Philly Fringe 2025: Heather Dutton and Grace Yi-Li Tong present SHEBANG

You’re Actually the Last Person I Wanted to See Today

Dutton’s piece opened with five AFAB dancers on stage with matching loose pink tunics and floral flowy pants. Besides Dutton, the ensemble included Abigail Linnemeyer, Sabrina Canas, Emory McApline, and Josephine Brunner. The costumes evoked pajamas and framed the piece as slumber party.

In an early segment, dancers played stylized versions of childhood games like Simon Says, setting the stage for later call-and-response movement and speech. The piece was broken out into vignettes, which were a mix of pure dance/choreography, theater, and acrobatics. The soundtrack was a mix of nostalgic 1990s hits.

Dutton’s solo particularly spoke to me. She used movement to express insecurities which others articulate verbally. These diary-like confessions ranged from serious (“I wish that I had a best friend”) to silly (“I wish that Anne Hathaway would write me back”). These moments of slowness and disclosure built emotional connection.

I also enjoyed segments of the slumber-party piece in which dancers took turns sharing stories of “girl crushes,” their disgust in kissing boys for the first time, and Sapphic longing that was yet to be named and yet casually explored. The dancers flowed gracefully through movements that required close physical connection between pairs or the entire ensemble. It was an engaging, silly, and thoughtful multidisciplinary piece that explored the struggles and connection found during queer adolescence.

ZOO!

Tong’s ZOO! was a blend of dance, miming, and clowning, which the artist described as a “fun and feral illumination of memory, charade, and the unsaid in the Asian-American experience.” It opened with Tong alone onstage while dancers offstage used handheld spotlights to illuminate her. She wore a white tunic and used ballet-inspired movement which quickly metamorphosed into a more modern and aggressive movement.

Tong was joined by the rest of the ensemble, including Sabrina Canas (again), Tamara Leigh, Demetris Charalambous, Isabelle Dayton, Hiroka Mori Nagai, and Daniel Ricardo Rocha. The movements were articulate, energetic, frenetic, and at times silly and absurd.

In one of the vignettes, Tong and the other Asian dancer, Hiroka Mori, were crowned with white crown hats and later declared that they were twins and it was their 10th birthday. Tong’s movements were synchronized with Nagai as the other dancers acted as party guests. Other vignettes included apple picking and fighting in slow motion. At times performers screamed as if in agony or made gagging noises with coordinated movements, adding to the absurdity and viciousness of the piece.

ZOO! demands to be noticed and seen, expressing bold emotions that perhaps Tong felt like she had to repress as a femme-socialized Asian American. Connecting the dots thematically between different vignettes was a bit harder for me in this second act, but I would be interested in seeing more works by Tong with her distinctive, emotive style of choreography.