After 18 years on the boards, Brian Sanders, artistic director of JUNK, showed thematic maturity with last year’s Live Arts smash, Sanctuary. This year, Sanders hews to a morbid theme in this self-produced Fringe work, a ghoulishly touching show prompted by recent deaths of people close to him. If part of grief is healing and part of healing is laughter, then Sanders puts the nail in grief’s coffin.

Part of Sanders’ genius lies in finding the right venue. For Dancing Dead, he’s in an old factory sub-basement rigged with roping and large squares of real turf, dimly lit by Terry Smith. Sanders, a crotchety old cemetery caretaker, does his rounds on skates or a rickety bike, pulling Connor Senning from a mound of dirt where he’d been lying long before the large audience entered.

Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/phillystage/Review-Dancing-Dead.html#ixzz1X1fONrPg

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Review: Zon-Mai

By Merilyn Jackson

Zon-Mai. It means home in French slang – maison backwards, but (appropriately) it also sounds like my zone in reverse. Everything about this film installation is turned inside out and upended with 21 dancers from 10 countries allowing us a peek at their intimate domains.

Each is an emigrant from somewhere else, and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui set dances on them in their current places, to perform in their bedrooms and bathrooms, under their tables, on their windowsills. Larbi and cameraman Gilles Delmas try to discover what home means when you have to set up far away from the home you knew.

The installation is shaped like a house made of screens, and the projections on it are like windows through which we can spy.

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/phillystage/Review-Zon-Mai.html#ixzz1WyIJGvwm