FringeArts Blog

Happy Hour on the Fringe with Donald Nally of The Crossing
Posted September 13th, 2018

FringeArts continues its signature podcast series Happy Hour Hour on the Fringe.

The Crossing. Photo by Becky Oehlers Photography.

In this episode, Donald Nally, co-founder and conductor of The Crossing, joins hosts Zach and Raina to discuss the choral group’s unexpected origins, his brand spanking new Grammy hat, and The Crossing’s Fringe Festival show Of Arms and the Man.

Of Arms and the Man presents an enticing program of choral pieces performed by the 24-voice ensemble under the direction of Nally. In keeping with The Crossing’s mission of presenting new works for choir, the program features a world premiere from 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist Ted Hearne—the nation’s preeminent composer of works of social advocacy—and a rare live performance of David Lang’s “depart.” Catch the Festival performance September 16 at 8pm at FringeArts, 140 N. Columbus Boulevard.

Listen now to the the wide-ranging conversation about the show and Meg’s signature performance technique.

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Posted in Curated Fringe, FringeArts, Music

Digital Fringe LIVE and ongoing!
Posted September 12th, 2018

“Going to the Fringe this week? If so, why not drop in to the Digital Art Showcase?”

So says John Timpane in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

This year, Digital Fringe is bigger than ever, with twenty-five shows—games, artworks, films, podcasts, taped theater, and more—available throughout the Festival at fringearts.com/list-view/digital-fringe-2018. The offerings in the 2018 Digital Fringe are presented in collaboration with this  a charitable organization focused on supporting game development and indie game enthusiasts in Philadelphia.Presented by Philly Game Mechanics, the FREE showcase presents selections from the online Fringe in an offline setting one night only, tomorrow night at 6pm, at 16th Street and Spring Garden streets.

“The game-dev scene in Philly is very indie,” Jake O’Brien of Philly Game Mechanics told the Inquirer. “We decided to have a two-week game jam, with the theme of ‘making digital art,’ and several of the pieces at Digital Fringe came out of that.”

Timpane picks out a few of his favorite Digital Fringe shows, including  @hereafter, an “escape-the-room game” played in a chat room; live streamed cooking visit Chez Vous; R&J, a text-message game based on Romeo and Juliet; How to Dance by Sean Thomas Boyt; Phillytron; Visualizationist by Michael Stauffer; Daniel Shumway’s Reset Hard; and Timpane’s “favorite Digital Fringe endeavor,” August in the City, which presents August Wilson monologues in places throughout Philadelphia.

These digital pieces are available online for your exploring, listening, and viewing pleasure. Share links using #DigitalFringe on social media.

This year, Digital Fringe is presented in collaboration with Philly Game Mechanics, a charitable organization focused on supporting game development and indie game enthusiasts in Philadelphia, PA. Stay tuned for details about their Digital Art Showcase during the 2018 Fringe Festival!

FringeArts also partners with Technical.ly Philly throughout the year, an organization dedicated to growing local technology communities by connecting organizations and people through news, events and services. Sign up to receive the latest on innovation from across the Northeast Corridor, including news, events and jobs from Philly, Baltimore, Brooklyn, D.C. and Delaware. Subscribe to the daily Technical.ly newsletter.

Read more of the Inquirer’s picks for the Digital Fringe here, check out all the Digital Fringe offerings here, and find more about the Digital Art Showcase here.

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Posted in Digital Fringe

Where Have All the Black Actors Gone? To Flying Quilt’s Day of Absence
Posted September 12th, 2018

Opening tomorrow at Painted Bride Arts Center (after two free performances for community groups), the thoughtful comedy Day of Absence explores the dilemma of an unnamed Southern town awakening to find all black folk…gone. Who will tend the children? Who will do the menial work? Who really wears the mask? It’s as relevant today as when Douglas Turner Ward wrote it in 1965.

The list of actors performing in Flying Quilt Productions’ Fringe show reads like a who’s who of black actors in Philadelphia: Joilet F. Harris, Cathy Simpson, Brian Anthony Wilson, Anthony Cooper, Steve Wright, Nastassja Baset, Rich Bradford, Kim Brown, Carlo Campbell, Niya Colbert, Walter DeShields, Andre N. Jones, Tiffany Bacon, Renee Lucas Wayne, Olivia Wayne, Lenny Daniels, Eric Carter, Chyna Michele, Jack Drummond, and Lary Moten. FringeArts spoke to Moten, artistic director of Flying Quilt, about his impressive cast and contemporarily pertinent play.

