice sets performers up to take risks and push past discomfort, and risk-taking is at the core of this practice. This workshop is accessible to all performers and will adapt to participants’ accessibility needs. No dance experience is required, but comfort with physical exertion and playful experimentation is key!

DISRUPTION, TECHNOLOGY, AND PROCESS: INSIDE THE WORK OF MITU

Led by Rubén Polendo, Founding Artistic Director of Mitu (Utopian Hotline)
Friday September 25th, 2026 from 1:30pm – 3:00pm

Innovation is not the product of new technology. It is the result of changing the conditions under which artists think, collaborate, and make. This workshop opens Mitu’s collaborative process behind UTOPIAN HOTLINE, inviting participants into the methodologies that have shaped the company’s work across nearly three decades.

Led by Founding Artistic Director, Rubén Polendo, the workshop will investigate art making as a dynamic system rather than a collection of roles, engaging technology not as a tool to be mastered but as an active collaborator capable of transforming process, authorship, and artistic possibility. Through conversation and collective inquiry, participants will unpack the strategies Mitu uses to disrupt inherited models of theater making in order to discover new forms of performance, participation, and meaning.

At its core, this workshop proposes disruption as a creative discipline. By embracing uncertainty, crossing disciplinary boundaries, and building unexpected collaborations, artists can create work that does more than tell stories—they can create conditions for rigorous discourse, deeper community engagement, and entirely new ways of gathering around complex ideas.

Health & Safety

Masks are optional, vaccines are not required. For more information about FringeArts COVID policies can be found here.