"Hidden City Philadelphia' (3rd review)

The art cognoscenti of Philadelphia made their bi-annual pilgrimage to Venice in June to anoint the Philadelphia Museum of Art-sponsored Bruce Nauman as the reigning art lion and to sip their Bellinis amid that city's familiar yet beguiling vistas.

Those of us who were homebound and Bellini bereft were rewarded by the "Hidden City" series of performances— art installations and revelations of historical sites in Philadelphia which were as exciting as anything the Arsenale or Giardini could offer. In a sign of marketing humility, Thaddeus Squire and his Peregrine Arts group forsook the labels of "festival" or "annual" and kept to a minimalist name to embrace the multiplicity of its offerings: nine sites largely unvisited by most of us, each with newly commissioned art installations or performances.

The Hidden City sites not only revealed their secret pleasures to viewers but also presented themselves as a powerful constellation of art, architecture, history and lived human experience, challenging visiting artists to meet them with all their creative imagination. In more cases than not, the historical site overwhelmed the artists' engagement. But the result was still deliciously satisfying for this audience member, who visited all nine performance sites.

An old opera house comes to life

Topping the list was the ghostly Grand Canyon of the 4,000-seat Metropolitan Opera House on North Broad Street at Poplar, built in 1908 by Oscar Hammerstein, grandfather of the lyricist we know.

In Revival, the New York choreographer Wally Cardona used the very upper levels of the house, so that the building's entire expanse unfolded before us, with the proscenium stage rising to the ceiling in the far distance. Cardona attempted to reference the building's varied history as an opera house, sports arena and church, setting dancers from the Group Motion Dance Company on multi-levels of empty seating. The movement of active-passive partnering, or play with chairs, or solo basketball tossing and gesturing was of intermittent interest. The expected music support from the talented composer Phil Kline was largely absent from the piece.

The building had the last and most satisfying final word, though, in the ending segment, where shifting lights on the proscenium stage and soft choral voices off-stage gave the space and building a soulful, organic presence.

The Royal, after 39 shuttered years

The spirits of past performers Fats Waller, Pearl Bailey and Bessie Smith, along with more latter-day radio show participants on WPEN's "Parisian Tailors' Kiddie Hour," were accessed by the first audience in 40 years to enter the Royal Theater on the 1500 block of South Street. This 1,200-seat theater, built in 1920, was the city's first black-run theater. The audience, donning blue hard hats, caught the specter of the remains of a ceiling painting, and Greek columns framing a long-empty stage.

The contemporary composer Todd Reynolds, whose extraordinary singing and interpretation of Zippo Songs (set to lyrics scratched onto Zippo lighters by Vietnam War soldiers, and bumbling Donald Rumsfeld statements early in the Iraq War) were presented at the Kimmel Center last year, created a new work, Sounds for the New Royalty, after he deduced the feel for the Royal through conversations with local residents. His chamber offering combined a minimalist, repetitive sound, Ó la Steve Reich or Philip Glass, with more saucy rhythms that fell in synch with the Royal's pop culture past.

The music had a simpatico film accompaniment on the rear brick wall by Bill Morrison: collaging images from the 1927 Philadelphia-made film, Scar of Shame. The wall projection undid the second half's video presentation by Anri Sala, The Long Shadow, whose on-screen saxophonist (at a Berlin location) was largely irrelevant to the live solo improvisation of the second half by Jemeel Moondoc, who like Todd Reynolds, evoked the years after the Royal's closing in 1970 with post-modern sounds.

War songs and dances, at the Armory

The last of the site-specific live performances came to the Armory of the First City Troop in Center City. Hidden City's Battle Hymns presented perhaps the most challenging performance offering a complex, unaccompanied choral work by the Pulitzer Prize winner David Lang, set to lyrics of letter excerpts by soldiers in the Civil War. This work was sung by the Mendelssohn Choir led by Alan Harler and also brought in the veteran site-specific dance troupe of Leah Stein, who had collaborated so well with Mendelssohn and composer Pauline Oliveros in Urban Echo at last year's Live Arts Festival at the Rotunda, and earlier in a joint Carmina Burana at Girard College's Chapel.

The subtle variations in music and vocal lines cast a sea of mournfulness across the Armory's empty spaces, and although the music and choreography won enthusiastic accolades from almost all around me, I found the dance, for all its energy and commitment, too disconnected to the music—more sharing the space with the composition than engaging with it.

A few sections of music and dance together stood out, such as an ensemble of abbreviated, angular, sharply executed movements, accompanying lines that read, "I want to be a soldier." In contrast to Urban Echo, where the Mendelssohn Choir sang without texts, enabling their movements to be enlivened by Stein's dancers, here the singers were wedded to the complex text in their hands and consequently proved much more static.

Sounds of the saw works

Among the other six sites, the star and most unusual among them was the Disston Saw Works in Tacony, where local installation artists John Phillips and Carolyn Healy presented a brilliant work honoring and re-inventing a large steel and saw a factory built in the 1870s and still operating (see the image above).