FringeArts: What first moved you about Day of Absence?

Lary Moten: When I first read it, I was in college—called Hampton Institute when i attended, now Hampton University—studying theater. It was 1968 and we were studying the plays that exploded from black playwrights during that turbulent time. Day of Absence struck me so much because it’s a comedy. It showed how all of the anger and frustration, analysis and commentary, could be turned into genuine laughter without casually dismissing the underlying causes, facing those issues unflinchingly. It grabbed me then. Unfortunately, it still grabs us now.

FringeArts: Why did you want to bring it to this year’s Fringe? 

Lary Moten: There is so much turmoil in the U.S. at this moment—people questioning black lives matter, political, social, cultural and economic upheaval—and Day of Absence speaks directly to those issues. And with lots of laughs. Day of Absence is castor oil smothered in honey. As usual in times like this, the best art rises to the challenge of connecting folks with issues that affect their daily lives concretely. That is why i wanted to see this show mounted. Especially during the Fringe. And at the Painted Bride given their history of community work.

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Posted in Independent Fringe, Theater

Gimme Shelter: Drip Symphony Returns to the Fringe
Posted September 12th, 2018

Nick Schwasman and Nate Barnett are local Philadelphia artists who run Drip Symphony, an experimental performance company now entering its second season. This Fringe, Drip Symphony presents Shelter, the story of a group of artists living together in an abandoned theater, brought together by a shared sense of artistic integrity. Staged using an immersive design where the entire theater is transformed into performance space and the audience, seated on stage and scattered throughout the house, lives among the action, Shelter explores the value of art, the nature of creation, and the power of physical boundaries to shape our realities.

Shelter runs September 19-22 at Plays & Players Theatre (and Barnett also sings with the Grammy-winning ensemble The Crossing in its Fringe show Of Arms and the Man, September 16). Schwasman and Barnett spoke to FringeArts about their artistic process, upcoming production, and views of the Fringe Festival.

FringeArts: What was the inspiration behind Shelter?

Nick Schwasman: I just turned 19. I was sitting around a fire behind a barn, talking to my dad and friends. My dad had recently received a letter from his dad, who is homeless and schizophrenic, and whom I had never met. I was talking about how I wanted to meet him. The idea came to me somewhere in this moment, that any homeless person I saw could possibly be my grandfather, and that’s essentially where it started.

We began writing the script for it back in 2013, in a barn on winter break. We still have scraps from back then, and many of the characters still exist in evolved forms. But it’s changed a lot. We’ve allowed this process to take any twists and turns that appeared, so much had changed. The show is now most strongly inspired by our artist colleagues and ourselves, and the experience we all have trying to navigate a very fraught artistic landscape. It’s about the decisions we make to survive and stay true to ourselves, and the spaces we create in support of those decisions.

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Posted in Independent Fringe, Theater

“I’ve lost everything but I managed to save my life”: New Video of Stories of Refuge
Posted September 12th, 2018

Tania El Khoury and Petra Serhal from Beirut-based Dictaphone Group collaborated with a group of Syrian refugees who had recently arrived in Munich, Germany, fleeing the Assad regime and the violence engulfing the country. They provided each person with a discreet camera for a day, the only instructions being to film their lives in Munich and their favourite spots in the city. The resulting interactive installation, Stories of Refuge is on display this month at Twelve Gates Arts as part of the Fringe Festival show ear-whispered: works by Tania El Khoury.

On opening weekend, videographer Dave Tavani visited the installation to record interviews with some audience members and footage as they experienced the intimate, affecting work.

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Posted in Curated Fringe, FringeArts

Hello Darkness My Ol’ Chum: REV’s Graveyard Cabaret
Posted September 11th, 2018

Since 2012, REV Theatre Company has brought Fringe Festival audiences into the iconic Laurel Hill Cemetery for a macabre cabaret of music and theater. As Philly Voice put it, Death is a Cabaret Ol’ Chum has become “a consistent favorite and top ticket seller… head to the cemetery for free cocktails and cabaret that spooks and stirs the soul.” The 2018 Fringe show opens this Friday and has four performances through September 22.

REV’s artistic codirector Rudy Caporaso spoke to FringeArts about this years happening.

FringeArts: Describe Death is a Cabaret Ol’ Chum for the uninitiated?

