Make Bank

About the Show

For a brief time during the 2023 Fringe Festival, guests are invited to join a band of currency-crazed visual and performing artists as they occupy The Manufacturers’ National Bank in Old City. Closed to the public since 1985, this space has been transformed into the den, cave, and sewer of Meg Saligman and her newest four-story mural. Come experience the intersection of art-making and currency with Brother Can You Spare a Dollar?, where guests can steal, barter or bring a dollar bill and turn it into an art piece; or experience This Ain’t Your Grandma’s Jewelry, an opportunity to make trinkets for the giant that lives in the basement. Who knows, when the bank reopens in 2024, your pieces might be on permanent display in their larger- than-life-sized music box. At night, Meg, along with Lillian Ransijn and Dylan Smythe of R&T, will guide guests through the space filled with video installations and zany characters like “The Teller” and “The Butoh Financier,” a dancer who will emerge to welcome guests into a land of fetish, finance, and bijouterie-burlesque.

Credits

A Meg Saligman Production Featuring Rough and Tumble Productions

Meg Saligman Co-Artistic Director/Performer

Terry Guerin Director

Dylan Smythe Devising and Artistic Consultant/Performer

Lillian Mae Ransijn Devising and Artistic Consultant/Performer

Theodore Laws Performer

Katarina Poljak Performer

Cesar Viveros Performer

Alison Mustokoff Performer

Chloe Marie Performer

Casie Girvin Performer

Maddie Hopfield Performer

Gavi Weitzman Visual Artist

Van Ngoc Tran Nguyen Visual Artist

Rosanna D’Orazio Choreographer

Andy Mellon Technical Director

Abby Golden Stage Manager

Support

Your Agency Inc 501(c)3 Producer for Make Bank

FRINGE FESTIVAL CO-PRODUCERS:

Anne & Edward Wagner Festival Producers

Lisa Roberts and David Seltzer Icon Producers

Mark & Tobey Dichter Star Producers

About the Artists

Meg Saligman

For the past 30 years, Meg Saligman has created large-scale public artworks worldwide, including some of our nation’s largest murals. Though she has created works across the USA and internationally, Saligman’s seminal murals in Philadelphia are considered a catalyst for the contemporary mural movement. With a focus on community engagement, collaboration, and facilitating social exchange in pursuit of shared experience, Saligman consistently amplifies local culture in her designs and the communities she works within. She seamlessly combines both the classical and the contemporary using paint, glass, light, and people to give new life to existing architecture. In addition to her iconic murals, Saligman takes on the same challenging subject matter in her temporary and permanent architectural installations.

Meg painted Philadelphia’s landmark Common Threads for Mural Arts Philadelphia at Broad and Spring Garden Streets. Other well-known works in her native city include Philadelphia Muses, Perspective and Perception in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts 2014, and Passing Through, seen daily by a hundred thousand motorists on Interstate 76.

Highlights from the past decade include public installations for Pope Francis’ visit to Philadelphia in 2015 and for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 2016. Additionally, in 2015, Saligman and her team produced a 42, 000+ square foot mural in Chattanooga, Tennessee that highlighted the city’s complex racial and cultural dynamics.

Saligman’s work has been featured by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Public Art Review, the Today Show, and numerous others. She has received honors from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mid Atlantic Council for the Arts. She has received the Moore College of Art & Design Visionary.

Recently, Meg quit her day job and purchased an historic bank. “Make Bank” is the first step in a journey to open MoA, a bank with no traditional currency, as an evolving immersive art installation – MoA Bank, opening in 2025. Stay tuned and make bank with us!

Dylan Smythe

Dylan Smythe is a lover of rhythm, bodies, people, and movement. Interest in play and improvisation has led him to work with creators such as Lily Kind as a member of the Wolfthicket ensemble, and with Lillian Ransijn as one half of Rough & Tumble Productions. Following a decade-long passion studying the Afro-Brazilian art of capoeira, he continues training in multiple queer-rooted Afro-diasporic dance styles, including House and Waacking, at Urban Movement Arts.

Lillian Ransijn

Lilian is a Philadelphia and Atlanta-based director, intimacy coordinator, teaching artist, actor, dancer, and choreographer. Tapping into performance as a space of elegiac and erotic ritual—fertile for what some call the 6th stage of grief, meaning-making— their works for stage and screen find beauty in the grotesque and humor in the ludicrous challenge of moving through and metabolizing everyday life/inherited lifetimes.

Casie Girvin

Casie is an actor, acrobat, singer, and physical theatre artist based in Philadelphia. She thrives combining her life-long passions of gymnastics and the performing arts into new pieces. Casie recently devised and performed THROUGH HOOPS, an autobiographical vocalise for soprano on Lyra. Other favorite performances include “Charlotte” in the CHARLOTTE’S WEB (Arden Theatre Co), and “John Webster” in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (Capital Repertory Theatre). Casie received their BM in Classical Vocal Performance from Temple University’s Boyer College of Music, and when she’s not performing, teaches voice lessons and choir to adults and children. Casie is also faculty at Circadium School of Contemporary Circus, and the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts. Next up, she will be singing the role of “Edith Wilkinson Cook” in the World Premiere of Steven Crino’s new opera, SIX AUTUMNS ON THE HUDSON. Huge thanks to Meg, Terry, Lynn, and the whole team for including them in this one-of-a-kind project.
Thrilled to be at the bank!

