McLane writes: “The ladies performing were Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese rather than “mostly Caucasian”, and the company is most certainly not comprised of my students. Rather, they are performers with extensive professional performance background coming from ballet, modern, and Georgian dance companies, and we perform regularly for corporate, embassy, and special events. I am loath to categorize these women as students performing in a recital (ouch). Finally, the majority of the choreography is a far cry from “belly dance”, but rather a fuller fusion of many dance forms.”

I stand by my initial assessment that it looked like a recital (though not a bad one: In my review I wrote, “the costumes are exquisite, the performers are elegant and seductive, and the dancing is very, very good.”) I also stand by my criticism that it lacked a compelling narrative or sense of plot, to which McLane also responded in her comment.

Dancing to Ancient Rhythms

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 25 @ 2:30 p.m.

They say: “Visually stunning vignettes of the sacred and profane, the transcendent and mundane. Theatrical dance inspired by the wisdom of the East in a captivating first Fringe Festival performance by the critically acclaimed Ancient Rhythms Dance Company.”

Mike says: Before I rip into this show as a terrible, terrible fit for Fringe, let me just say that the costumes are exquisite, the performers are elegant and seductive, and the dancing is very, very good. Despite all that, this show is the worst Fringe has to offer.

Why? Because Dancing to Ancient Rhythms is an hour of belly dances performed by students of the Ancient Rhythms Dance Company, some of whom are still in high school. In other words, it’s a dance recital. On top of that, it’s located in the Apothecary, which is poorly insulated for temperature and sound—the latter so much so that last night’s dance routines were frequently interrupted by what sounded like a much more interesting show next door.

The dances, though well executed on the individual level, didn’t tell a story. (A narrator introduced each dance with a sentence or two about priestesses, the cosmos, purity, etc. This hardly counts as storytelling.) In fact, the only thing each number communicated is just how popular belly dancing is with suburban teenage girls. Ergo, the show falls flat even from a theatrical perspective.

See it if: You don’t mind sitting on musty church pews in a stifling hot building while a line of young, mostly white women stand in a line and belly dance while making Xena noises.

Skip it if: You do mind the above, or have medium-to-high standards for interpretative dance performances.

Remaining Performances:  Friday, July 24th at 8:30 p.m.; Sunday, July 26th at 6:30 p.m.

They Say:  “The fifteen year high school reunion of the Fighting Eagles brings out the teenager in 7 former friends. But as the drink count rises and secrets are revealed, will they manage to stay that way?”

Glen’s Take: The above description promises — or threatens, I suppose, depending on your point of view — a tried and true reunion-sparks-shattering-revelations drama in the That Championship Season mode.  Which is essentially what Late Bloomers and Glory Days delivers — you’ll know you’re on rails from beginning to end, but the track runs pretty smooth.

Local playwright Allyson Currin knows that we ‘ve seen this all before, and plays with those expectations a bit.  That shattering revelation is deliberately anti-climactic, and — mercifully — has nothing to do with anyone coming out of the damn closet because that shit is, can we all agree, A) not particularly shattering, and B) SERIOUSLY tired, already.

But Jessica North Macie’s direction doesn’t seem to be coming at Currin’s script from any particular angle.  True, this  allows us a clear, unobstructed view of the performances.  It doesn’t, however, give us much else to hang onto, and the evening starts to seem more like a tag-team actor showcase than a narrative about which we’re supposed to care.  This feeling is underscored at the close of the play, which calls for characters to make a symbolic gesture that, in this production, comes off more capital-S-Symbolic/on-the-nose/writerly than real.

But if this show’s intent is simply to introduce us to some actors, let’s play along.  All the performers are graduates of DC’s National Conservatory of the Dramatic Arts, and they do solid work.  Oh, there’s some stiffness, some rushing through lines.  And with the notable exceptions of Leigh Anna Fry and Michael Harris, there’s also a vague but pervasive reluctance to commit to the script’s comic touches, to really hit the jokes.

But again: You can go into Late Bloomers and Glory Days confident that you’ll get out of it … pretty much what you imagine you’ll get out of it.  Which, people tell me, is what going to a high school reunion feels like.

(Note: Harris is not scheduled to appear in Sunday’s production; Fry will not appear in tonight’s.)

See it if: You’re on Facebook to reconnect with high school friends.

Skip it if:  You’re not on Facebook, because you see very little daylight between the phrase, “You can reconnect with people from high school!” and the phrase “You can get spastic colon!”

The Bedroom at Fort Fringe

Remaining Performances:

Just the one:  Wednesday, July 15 at 8:00 p.m.

They Say: “The fifth century meets the twenty-first when Lance-Corporal Pellinore is shipped off to Baghdad.  It’s Arthur’s story…as you’ve never heard it before.”

Glen’s Take: Well, that doesn’t really cover it.  No, if you want to know what to expect, there’s a few lines from the program that’ll do the job better.

I’m not talking the extensive bibliographic exegesis of source texts, or the quotes from Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sir Thomas Malory and Dennis (”You can’t expect to weild supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!”) the Peasant.

No, it’s this bit, from the cover:  ”The Rise of General Arthur, an original presentation of stories from a theatrical work-in-progress by phillip andrew bennett low”.

Got that?  Here’s the take-home:  1. Stories. 2. Work-in-Progress. (And okay, 3. Name in lowercase. Pretension threat level: orange.)

What Low is up to here is a staged reading of his original prose poem.  It’s never anything less than interesting, but neither is it theater — not quite, not yet.  Theatricality, yes:  There’s some props, and Low does step away from the reading stand now and again to give particular scenes some added dimension.

