Sunday, August 01, 2010

Fringe 2010 - FFA2 - A Strange Dance/Storytelling Hybrid You Knew I'd Like

This time a three-in-one mash-up of Fringe vets from Fringe-For-All that no one should be surprised I'm looking forward to seeing...

My Mother Told Me

[...you better shop around... - blogger has had that song stuck in his head for weeks. Captain and Tenille? Shiver.]

Sara Stevenson Scrimshaw, with phillip andrew bennett low and DRP Dance

"Armed only with the dubious advice of his mother, the boy sets out to conquer a world full of peril, romance and perilous romance. Words twirl and limbs speak in this unique duet of storytelling and dance.

Dance, storytelling, and bluegrass -
Fringe veterans Sara Stevenson Scrimshaw, phillip andrew bennett low, and DRP Dance combine forces to create this genre-blending show of words and movement, set in the eastern hills of North America to a bluegrass score."


Sara Stevenson Scrimshaw is a returning favorite off my 2008 pre-Fringe Top 10 List for her dance comedy Fringe show Dance of the Whisky Faerie, which I gave 4 stars. I missed last year's offering from her, Mansion of Dust, so I'm happy to have a chance to catch her once again.

This year Sara teams up with another returning favorite (from my 2007 pre-Fringe Top 10 List), phillip andrew bennett low, of Maximum Verbosity. I wasn't as big a fan of phillip's 2008 Fringe show All Rights Reserved: A Libertarian Rage as I've been of a lot of his other work. But he dazzled both me and Mom last year with the 5 star presentation of The Rise of General Arthur.

And just to make the whole thing completely irresistable, they bring choreographer Danielle Robinson-Prater of DRP Dance into the mix. They quote me on their Fringe page about DRP so why try to paraphrase myself...

"What DRP's Artistic Director/Choreographer Danielle Robinson-Prater does best, create visually beautiful stage pictures full of movement...it has its own subconscious logic to it that's extremely satisfying...like good music, it sort of washes over you, submerging you in its world." (Fringe blogger Matthew Everett, 2008)

When phillip performed a chunk of the beginning of the show at a recent fundraiser for Maximum Verbosity, I wondered, "Why are his characters all speaking in southern accents?" Well, the Fringe-For-All preview cleared that up. Bluegrass music for the dance sequences. I'm still not entirely sure how this whole thing is going to congeal together. That was one of the challenges of Whisky Faerie, too, but Sara seems interested in finding ways to blend text and movement, comedy and drama and choreography and music. And with this group of collaborators, I'm more than willing to go along for the ride.

Plus, I'm curious if they ever get phillip to dance.

This is one of the Rockstar Storytellers Passport series. See all the Fringe shows, collect the trading cards and get a break on the new Rockstar Storyteller season of shows. Check out the passport page for the full list. It's a fun line-up.

DRP Dance MNArtists page

Joking Envelope website (Sara's theater company with husband Joseph Scrimshaw - jokingenvelope.com

Maximum Verbosity website - www.maximumverbosityonline.org

Their Fringe page

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