Employing their virtuoso talents at sculptural, sound and video installation, Phillips and Healy presented scanned images from blueprints and ledger books that appear to come from museum graphic works on paper collections, as well as images and sounds of current Disston workers, all within a factory space where the specially lit conveyor belt and other apparatus merge life (at work) and art in a memorable way. This was a brilliant choice of marrying imaginative artists with a historical site that's overlooked by the cultural mainstream.

A station on the Underground Railroad

Equally shining in a spiritual setting was the Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church on South Sixth Street. This church— founded by Richard Allen in 1790 and continuously owned by African-Americans since then—has one of the richest histories of any Philadelphia church and might have the most beautiful interior too (recently restored to its original Romanesque revival style). The church and the Free African Society led by Allen and Absalom Jones, provided leadership among the City's large free black community.

Installation artist Sanford Biggers played off the church's leadership role in the anti-slavery movement, creating a "Constellation" star map with Mother Bethel as the North Star and other Philadelphia houses in the Underground Railroad forming a cluster of surrounding stars. His star image also got transformed into a graphic image whose star projections are the horrific drawings of the holds of slave ships packed with bodies. Multiples of this image on 12-inch-square linen cloth were distributed to visitors. Early American quilts, some with star constellation stitchery added, hung down the second level of the church interior, whose intimate cello-curved wood interior was reminiscent of Verizon Hall but much more compelling in its warm intimacy.

Gunshots and a purifying rainstorm

Another surprise, especially to Center City area residents living for years a few blocks away, was the Shiloh Baptist Church at 2040 Christian Street, which began as an Episcopal church designed by George Howitt of the firm that included Frank Furness. This major church peaked with a congregation of more than 10,000 during World War I. Its stained glass windows and high-Victorian nave, with the kind of bare steel beam ceiling supports found at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, stood out for this visitor.

In an empty upper floor, the Chicago artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle created an unusually inventive sound installation, Sonambulo, taking a recording of a live gunshot form his own neighborhood and deconstructing its components into an 11-minute looping soundtrack, totally transforming the sound into thunder and a purifying rainstorm. Addressing the comforting embrace of church and sought-after safety with the reality of concurrent violence, the artist fashioned a redemptive response from nature.

Stephen Girard returns to his college

Artist Steve Roden brought us up to the secret spaces of the third floor of the magnificent Girard College Founder's Hall, the legacy of one of our nation's founding financiers, Stephen Girard, and the architect Thomas U. Walter, who later designed the U.S. Capitol. Roden mined the 19th-Century history of both men as well as their contemporaries to create a multi-media installation, referencing the endeavors of these historical personages.

Roden added a whimsicality to his renderings, whether via color-pencil drawings or colored matchstick sculptural construction or quirky soundscape, as if throwing up his hands at the overwhelming ego of the space he inhabited.

A mixup at the Inquirer

The least successful installations came, oddly, from blue-chip artists with international reputations. Stan Douglas did not create a new work for the German Society on Spring Garden Street, and his film installation in its library was opaque and inconsequential.

Aleksandra Mir sought to convey the power of the printed newspaper and the role of women by collaging onto seeming realistically rendered front pages of the Inquirer a host of juxtaposed news reports and roles of women in society. Her installation, originally set up on the ground floor of the Inquirer building, got caught into the Inquirer's current dysfunctional family dynamics and was banned for a day or so, with 5,000 copies of a multiple newspaper Mir created unceremoniously tossed into the building's outgoing bin. Her installation of framed, front-page images was relocated onto the Inquirer's 18th floor, right under the clock in the iconic white tower building on North Broad Street, which offered cinematic views of the entire city.

Duchamp had a word for it

Duchamp once observed that the final phase of an artwork is the audience engagement, and indeed one of the most exciting elements of these installations was the visitors' interaction with the sites and with each other. As memorable as the sites were those you met there: at Shiloh, the nine-year-old tour guide who was baptized at the church a year ago into a small pool-size baptismal bath she revealed behind the altar; the two Danish girls on a day trip from New York, who marveled at Mother Bethel, the first Baptist church they'd seen; my serendipitous meeting on the 18th floor of the Inquirer building with Torben Jenk, the industrial historian and designer of the Workshop of the World website, who gave a 20 minute discourse on the Kensington archaeological dig around I-95 and the industrial sites there, which we viewed together long-distance from the Inquirer building; Disston Saw Works workers who could identify the sounds of their particular machines via the Phillips-Healy sound installation; and those visitors at the Royal Theater who remembered the "Tip-Top" talent show and "Kiddie Hour" from more than four decades ago.

This active human dimension of the Hidden City experience brought the melding of history, space and art to a satisfying conclusion.â—†


To read another review of Battle Hymns by Tom Purdom, click here.
To read other reviews of the Hidden Cities performances by A.J. Sabatini, click here.