Rudy Caporaso: First of all, the show is listed in the Fringe Guide as a happening because that’s exactly what it is. Audiences will enjoy free cocktails as three “departed souls” appear out of the darkness of historic, iconic, beautiful Laurel Hill Cemetery, to music ranging from Bessie Smith to the Scissor Sisters and Cole Porter to Sonny and Cher. The music is a “Whitmans Sampler” of death-centric songs, all sung by—according to a critic—”performers with killer pipes”. And another critic said they’ve never experienced a more life-affirming theatrical event. An adventurous audience seeking a truly unique and immersive theater experience will like this.

FringeArts: What makes Laurel Hill Cemetery so suitable for this piece?

Rudy Caporaso: The piece was specifically made with Laurel Hill in mind—and I hope this doesn’t seem too terribly self-aggrandizing, but Laurel Hill is tailor-made for this production. It has the prerequisite mysterious and splendid Gothic grandeur. I always think of the Cemetery as the fourth character in the piece.

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Posted in Independent Fringe, Cabaret, Theater

Take Two Plunges with Brian Sanders JUNK
Posted September 11th, 2018

Brian Sanders’ JUNK has sold out Philly Fringe shows every year for almost twenty years with innovative, ingenious, and boundary-defying choreography. This year, us “JUNKies” have double the chance to see the highly physical, energetic dance company: For the 2018 Fringe Festival, JUNK is presenting TWO shows: FIGMAGO (through September 23) and Plunge (through September 22).

Daytime

A multi-faceted artist, Sanders shows us his family-fun side with FIGMAGO, an ongoing collaboration with muralist Meg Saligman.

Meg Saligman’s Theatre of Life mural.

“Meg and I share a lot of the same aesthetics,” Sanders tells FringeArts. “Bold but not over-the-top, dynamic, intense and emotional.”

The artists connected at the dedication of Saligman’s Theatre of Life mural on Broad and Lombard streets. “I repelled down the face of this giant mural and danced among the painted figures,” he says. “We always knew we would work together but we just didn’t know when and how, but the right space and the right time brought about FIGMAGO.”

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Posted in Brian Sanders, Independent Fringe, Dance

Scenes from a Life: Miguel Gutierrez on Discovering John Bernd’s Enduring Influence
Posted September 11th, 2018

Miguel Gutierrez initially joined collaborator Ishmael Houston-Jones in a limited role on a project reconfiguring dance by experimental East Village choreographer John Bernd. Watching videos of Bernd’s shows and reading about his work, Gutierrez quickly realized he needed to immerse himself in the project. The resulting Fringe Festival show Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd, mashes up works by the influential choreographer, whose work flourished during the era of experimental dance in 1980s New York, and whose life was tragically taken by AIDS in 1988.

Running this weekend, with performances on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the highly anticipated show combines Bernd’s last seven pieces into a new dance performance that honors the choreographer’s memory and imagines what dance would look like today if the community had not been decimated by the deadly AIDS epidemic. As a contemporary Brooklyn artist and performer who creates dance-based performance, music, and poetry, Gutierrez witnesses the lasting impact of Bernd’s multidisciplinary work on dance today and on his own work. He spoke to FringeArts about finding roots in the past and continuing Bernd’s legacy into the future.

FringeArts: What was your introduction to the work of John Bernd?

Miguel Gutierrez: I’d only known about John Bernd peripherally for the many years I had been in New York. It wasn’t until Ishmael asked me to help him out with this project that I sat down and watched his pieces. Within five minutes I knew I wanted to be involved in whatever way I could with this project.

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Posted in Curated Fringe, Dance

Scenes from Opening Weekend
Posted September 10th, 2018

The Fringe is OPEN for business!!!

Opening weekend kicked off with hundreds of performances in every corner of the city, from deep south Philly to the Art Museum steps, from the Delaware Riverfront to University City. Relive some highlights with this photo diary of performances.

 

Anu Tali conducts Heiner Goebbels Songs of Wars I Have Seen at FringeArts. Photo by Joanna Austin, AustinArt.org.

Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s production of Eccentricities of a Nightingale by Tennessee Williams, at Bethany Mission Gallery through September 23. Photo by Joanna Austin, AustinArt.org.

An audience member experiences Tania El Khoury’s Stories of Refuge, at Twelve Gates Gallery through September 28. Photo by Joanna Austin, AustinArt.org.

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Posted in Dance, Theater

Like Mother Like Daughter
Posted September 10th, 2018

Jennifer Blaine was in the first Philly Fringe. This year her daughter Lily Blaine is in her first.

Lily and Jennifer  last week.

