"Traditional opera has provided us an alternate view and way on reading our history," Yung said. "Learning how to read our tradition should be on our progressive cultural agenda."
The piece is part of a series called "Reinterpreting Tradition," a title that could apply equally well to numerous shows in this year's Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe, starting today through Sept. 18. Live Arts events were selected by festival producing director Nick Stuccio; the Fringe is open to anybody who wants a forum for their work.
As much as the intertwined experimental arts festivals, which take over the city for the next few weeks, are dedicated to new forms of expression, many of their performers are finding them by looking back at classic pieces and traditional forms.
Last Friday, the theater space on the fourth floor of Christ Church Neighborhood House was a chaos of cardboard and power tools, onstage and off. Puppeteer Beth Nixon, dressed in a safety-cone orange sweater featuring an image of an elk, rushed frantically around, singing a ukelele-accompanied song while wearing a cardboard deer head, or trying to fix the straps on a cardboard turtle shell for another actor.
Halfway through one scene, another character ran up and offered to sell her some matches, advising, "It's gonna get real dark around here real soon."
Getting dark is nothing new for Philly's Pig Iron Theatre Company, and neither is taking a twisted spin on a classic. For Live Arts 2007, the troupe turned Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" into a play performed by naked corpses in a morgue.
Last year, Western clichés, slapstick clowning and cartoon physicality combined in the madcap "Welcome to Yuba City." But this year, Pig Iron is creating a family-friendly fairy tale, albeit one with a distinctly Pig Iron sense of humor.