Maddie Hopfield

Maddie Hopfield is a queer, hapa/Japanese American choreographer, performer, and taiko drummer based in New York City. She has shown her work at LifeWorld, the MAAS building, Urban Movement Arts, Vox Populi, and Baby’s All Right. As a dancer she has collaborated with Kayla Bobalek, Julia Bryck, and Marin Day, and performed with Paris Cullen & Sarah Zucchero, Lindsey Jennings, Maya Lee-Parritz, Amalia Colón-Nava, Leah Stein Dance Company, Philly Kerplop (Vince Johnson), Lily Kind, Lillian Ransijn, and Concept Kinetics (“Cricket” / James Colter), among others.

Chloe Marie

Chloe Marie is a multi-disciplinary artist based on the Lenni Lenape Land also known as Philadelphia. Originally from the Kumeyaay nation also known as San Diego, California, Chloe attended the San Diego School of creative and performing arts, and in 2013 moved to Philadelphia to attend The University of the Arts where they received their BFA in 2017. While at UARTS they worked with various artists including Kyle and Dinita Clark,Doug Varone, Netta Yerushalmy, and Yazmeen Godder. Chloe currently collaborates with artists of multiple disciplines and is excited
to expand their teaching practice. Chloe realizes the immense privilege they have to ponder the complexities of choosing art as their primary way to exist and express; they are extremely thankful for those in their life who continue to support and care for them.

Theo Laws

Theo Laws, the voice of the Teller was born and raised in Philadelphia. Theo graduated from the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, where drama was his main focus, being taught by celebrity acting coach, Melvin Williams.  Currently Theo is an entrepreneur,  overseeing 2 businesses: Touch Of Class Floors & More as well as Touch Of Class Commercial Cleaning. Theo also works as a private bartender as well as providing private security. Theo is what some would consider a Renaissance man. 

Cesar Viveros

Cesar Viveros has been creating public art in Philadelphia since 1997. As well as being a muralist, César also performs Aztec dances and ceremonies, sculpts altars, creates frescos and works in a variety of materials from mosaics to feathers. Along with his visual artwork, César has also created documentaries as an avenue to give communities a voice.

Alison Mustokoff

Alison Mustokoff is a Philadelphia based ceramic artist. Her work explores the intersection of female identity, motherhood, and self through the interplay of clay and female ornamentation. She works with dark stoneware as a palette for her painted patterns, beading, flowers, and crystals.

Katarina Poljak

Katarina Poljak is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary performance artist whose work has been shown at The Kimmel Center, Vox Populi Gallery, Icebox Project Space, and several international film festivals including ARFF Paris, Croatian Fashion Film, Indie Short, and Rethink Dance. Their often performance based films are informed by a critique of social traditions and technology. Scenes located in their work immerse the audience in a fantastical universe steeped in retro futurism, sculptural set-design & ornate hand-made costumery. They have been greatly influenced by their collaborations with experimental film and performance artist Kathy Rose and are invested in continuing to create work that references both the past and future of mass culture, and the unspoken boundaries that define our social lives. Poljak received a BFA from University of the Arts, where they studied both Dance and Film, and was awarded the Shannon D. Moore major film award for their thesis film in 2019. They are intereste  in humanity’s trajectory into a “posthumanism” and how this is framed by our sense of the idealized human body. Their work evokes a sense of surrealist suspense, indulges in contemporary culture’s collective obsession with the spectacle of gore, and connects audiences to the visceral nervous system of the grotesque. The imagery they compile suggests an exaggerated evolution so extreme that we see the horrors of the glamorized human form. Poljak’s latest film Incredible Machine Glass Body was selected, screened, and won at several international film festivals in 2020. They are an associate professor at The University of the Arts, School of Film and currently a 2023 Artist in Residence at Mascher Space Cooperative. In these positions they continue to curate interdisciplinary performative work involving projection and the body and are working to bring a new short film, Source Architecture to life.

Terry Guerin

Terry Guerin spent 32 years making theatre with students at Friends’ Central School. During that time she introduced them to the work of Pig Iron Theatre where she now serves on the board of directors. She is a docent at the Paul Robeson House and Museum.

Ensemble

About FringeArts

FringeArts is Philadelphia’s home for contemporary performance, presenting progressive, world-class art that expands the imagination and boldly defies expectation. Our programming exposes audiences to genre-defying dance, theater, and music performances by accomplished and emerging innovators who push the boundaries of art-making and redefine the artistic landscape worldwide.

FringeArts Staff + Board

FRINGEARTS STAFF

Nick Stuccio
President & Producing Director

Melissa E. Bridge
Director of Finance

Amy Kurzban
General Manager

Devi Bass
Grants & Front of House Database Manager 

Lindsay Bedford
Director of Strategic Partnerships and Community Outreach

Mikaela Boone
Programming and Fringe Festival Associate

Josh Bruton
Head of Audio

Anna Buller
Development Manager

Director of Production
Kristen Ruthemeyer Hammer

Will Lincke
Finance Associate

Kristen McCollum
Seasonal Marketing Associate 

Melissa Negro
Marketing & Communications Director

Associate Production Manager
Kelly Orenshaw

Simon Rabinowitz
Fringe Festival Coordinator

Sydney Norris
Master Electrician

Carolyn Schlecker
Senior Advisor Operations

Chuck Whitters
Technical Director

BOARD
Mark Dichter
Chair
Jennifer Bohnenberger
Vice Chair/Secretary
Lisa P. Young
Treasurer
Donald Baines
Tony P. Forte
David Hoffman
Eve Hyppolite
Virginia G Susini
David Lipson
Tom Lussenhop
Jake Reardonl
Darryl Ridgeway
Theresa Spencer
Nick Stuccio
Paul Wright