Site-specific performance work Portal – meaning entrance, opening, connecting across thresholds – invites audience and performers to experience unexpected, surprising and spontaneous inter-connections among the street traffic, sidewalk pedestrians, and the indoor café space. The glass door of the Café, surrounded by glass windows, offers a “portal” of communication and interaction. Intentional and spontaneous events of meetings, partings, crossings, interactions, color, costume, sound and movement integrate an inter-generational group of performers, audience and the general public.

Performers include LSDC members David Konyk, Andrew Mars, Megan Wilson Stern, Michele Tantoco and multi-generation community participants.

$20 / 50 minutes

Photo: Lois Greenfield

Now in its 15th anniversary season, Leah Stein Dance Company brings dance to people from diverse backgrounds, age groups and communities. Inspired by the physics of movement, the forces of nature and the interplay of architecture and movement, Artistic Director Leah Stein seeks to deepen and enliven a sense of place. The Company is a dynamic group of talented dancers who work collectively to realize Stein’s vision. Leah Stein, Artistic Director, formed the Leah Stein Dance Company in 2001. LSDC’s site-specific dances have been performed locally, throughout the United States and internationally in Canada, Scotland, Romania, Poland, and Japan. Major works include TURBINE at the Fairmount Water Works in collaboration with composer Byron Au Yong and Alan Harler of the Mendelssohn Club Chorus, battle hymns at the 23rd Street Armory with a co-commissioned score by David Lang, In Situ, created for the extraordinary DanceBase building in Edinburg, Scotland, and GATE at Eastern State Penitentiary. Stein has been supported by Leeway Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts including three Fellowships in Choreography, an Independence Foundation Choreographic Fellowship, a Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland among others. In 2014, with support from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, LSDC engaged in a year-long Voice/Movement research project with composer Pauline Oliveros. LSDC facilitates an annual residency in site-specific performance with high school students at Science Leadership Academy. Stein has taught extensively at Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr Colleges and Drexel University.

According to Hidden City, FRIEDA’s Café is “a hub for community art workshops, vocational training, industrial design prototyping, and, ultimately, a place to reconnect people of all ages and economic situations. Rather than create yet another place to get coffee, the founders of FRIEDA for Generations want to bring the young and old together in a forward-thinking, design-minded environment.”

LSDC’s commitment to intergenerational work and connecting people from a wide spectrum of backgrounds, age groups, and communities makes this partnership between LSDC and FRIEDA’S Café a perfect fit.