Performer Jennifer Blaine got a feature in the latest Philadelphia Weekly, detailing her long history with the Fringe Festival and how she has used it as a jumping off point to launch numerous successful shows.

Blaine was part of the very first Philly Fringe in 1997, performing her solo show Safety By Numbers in an Old City alleyway. As she related to Philly Weekly, she’d use reviews from her Fringe shows to book tours across the country, eventually opening up for George Carlin, Chris Rock, Joe Piscopo. This year, Blaine returns to the Festival for the 16th time with narrative stand-up show Ridiculous at L’Etage in South Philadelphia.

“It’s such an opportunity to open yourself up to an audience that you wouldn’t have reached otherwise,” Blaine told writer Andrea Cantor about the Fringe Festival. “You have no idea where it could end up for you.”

At the FringeArts Blog, we were struck by tidbit in the article about where it has ended up for Jennifer: this year, her 11-year-old daughter Lily is performing in her very first Fringe Festival. The younger Blaine dances in Paprika Plains, another family affair by two artist-sisters combining dance and body painting. 

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Posted in Independent Fringe

Happy Hour on the Fringe with Meg Foley
Posted September 9th, 2018

FringeArts signature podcast returns with the a new episode in a series of enthralling Festival-related shows.

The undergird. Photo by Tasha Doremus.

Hosts Zach and Raina sit down with performer, choreographer, educator, and double libra with a moon in pisces, Meg Foley. They discuss Meg’s Fringe Festival show the undergird, how identity shapes Meg’s work, and, just between us, breaking the space-time continuum.

Her 2018 Fringe Festival piece, The undergird opens at Icebox Project Space on September 13 and runs through September 16.

Listen now to the the wide-ranging conversation about the show and Meg’s signature performance technique.

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Posted in Festival

Location, Location, Location: Panorama Philly
Posted September 8th, 2018

Location: Panorama Philly

Neighborhood: Southwest Philly

Description: A converted warehouse space, Panorama Philly (not to be confused with the Old City restaurant) offers a stripped down 2,100-square-foot theater and rehearsal space, easily accommodating over 100 patrons. For the 2018 Fringe Festival, the space has become something of a Fringe hub, with five shows sharing the space and presenting successive shows on many days.

Year built: 1930

2018 Fringe shows: Literary Creatures (“spontaneous bursts of sound, poetry, and movement encouraging the audience to explore playfulness as vulnerability”), All 100 Fires (“At a guerrilla base camp, a retired clockmaker weighs who needs to be purged from the ranks”), NIGHTMARE FUEL (“dark and demented…. what the Fringe is all about.” The Wee Review), Pestilence: WOW! (“Part reality television, part psychedelic fever dream, this is a play about humans and the way we deal with real, actual tragedy: totally inadequately, and like assholes.”), The Presented (“a fun and hilarious 50-minute show that will make you never want to pursue a career in the arts ever again”).

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Posted in Festival

What Fringe Artists Think You Should See
Posted September 7th, 2018

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been asking select Fringe artists for their picks of shows to see in the 2018 Fringe Festival (they weren’t allowed to pick their own show!). Here’s the work they recommend:

Lary Moten (Day of Absence)
“James Ijames’s Kill Move Paradise is a must-see for me.  And Kaleidoscope’s For Colored Girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.   i am very curious about what their take will be on this classic.  Simpatico’s 4Solo looks interesting.  And of course Iron Age Theatre’s August in the City.”

Bastion Carboni (A Vacation)
“I’m super-about Kill Move Paradise and Simpatico’s 4Solo. Songs For Monsters is gonna be a kick in the dick also.”

Ants on a Log (Music for Children and Other Curious People)
“We  can’t wait to see our friend and creative-consultant Emily Schuman in Bon Iver Fights a Bear!”

Randi Alexis Hickey (The Buried Life)
“On the Rocks’ WOLFCRUSH of course. Close Your Legs, Honey. White Feminist by Lee Minora. Phaedra’s Love by Svaha Theatre Collective! There are so many more I could list! It’s why I love Fringe—I’m so excited by so much of the work going up during in just the span of a month.”

Ben Grinberg (Jeanne/Jean/John/Jawn)
“In terms of Curated Fringe, I’m most interested to see The undergird, which is bound to be one of the most deeply researched and moving things in the Festival. But the independent shows are where it’s at this year —to name just a few, I’m really hoping to see feral girl wild child, Metal & Kind’s Indestructible Flowers, Skills and Scars (that one’s happening in my house!) and Bon Iver Fights A Bear (because Emily Schuman is a goddess).”

