Fringe Benefits.

New York International Fringe Festival
Various Lower East Side venues
New York, New York
August 9-25, 2002

In 1999, Urinetown began life at the third New York International Fringe Festival. This annual two-week explosion of theater, dance, and performance art is a breeding ground for potential stars. Of this year's twenty-odd dance events, some make you wonder what they were thinking. But some show individual vision and substantial craft. And companies have catchy names: a trend.

Decadancetheatre is Jennifer Weber's company. Her Heroin(e), a "visual journey through an emotional state," strung together hip-hop gyrations for six women in torn tank tops, low-slung cargo pants, and sneakers. Live DJ Prof. Rockwell scratched pounding rhythms to drive the tough acrobatics and sassy attitudes.

Masaru Inayoshi's company, Rakudo, from Japan, showed Beringia, the Root of Asian, which also used jazz, MTV style, interspersed with pantomimed narrative. The high-energy dancers tried hard but didn't have the technique or polish to pull it off.

Odd performance times and $12 cheap tickets benefited shows that might have seemed insubstantial as an evening's concert. Monkeyhouse from Boston did seven short dances, whose only distinction was imaginative costumes by Karen Krolak. Phaithmoves showed Of (h)air, hugs, and hospitals, five short, clear dances by recent NYU graduate D. Faith Howard, well danced by seven of her talented classmates; pleasant, but obviously a first effort.

Choreographer Dagmar Spain's company, Dance Imprints, did appearances, a meditation on urbanity. First, two dancers tried to communicate through a long, silver Slinky, then five others of assorted ages (bravo!) joined them, enacting scenes of subway congestion, hostile confrontation, and cataclysm--9/11 perhaps?

The group Minus (aptly named) presented Body Maps, mixing media. But the sum equaled less than the parts. An actor spoke text, a singer trilled, video images played, and dancers improvised. Oana Botez-Ban's asymmetric, all-white fabric-sculptures-as-costumes were imaginative but underused; an atmospheric soundscape by her spouse, Lucian Ban, was fascinating.

The stars of KDNY, Kathleen Dyer's show, are angel-voiced a cappella soprano Laura Pfortmiller and composer and percussionist PJ Merola, who rocks. Dyer's "AutoPortraits" program boasted her nicely designed costumes, but her polite choreography recalls '50s modern dance: It takes too long to say little, and do we need to watch people braid hair onstage? Sharing her program was Erica Murkofsky's What We Do, which encapsulates with dead-on witty text and movement the plight of three dancer/waitresses. It's a keeper.

Regina Nejman's Maria Vai Com as Otras (Maria Who Follows the Others) depicted seven Marias (including one man), who strutted around in high heels and banged on walls. It was packed with lively dancing, including a passage lit by flashlights. Young Brazilian-American Nejman is still at the stage where choreography is all about her own powerful, athletic dancing.

Clare Byrne is a charming clown with a big, sad-eyed face that makes you laugh and cry, whose dancing mixes devil-may-care abandon and finger-small articulations. Wet Blue & Friends, her extended solo with able assists from a trio of women and a male actor/dancer, involved three pink chairs, party-colored inner tubes, and an interloper, who stormed onstage from the audience and got into the act.

Increasingly more offerings at the Fringe straddled the line between theater and dance. The United Kingdom's Perpetual Motion Theatre brought One-(the Other), surreal movement theater. Two men and two women--all with gorgeous feet--have collaborated on a strange, urban narrative with video-projection scenery. A gawky stranger rides the subway, meets a hoop-skirted English tutor with a tremor, a tippling dancing master, a drugged-out disco queen. He falls in love, gets mugged, and finally douses himself and cast mates with water.

Stalking Christopher Walken by the troupe Venus Fly Trap connects the spooky actor with actress Natalie Wood. (He was on her fatal boat trip along with her husband, Robert Wagner.) The fast-paced, relentlessly strange seven-person revue delivered tap, kung fu, and show dancing by Dana Ruttenberg. They danced one number wearing identical Walken masks, and--another trend--used flashlights.

Some managed the theater-dance straddle without tripping. From Germany came MS-Tanzwerk with Blind Date--Body Theater, featuring choreography by Mario Heinemann and video backdrops by Sophie Jaillet, the company's codirectors. It was a well-conceived and thoughtfully executed work for four remarkably skilled and physically attractive dancers. A couple measured their limbs against each other in intricate permutations. Two women read their personals, describing their ideal mates. Later, one woman drew dotted lines along the axes of the other's naked body. They ultimately discover the perfect relationship: pi, the mathematical ratio, which determines nature's geometry.

THEATRON, Inc., a Greek-American troupe created EROStudies, a series of visual episodes. Their relation to eroticism and to each other was obscure, but they featured--as well as flashlights--a stunning video collage by Maria Anthelman Vlahou and provocative choreography by Tzeni Argyriou and Euripides Laskaris: a lip-locked fox-trot and three dancers trampling on a fallen chanteuse.

And Billy Nijinsky was a treasure, written by and starring Blue Man Group veteran Randall Jaynes and choreographed by Twyla Tharp alumnus Richard Colton of SPENCER/COLTON. Jaynes as Billy, psychotically obsessed with his hero Vaslav, gave a tour de force performance trying to contact his hero by telephone at a Paris theater, at a side show, at Bellvue hospital. A fierce and poignant duet with Edisa Weeks as the Spectre (of the rose) added sexual innuendo to obsession. It may not be Urinetown, but it deserves a longer run somewhere.