Dorner's "Bodies in Urban Spaces' at Fringe Festival

For sheer magnetic excitement, the Vienna-based choreographer Willi Dorner set in motion on the streets of Center City one of the most engaging public performances seen in recent years.

Dorner's Live Arts Festival work, free to the public, hurled 20 Philadelphia dancers— many from the alternative contact improvisation community— through the city streets from LOVE Park into and onto buildings, winding up in Rittenhouse Square, during which time varying groups of performers set up sculptural tableaux at perhaps two dozen locations, where they remained for five to eight minutes to be eyed and awed. In each case the audience tripled to more than 500 during the course of the performance, as passersby joined the Pied Piper pull of this extraordinary event.

The performers, clad in solid-color sweatpants and hoods, formed these tableaux as dense bodies without a face in sight, and more often than not via inverted positions, as if some nuclear accelerator loose in the city had beamed charged bodies into architectural niches, doorways and even the space within iron and tree enclosures.

At one point, about eight bodies were piled more than five feet high within one tree pit iron enclosure, in effect reinventing the practice of tree hugging. One performer afterwards commented that if she'd died in a pile of bodies, no one would really know. Another remarked that her sleep had been interrupted by the feelings of claustrophobia generated by these dense pilings.

An enthusiastic audience raced ahead to see where the newest locations would be established, including one viewer who, believing the whole thing was some improvisational game already under way, suggested new locations where dancers could set up. When the audience was led into one of the most pungent of back-of-the-restaurant alleyways, and also later when we observed the bruises and scrapes on the bodies and legs of performers, we knew these movement artists were totally dedicated to the piece.

For their Olympian dance efforts, cheers to Adams Berzins, Nicole Bindler, Jacelyn Biondo, Adrianna Carey, Lisa Clar, Ajja DeShayne, Carolina del Hierro, Kate Jordan, Jennifer Morley, Sara Nye, Rebecca Patek, Gabrielle Revlock, Lisa Rothstein, Kristen Shaverdian, Kate Speer, Zornitsa Stoyanova, Danielle Strawmyre, Sara Yassky.