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Posted in FringeArts

The Plague Comes to Philadelphia: Pestilence: WOW!
Posted September 7th, 2018

Playwright and director Savannah Reich recently moved to Philadelphia after making work with her company Eternal Cult for ten years and touring it to bars, basements and warehouses across the country. Opening tomorrow night, Pestilence: WOW! marks the Fringe debut for her raw and immediate style of theater, produced punk-rock style: collaboratively, accessibly, and strange.

Reich spoke to FringeArts about this new play about the bubonic plague that lives somewhere between a game show and an acid trip.

FringeArts: What’s the worst illness you’ve ever suffered?

Savannah Reich: I was a sickly child and always had some kind of a cold. I have a real fascination with the the intimate nature of illness, and the way it takes away our illusions of control. I did a lot of reading about illness in preparation for this play: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, and Eula Biss’s On Immunity; An Inoculation are particular favorites. None of this ended up in the play directly, of course.

FringeArts: What brought you to Philadelphia?

Savannah Reich: I graduated from Carnegie Mellon with my MFA three years ago, and I’ve been kind of an art tumbleweed ever since. I lived in Chicago for a few years, and I’ve been bopping around and doing plays in Pittsburgh and Minneapolis and traveling a lot. I think I’m looking for my artistic home.

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Posted in Independent Fringe, Theater

Getting In A Tangle: Meredith Rosenthal Goes In the Forest
Posted September 7th, 2018

A Fringe Festival favorite since 2011, Tangle Movement Arts is a contemporary circus arts company whose performances mix traditional circus like trapeze and acrobatics with dance, theater, and live music to tell multidimensional stories. Tangle’s work reflects individuals of diverse identities, with an emphasis on queer and female experiences, and is devised collaboratively by its all-female ensemble.

Meredith Rosenthal

FringeArts spoke to Meredith Rosenthal, a member of this ensemble, about Tangles new work In the Forest—an immersive world of circus-theater that surrounds the audience with a 360-degree display of aerial dance, live music, giant yarn sculptures, and circus magic. The show comes to the 2018 Fringe Festival September 12-15, at the Sanctuary at the Rotunda in West Philly..

FringeArts: How did you become involved with Tangle?

Meredith Rosenthal: About five years ago, Lauren Rile Smith discovered me at a student showcase at Philadelphia School of Circus Arts. My first ever performance! She asked me to be a guest artist for a TinyCircus show, one of Tangle’s pop-up circus events.

FringeArts: What do you like about the company?

Meredith Rosenthal: Tangle feels almost more like a community than a company. Everyone is so supportive and encouraging. We try to make accessible circus for the masses, whether it’s by outdoor performances or our energetic narrative shows.

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Posted in Circus Arts, Tangle Movement Arts, Independent Fringe, Circus

Revisiting Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. With a Bear.
Posted September 6th, 2018

This my excavation

In 2006, musician Justin Vernon left North Carolina after two breakups: with his band and longtime girlfriend. Broke, heartbroken, he drove back to his home state of Wisconsin and spent a cold autumn and winter in his father’s hunting cabin. There he cut wood, drank, and wrote and recorded one of the finest, most emotionally moving, rawly authentic albums of this young millenium.

That’s the story.

It’s one that playwright Doug Williams and director Maura Krause wanted to explore and flip over. “We’re both music obsessives, and the story behind Bon Iver’s first album is a modern music legend,” says Williams. “But there are larger questions about the ‘broken male genius’ that feel really primed to be pushed back upon right now.”

These questions get a outlandish treatment in the pair’s world premiere Fringe Festival show, Bon Iver Fights A Bear, which opens tomorrow. “We figured, if we’re really trying to tell this story in the most outrageous way possible, we gotta have this talking bear narrate it and sort of call bullshit on the mythology of the whole thing,” says Williams.

“We want to explore the ways in which we romanticize the story of the white-male-genius-type that retreats to the woods to get over his heartbreak,” adds performer Emily Schuman, who plays Bon Iver, hipster beard and all. (The moniker was taken from French for “happy winter,” a repeated greeting in cult TV show Northern Exposure.) “Really, he was just a 24-year-old kid who was trying to figure himself out but ended up doing something incredibly honest.”