He’s also brought some serious scholarship to bear on this Gulf War iteration of the Arthur myth. (Technically the Pellinore myth, I suppose, as Arthur and Merlin don’t really show up for a while.)  Maybe you’ll feel, as I did, the dead weight of all that scholarship pressing down on the evening, but you likely won’t mind, as Low has a hell of an ear for language. Those are some downright beautiful sentences he’s uttering up there, and if they sound too written, and inextricably bound to those pages he’s turning so carefully, well, big deal: the guy gives good aural.

He seems to know this, and can’t help a bit of preciousness from leaking in to his delivery — he clearly loves this work, these words. Once he begins to love them enough to stop reading them and start really performing them, I daresay we’ll love them too.

See it if:  The whole go-for-broke, slapped-together nature of Fringe has begun to pall, and you’re in the mood for something that has clearly been wrought – carefully, meticulously (and, yeah, okay, a little over-) wrought.

Skip it if:  You used to chafe at storytime.

- muscle-bound bald guy, intensely discussing marginal tax rates and Congressional committee machinations, while monkey noises from “Please Listen: A Musical Chaos” waft from the Baldacchino

Leave a Tone After the Message!!!

Remaining Performances:
July 12 at 2:00p.m.

They say: Check your mirrors. Where’s True North? Five journeys to find the secret. You can’t get there from here. Who has the key? Where’s the lock-box? Talismans everywhere leading us forward and astray simultaneously.

Brett’s take: “My friend often asks me, ‘What is modern dance? Isn’t it just a bunch of people running back and forth across the stage?’”

That is not overheard gossip outside of this show; rather it is a quote from the first of four modern dance pieces that compose this hour-long show. What follows that quote: the dancers running back and forth across the stage.

With that cheeky self-awareness “Magnetic East” begins, but the promisingly winking tone is, alas, not sustained. The dancers are simply neither talented nor committed enough to blow the cliches up to humorous oversize. And so goes the rest of the hour: watching, I frequently wished to see the same concept performed by more capable dancers, or at least more capable actors: often, even when the movement grew interesting, the dancer’s faces were blank or strained, shattering the illusion (the exception being the pixieish Adrian Moore, whose expressive face showed what might have been).

The second piece, “Roma,” is a whimsy about two travelers in the Italian capital. It succeeds in creating gentle tension through a sine-wave-like oscillation between the dancers first matching exactly and then one echoing the other; but the individual moves are not always inspired. The multi-sectioned final piece, “Ice Cold Melt,” concerns a passage over a freezing mountain. Throughout the show, original music is performed live on instruments organic and electronic, and is often a highlight (the music is composed in the rehearsal process with the company), and in “Ice Cold Melt,” the standout movement is the one wherein Gary Rouzer plays on a series of found percussion objects. He transcends “some guy banging on stuff” and reaches “a musician conveying the sense-experience of iciness by differentiating between the timbres of wood on tin and plastic on aluminum.” But the choreography lacks creative force; too much arm waving-like-a-bird, too much fall-and-get-up.

However (for those playing the home game), I’ve skipped the third piece, and that is because it is perhaps, on its own, worth the price of admission. Choreographer/performer Chris Dohse (not part of the company) plays a sort of pajama-wearing lout, or perhaps a tragic W.C. Fields, captivating us with his haughtiness one moment and then surprising us with vulnerability the next. The performance is not perfect – as with the other dancers, he could use a good artistic shot of mime training – but it is interesting and somehow works with the bits of Alice Through the Looking Glass quoted therein.

The answer to the question about modern dance is this: it is movement freed from classical restraints, capturing emotions, ideas and moments. Dance Performance Group have freed their minds from typical subject matter; but their terpsichore does not live up to their conceptualizing.

See it if: You’re a glass-half-full type, who’ll forgive some flaws for the achievements; AND you’re an intuitive type, who can enjoy evocations without storylines.

Skip it if: You’ve ever been that friend ‘quoted’ above.

All That Was Left of Them

Remaining Performances:
July 11th @ 1 pm
July 11th @ 5:15 pm
July 12th @ 5 pm

They say: A toy soldier yearns for an impossible love. A girl is punished for her vanity. All That Was Left of Them combines the work of Hans Christian Anderson to praise the importance of fairy tales and question the way we tell stories.

Chris says: Sure enough, this show comprises two fairy tales.  The first is a doomed Toy Story love affair between a tin soldier and a paper doll (hint: he melts, she burns).  The second is a darker cautionary tale for naughty children.  A girl who was to bring a loaf of bread home to her mother has instead stepped on it to navigate her way across a mud puddle.  This misdeed propels her to the devil’s entrance hall, where she she finds herself entangled and starving in a web as demons taunt her with bread.

The tricky part of adapting a narrative work for the stage is making the “this happened, and then this happened” into action.  The cheater’s method is to leave the narration intact.  There are moments, especially in the first fairy tale, when one of the actors quotes from the fairy tale while another acts out the scene like a Christmas pantomime.

Mostly, however, the adaptors grapple with the flatness of narration not by banishing it but by making it into the performance.  The highlight of the evening is a series of retellings of the story of “The Girl Who Stepped on Bread” in the style of an evangelical sermon, a radio drama, a Broadway musical number, etc.

Is this mash-up of styles a choice (and a good one at that) or a consequence of too, too many aesthetic contributors (two directors and seven writers are credited)?  I want it to be the former, but I suspect it’s the latter.  In other words, there are some good bits in this performance, but the creators are not confident about their choices.

See it if: You like fairy tales.

Skip it if: College theater turns you off.