Philly Fringe opens LAB, Live Arts Brewery, in Northern Liberties for new works

This year's Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe opens Friday with a pioneering idea that could become a model for new work, a project far outlasting the festival's two-plus weeks of cutting-edge, oddball, occasionally thought-provoking, and sometimes brilliant performances.

With major grants, an expanded new space in Northern Liberties, and a determined leader, the festival is tackling research and development - a concept generally associated with new drugs and new cars, but not new works of art.

It has developed a program called LAB - the Live Arts Brewery - that pays a handful of theater artists, dancers, and musicians (at this point all local) to create work. It gives them the space to do it, the equipment to do it right, small audiences to react as it evolves, and the oversight of a major-festival producer to guide it to polished completion.

The idea is simple: With R&D, artists get to develop work in the sort of incubator big companies use for their best creative minds. And the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe gets first crack at the results.

The idea had been floating in the head of Nick Stuccio, 47, the Fringe's cofounder and producing director, for at least five years. Why, he kept asking himself, couldn't artists use the same plan, and similar procedures, to develop work as, say, a computer company uses to develop products? Why must so many artists create work with no support at all? And why is there no organization to structure this sort of R&D?

"I got sick of talking about it," Stuccio says. Last year, when the festival headquarters moved from a cramped, more costly Center City office to a large North Fifth Street building that was once a brewery, "I said, 'Here's a big empty room. We can use it. Let's just go ahead and do it.' "

So almost under the radar, the Fringe last fall invited a handful of artists to use its space and resources for a set period of time; initially there was no money involved.

The organization couldn't have done even that much without the support of two real estate investors who are longtime friends of the 14-year-old festival, which includes 20 Live Arts programs selected and backed by the festival administration, as well as almost 190 Philly Fringe productions, a free-for-all for artists who essentially invite themselves.

The real estate investors, Michael di Paolo and Gene LeFevre, negotiated a low rent for the 22,000-square-foot building at 919 N. Fifth St., of which the Fringe occupies 10,000 square feet.