Troupe

Temple University Repertory Theater, a new professional summer company, launched last weekend with Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov and William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure , which will run in alternating performances. The professional casts are composed of mid-career students in the theater department's master of fine arts program, plus faculty. Following are reviews of the inaugural productions.

The Jamison Project, a dance troupe founded a year ago by the Philadelphia- born dancer-choreographer Judith Jamison, will be in residence at the University of the Arts from Monday through July 28. During the eight-week period, Jamison will rehearse her company for a national tour, teach in the university's dance department and at various city sites, give lecture-demonstrations, and present performances of works in progress. Jamison and members of her troupe will give a lecture-demonstration at 11 a.m. July 27 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at 3 p.m. July 28 at the University's Great Hall at Broad and Pine Streets.

Footlighters Theater took first place in a field of six nonprofit companies at Saturday's Pennsylvania Community Theater Festival. The troupes performed one-act plays or excerpts from full-length plays at the Footlighters' Berwyn venue and were judged by three stage directors. Footlighters won for "I Hate Hamlet" and will travel to Washington in April for a regional competition. West Chester and Barley Sheaf Players won first runner-up and will be the alternate.

Moscow's famed Bolshoi Ballet has produced an offspring. Bolshoi artistic director Yuri Grigorovich announced at a news conference yesterday that he had formed the Bolshoi Ballet Grigorovich Company, a 60- member touring troupe. The junior Bolshoi will debut Nov. 23 at Texas A&M University with Grigorovich's version of The Nutcracker. It also will visit several other cities, as yet unnamed, through December. Philadelphia may be included in the company's itinerary in the spring, organizers said.

In these hard-pressed financial times, when most dance companies are fearing for their futures, here comes a troupe with nothing but a future, the brand-new Dances/Greg Myers & Company. This troupe, founded by former ZeroMoving dancer Greg Myers, made its debut last night at Temple University's Conwell Dance Theater, with a promising program of four pieces, all choreographed by Myers. It began with a surprisingly formal study in movement - surprising because even though Myers dances alone against a quartet of dancers, his aloneness has no thematic fallout.

The Heralds, an ecumenical musical troupe, is seeking new members. The 15-year-old group performs a Lenten musical called Celebrate Life in area churches. Practice will be from 7:30 to 9 p.m. Jan. 6 at the Incarnation-Holy Sacrament Episcopal Church, 3000 Garrett Rd., Drexel Hill. For more information, call 610-328-6300. CANDLELIGHT SERVICES Christmas Eve candlelight services will be held at the following times and places: At 7:30 p.m. at Aston Presbyterian Church, Concord Road and Baldwin Run Drive.

A rijsttafel is a hearty spread of Indonesian food, usually eaten once a week and set out for hours at a time. Americans might call it a smorgasbord. Last night at the Painted Bride, a 16-member troupe of musicians and singers from Indonesia presented a rijsttafel of classical, folk and popular music from the Sundanese culture, which occupies the western third of Java. The troupe, which is traveling across the country as part of the Festival of Indonesia, represented a culture that is related to, but distinctive from, that of the rest of Java.

If you like your dancing hard, fast and intense, then Koresh Dance Company is for you. Koresh's new program, Culture Shock, opened last night at Drexel's Mandell Theater, with a second performance tonight. Looking for Venus, one of two premieres, showed off this company's strengths. This six-part piece (choreographed by Artistic Director Ronen Koresh, as were all four works here) tackles the familiar domain of love and relationships, but does so with hardly a shred of sentimentality.

Teatro Del Sur is not just from Argentina. The theater troupe is of Argentina as much as the pampas, and when it travels abroad it brings its native country with it. Last year on its U.S. tour, the highly creative company brought a piece that dealt with the Argentine problem of the "disappeared," the many people who vanished under the country's deposed brutal military dictatorship. On its present visit, the troupe is performing Warsaw Tango, which, as the title implies, seems to be about the country's most famous and popular dance style.

More and more frequently, the publicists in Atlantic City seem unable to avoid the temptation to excitedly announce, "The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming," which you may recall is the title of a vintage movie produced in the days that the Soviet Union was regarded as an evil, godless place - a threat to our way of life. Naturally, the Russians who have been coming to Atlantic City during the last several years have hit the Jersey Shore with intentions of conquering only our hearts.

Imagine that José Garces and Stephen Starr joined forces. Now imagine that instead of building a new facility lined with exotic decor and a model-pretty staff, these celebrity chefs used the partnership to develop their own culinary aesthetic, and put the pursuit of cuisine ahead of a restaurant's sustainability. A merger of similar stature and quality took place in the Philadelphia dance community recently, when dancer-choreographer Kate Watson-Wallace and choreographer-poet-impresario Jaamil Kosoko rechristened anonymous bodies, Watson-Wallace's company, as a joint collaborative for the pair's work.

