

The popular, long running works-in-progress series on the first Monday of every month.
Come see a roster of Philly’s most talented artists perform new material from shows they are working on in this fast-paced sampling of contemporary theater, dance, performance art, and everything in between. Scratch Night features short performances by four-to-six companies/artists, offering an inside look at the future of performance.
60 minutes
FREE / Suggested Donation
This Month’s line up:
Brilliant Traces by Irina Varina
A solo piece about longing. There will be objects – some ordinary, some a little bizarre. A reading from a play. And moving around.
They Extract! by Alma’s Engine
They Extract! is a new play by Eppchez. Unplug into an imaginary era where mining emotion keeps the lights on. A combustible story about love, but by no means a love story. Funny, physical, lyrical, and heart breaking; poke at that uneasy feeling of scarcity, so ludicrous in a world that is so abundant.
Photo by Eppchez
Beowulf/Grendel by The Renegade Company
Enter the cemetery. Follow one of two figures, standing in the sunset. You won’t know if you have yoked yourself to Beowulf, or Grendel until the end. There is a monster in the dark, atop a pile of bodies. Will you be able to see clearly enough to know who it is? A site-specific performance based on the Old English epic, Beowulf/Grendel takes the audience on a journey through historic Mount Moriah Cemetery, inviting you into a world where storytelling is always suspect, and any deed can wear the guise of honor.
UArts Sophomore Performance and Coaching Project by University of the Arts Dance majors
Sophomore Project offers students the opportunity to make physical, conceptual, choreographic, performative and intellectual connections through engaging in creative process. This project assists students in making important physical/conceptual connections within the development, rehearsal and performance of new dance work.
Excerpt from ‘Jerk’ by Alex Romania
This physically vulnerable choreography frames the male body between violence and pleasure — a microphone is bound to the body and swung from the pelvis evoking forms in the realm of BDSM, pornography, athletics, games, and flagellation. Through genital hypnosis and rigorous discomfort, this is a dance of (narcissistic) pleasure and (quiet) longing, (self) mutilation and (self) care. A dance to flatten and complexify the male body, to tenderize the flesh, to move beyond and to newly inhabit — a phallic solo to recompose the phallus.