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Posted in Independent Fringe, Music, Theater

Remembering 2012’s Le Grand Continental As It Gets Super for 2018
Posted September 6th, 2018

The 2012 Fringe Festival kicked off on the steps of the art museum with a large-scale spectacular of dance by Montreal-based choreography Sylvain Émard. As we prepare to return to the iconic steps for a brand-new extravaganza combining the pure delight of line dancing with the fluidity and expressiveness of contemporary dance we look back on the 2012 show. Dozens of the non-professional performers from six years ago return this year for the bigger and better Le Super Grand Continental in three FREE shows this Saturday and Sunday. You should too.

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Posted in Curated Fringe, Dance

Building Trust with Darcy Lyons
Posted September 5th, 2018

“Security is both a reality and a feeling and they’re not the same thing… The foundation of security is trust, both personal trust and global trust.” —Security specialist Bruce Schneier, an inspiration for 2018 Fringe Festival piece Proceed with Caution

Fear. Insecurity. Trust. Security.

The topics broached in Lyons and Tigers’s Proceed with Caution (September 7-9 at The Iron Factory in Kensington) are relevant on a personal, political, and geopolitical level. This new full-length dance theater work explores security in a time of global violence, the Trump presidency, police brutality, mass shootings, and the #MeToo movement. Through dance, the show asks, “How do humans build trust?”

Creator Darcy Lyons spoke to FringeArts about her timely show.

FringeArts: What was the inspiration for Proceed with Caution?

Darcy Lyons: In 2012, I created a short version of this piece that was about rational and irrational fear. I have always wanted to return to the piece and this year felt like the right time. The initial inclination came from my own struggles with anxiety. The concepts around fear and trust are important to me to continue to explore, especially in the uproar of the Trump administration.

FringeArts: Can we ever really trust anyone about anything ever?

Darcy Lyons: Yes. Trust has a lot of layers of meaning. We are constantly working with trust in our everyday lives.

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Posted in Uncategorized, Independent Fringe, Dance

Brett Mapp has a Fringe Schedule to Envy
Posted September 5th, 2018

Performances for the 2018 Fringe Festival have already begun, and the Festival officially kicks off tomorrow! Thus begins three weeks of awesome performances: so many it’s difficult to decide what to see! It might seem overwhelming to fit all these amazing shows into just a few weeks, but thankfully there’s hope. Fringe Festival veteran, Old City District director of operations, general man about town, and self-described “hardcore Fringer” Brett Mapp has been kind enough to share his 2018 Fringe Festival schedule with us. If you’re looking for some guidance on what to see and how to fit it all together, it can’t hurt to start here:

Kill Move Paradise

9/6
Eccentricites of a Nightingale

9/7
Kill Move Paradise

9/8
Le Super Grand Continental (4pm)
The Accountant (8pm)

9/9
Lay Me Down Softly (2:30pm)
Stifters Dinge (6pm)

9/10
Fly Eagles Fly

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Posted in Festival

The Things We Don’t Know How to Explain: An Interview with Heiner Goebbels
Posted September 5th, 2018

The 2018 Fringe Festival kicks off this weekend with a performance piece unlike any other. Created by acclaimed German composer and director Heiner Goebbels, Stifters Dinge does away with actors in favor of light, pictures, murmurs, sounds (five self-playing pianos), and voices (recordings of William S. Burroughs, Malcolm X, and Claude Levi-Strauss), creating a meditative dreamscape that allows the audience to form their own opinions about what they witness.

This newfound contemplative space recalls the writing of 19th-century author Adalbert Stifter, after whom the piece in named. Goebbels explained to FringeArts his interest in Adalbert Stifter and the other inspirations for this large-scale performative installation.

FringeArts: What inspired this piece?

Heiner Goebbels: I was talking with set and light designer Klaus Gruenberg — with whom I’ve worked nearly exclusively for the last 20 years — and we asked ourselves if it was possible to create a theater piece without any people. That was the experimental question for our artistic research. That was the beginning. Everything else happened in the process.

FringeArts: Where did the title Stifters Dinge come from?

Heiner Goebbels: It came pretty late in the process; even the involvement of the text by Stifter came late, because I usually don’t know much earlier what I am working towards…

FringeArts: Could you tell me a little about Adalbert Stifter?

Heiner Goebbels: He was a landscape painter and author in the first half of the 19th century in Bohemia. The disturbing and surprising moments in his writings come in his attentiveness and sensibility toward non-human forces, natural phenomena, and things we don’t really know how to name and explain. That is what he calls dinge, “things.” You find that word on nearly every page of his writings.

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Posted in Curated Fringe, FringeArts