Jill's PLAF Diary for Saturday, August 30–Tuesday, September 2

Car
I still remember, two years later, how breathtaking I found Kate Watson-Wallace's House. It was a little voyeuristic, incredibly poignant, and breathtakingly beautiful to watch. Her follow-up, Car, has been two seasons in the making (excerpts of it previewed at last year's Festival), and though it lacks the emotional poignancy of House, Wallace has managed to one-up herself on thrills. Performed for four ticketholders at a time in the parking lot adjoining University City's FreshGrocer, Car takes place in and around first one car, then two vehicles: a silver Jetta sporting an Obama sticker, and a purple PhillyCarShare hybrid hatchback. (The two vehicles left little room for doubt as to the dancers' political views; I'd say that might make some in the audience uncomfortable, but realistically, the majority of the Fringe audience shares these views.) Because of the close quarters of the "theatre" in which the show is set, Car is at times jarring—dancers perform atop and inside the car while you're still seated—but in some ways, this only serves to make the show more impressive and more effective. It's the kind of show you don't soon forget, nor would you want to. (A word to the wise, though: if you get motion sick easily, sit on the far left or far right of the backseat in the Jetta. Trust me.)

Sweet By-and-By
I'm beginning to suspect that I like the idea of Pig Iron Theatre Company more than the actuality of it. Because although I often say how much I like Pig Iron, I'm often disappointed, if not flat-out unimpressed, by their work. And so it was with their Live Arts contribution this year, which they conceived, wrote, and produced in collaboration with Daniel Rudholm of Sweden's Teater Sláva. Rudholm is the only actor who appears onstage, and he's a talented one: charming and affable, he sings Joe Hill's music with great gusto and moves about the stage as if he owns it. The set, although minimalist, is effective, with a wall of pinned-together envelopes serving as a video screen for the multimedia films that accompany the play. But despite all of this, I was left bored with the show, wondering why, exactly, I was supposed to care about Rudholm's (great-?) grandfather who carried an envelope of Joe Hill's ashes everywhere he went until he died. The show was not, as the program promised, about the protest singer and union organizer—which would have been far more interesting—but rather used his biography to tell the story of an immigrant. The immigrant's story was not especially extraordinary, nor was it especially different from the many immigrant stories that we've heard in the past. Even with all of Rudholm's talent, Sweet By-and-By ultimately fails to impress.

Everyone
Let me just say, bluntly, that the only good thing I have to say about Everyone is that its run is over, and none of the rest of you will have to suffer through it like I did. Although advertised as a dance program, the piece contained no skill, no technique, and the only talent required was the ability to count to very high numbers in order for the, err, "dancers" to figure out exactly which of two hundred identical cymbal beats they were supposed to enter the stage on. Everyone's 75 minutes stretched on and on as I watched a motley group of hipsters run around and dry hump on stage, looking and sounding much more like recess at the psych ward than a dance performance, and between the fact that the audience was seated onstage and that Karen Getz was in the audience, literally sitting at my feet and blocking the one exit route I might have taken (I love her in everything she does, but really, if the show had gone on much longer, I can't say I wouldn't have shoved her aside and let the "dancers" sort everything out), I was beginning to feel claustrophobic. And ever so slightly homicidal. I'm a big fan of modern dance, of performances that reek just a little bit of pretension and leave the audience members scratching their heads, but this production was so bad that afterward, I had to find a bar in which I could try to drink myself into forgetfulness. It didn't work, but thanks muchly to the staff at Jack's Firehouse in Fairmount for helping me try.

7 Veils
Although I'm not seeing Karen Getz's 2008 Live Arts contribution, Disco Descending until this evening, she gets her second mention in this diary here, and this time not because I briefly contemplated hurling her into a dry-humping group of hipsters pretending to be dancers. No, rather, I feel that I should mention her here because the pre-show component of 7 Veils, in which one of the show's two dancers gleefully hangs laundry and lays out pairs of shoes, all the while moving in time with the greatest pop hits of the early sixties (Dave Clark Five, anyone?). This charming bit of nostalgia was right up Getz's alley, if a bit less perverse than some of the action in Suburban Love Songs. The performance gets off to a charming start this way, and also helps to ensure that the scene will be set when the pre-show is over and the second dancer takes the stage. At that point, the tone shifts, as we see the second dancer (unfortunately, the program doesn't indicate which of the dancers—Sarah e. Jacobs [sic] and Erin Malley—is which), over the next forty minutes or so, take on the personnas of the people whose clothes and shoes are first carefully placed on, then indelicately strewn about, the stage. This isn't a straightforward dance performance by any means: the second dancer doesn't only dance, but she also performs monologues pieced together from text sources as diverse as Chuck Pahlaniuk, lonleygirl15, Margaret Atwood, and Craigslist personal ad posters. She takes the characters on with full physicality, and the first dancer joins her onstage, sometimes as a secondary character, sometimes as an onstage prop mistress, but always as a compliment to the action. Regrettably, it takes some time for the audience (all ten of us in attendance last night) to get into the feel of the piece, and by the point we find ourselves immersed, the piece is over. There's much promise in 7 Veils, but forty-five minutes wasn't enough time to allow the audience to see the performance at its full potential.