About 4:30 a.m., Bradley Wrenn knew his fellow cast members needed a lift: They had been acting for nearly nine hours straight - and had 15 more to go. So he scrapped his fireman's uniform and came out on stage in a thong. "I decided I should match that," said fellow cast member Gwendolyn Rooker. Out she came sans maid costume, in just a bra and panties. And so it went at Plays & Players Theatre in Center City on Saturday, where Brat Productions staged a 24-hour version of The Bald Soprano.

It's 60 minutes of sheer delight - jam-packed with slapstick humor, astonishing acrobatic feats, witty visual effects, romance, heartbreak, and music ranging from jazz to Tuvan throat singing. Oyster , inspired by a book of poems by filmmaker Tim Burton, is a signature work of Israel's award-winning Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollak Dance Company. The troupe's three-day run at the Annenberg Center, which began Thursday, marks the end of its latest U.S. tour. While each of the vignettes that make up Oyster evokes its own mood, the overall sense of eeriness and androgyny - and especially the dancers' stark white makeup, fright wigs, and outrageous costumes - are certainly Burtonesque.

It's the little inventive stuff in children's theater that can excite the kids and charm the adults. In its first stab at family theater, the young Off-Color Theatre Company's original show, Tiny Tales From a Big Chair , has the clever stuff, but not enough. Tiny Tales is supposed to be a comedy - the troupe, mostly University of the Arts grads, came together in the 2009 Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe with a mission to create comedy. The show is lighthearted throughout, but not as funny as it tries to be. It lacks the constant stream of stage business that would raise it a notch from merely amusing.

Some audience members said they were in shock and awe after Compagnie Marie Chouinard's opening-night performance Thursday of Rite of Spring at the Annenberg Center, as the Montreal company began its first visit to Philadelphia in 17 years. But after seeing Chouinard's Rite in Phoenix in 1996 and longing to see it again all these years, I was just in shock. It was so unlike the original, my favorite of many Rites I've seen. Company agent Paul Tanguay said audiences at a planned appearance in Shanghai in October will see the original, with the white- and tan-colored leotards and Rober Racine's 12-minute prelude, Sound Signatures . But we get a bargain-basement version, without the Racine or the costumes.

After 12 years of creating dance, commissioning work from world-class choreographers, and opening a theater and studio in a converted mechanic's shop, former Martha Graham principal dancer Jeanne Ruddy announced Monday that she was folding her Philadelphia modern dance company. "I came to the decision that it was time for me to move on, and that I had done what it was that I had set out to do," Ruddy, 58, said in her office at the Performance Garage on Brandywine Street. She paused frequently to get her emotions in check, and drew her long, dark-blond hair up in a clip several times, before pulling it down again moments later.

Alexei Ratmansky's Jeu de Cartes was built on the very specific talents of Bolshoi Ballet royalty, international luminaries such as Natalia Osipova, Svetlana Lunkina, and Maria Alexandrova. The fleet, energetic ballet, set to Stravinsky, was choreographed in 2005 to honor the 80th birthday of Maya Plisetskaya, one of the most prima of ballerinas ever to grace a stage. It won a major Russian award for best choreography. And only the Bolshoi has ever danced it. Until this week.

If you're waiting for the buzz about what will be the big-deal, dark-horse hit of the Fringe Festival, here it is: a raw-talking, blood-pumping, street-smart and altogether charming piece with the unlikely title Heavy Metal Dance Fag . It comes from the minds of the highly physical local troupe called Tribe of Fools, which also ran away successfully in the last Fringe with an oddball take on Dracula, for which audience members had to sign waivers...

Sunday Experimental drama The conceit of Rude Mechs' comedy The Method Gun is that it is based on the faux history of acting coach Stella Burden, who once developed "the most dangerous acting technique in the world. " After their guru's disappearance, her troupe - which has been rehearsing A Streecar Named Desire for nine years, using balloons, beer, and a loaded pistol - tries to carry on. The Live Arts Festival show goes on at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Wilma Theater , 265 S. Broad St. Tickets are $15 to $30. Call 215-413-1318.

At 14 hours long, you're going to need the gentle accoutrements of chair massage and seated henna tattooing offered up at this year's version of the Kimmel Center's annual Summer Solstice Celebration. Not every aspect of the Summer Solstice event will go by in a heated blur. The First-Person Arts Story Slam of true-to-life prose may be harrowing, but how loud can a group of tall-tale tellers get? Classical guitarist Miloð Karadagli will bathe the stage with a sense of calm rather than commotion.