Philadelphia dances

Surveying the city's dramatically renewed Avenue of the Arts from atop his City Hall pinnacle 500 feet above Philadelphia, the totem of founder William Penn has twelve-foot arms and five-foot-long bronze shoes, and bemoans the fact that he can't dance. But the city over which he presides makes a perfect partner for the booming dance arts and education here.

The city today is home to more than forty performing dance companies, large and small, and more than 2,000 professional dancers. Drawing on a unique alchemy of passion, perseverance, and cooperation, Philadelphia dance companies light up the City, tour the United States and abroad, and receive impressive reviews from dance critics wherever they travel.

Philadelphia is securely stitched into the fabric of American history. In Old City the unpretentious red brick Independence Hall, where President George Washington delivered his farewell address to those who wanted him to stay on as king, stands alongside such national icons as the Liberty Bell, the Betsy Ross House, and a gleaming new National Constitution Center--historic landmarks and tourist magnets that serve as daily reminders of what it means to stake a claim to democracy and tolerance. Across the centuries, from Penn's 1682 arrival to today, Philadelphia's very DNA screams independence.

Before there was Indie rock or Indie film, there was Indie dance. A native-born and quintessentially independent art form, American modern dance showed itself early here: Isadora Duncan frolicked barefoot before adoring crowds at the famed Academy of Music; Joan Kerr and Nadia Tchiakowski built local modern dance institutions. Today's next-generation contemporary dance companies hold the territory now thought of as "classical" modern dance and folk dance that has morphed into exciting new professional genres, as well as cutting-edge performance art and street-dancing-derived hip-hop narratives. That's not just a mouthful, it's a soulful eye-full.

OUT ON THE EDGE

The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, modeled on the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by dancers Eric Schoefer and Nick Stuccio, attracted more than 40,000 performing arts patrons in 2003 for performances by 220 different groups for 16 days in early September. The festival has helped change the way the city's audiences think of the arts by bringing down traditional "high art" barriers and guaranteeing wide accessibility via cheap tickets and free stuff.

"The Fringe brought the Philadelphia underground above ground with a bullhorn, says Stuccio. "It's had a great effect on the community. It has built a core audience for local groups, it has built the taste of" audiences, and it has inspired artists to continue to make work and stay here."

The Fringe Festival strives far a mixture of Philadelphia-based and non-Philadelphia-based artists in the belief that guests with good reputations can serve to demonstrate that local artists are making work that's as good as some of the most famous ones. "It's important to us to present our artists on par with their peers elsewhere," says Stuccio.

He began studying on scholarship at the school of Pennsylvania Ballet and was taken into the company, where he danced for almost a decade before retiring in 1995. The experience had its complicating factors. "As a ballet dancer I saw that we were performing for the tiny cultural elite.... In starting a festival we thought that this was finally a way to give access to our work to the other 99 percent, the bus drivers and people like us who couldn't afford to see ourselves dance." Stuccio credits the William Penn Foundation, which offers dance companies organizational support, with taking a chance on the Fringe Festival seven years ago with a first-time grant of $30,000.

Not insignificantly, Stuccio's initial experience with production was the 1993 debut of an independent philanthropic effort, created by four dancers from Pennsylvania Ballet, which they called "Shut Up and Dance!" That project, which returns to Forrest Theatre for its eleventh annual show on March 13, is a one-night concert of original choreography for the benefit of MANNA (Metropolitan AIDS Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance). It was conceived as a way to honor the death of fellow dancer Edward Myers, and to give to the community'; this annual performance continues the tradition of raising money to help people living with AIDS.

ON TRACK WITH A MISSION

Pennsylvania was a colony based on the idea that people of diverse religions, nationalities, and ethnic backgrounds could five together in peace. The best remembered Penn legend tells how, rather than build a barricade around his colony, he negotiated a treaty of friendship with his indigenous Lenni Lenape neighbors. Visitors to the Fringe Festival are likely to be struck by the multitude of historic houses of worship of every denomination. As the birthplace of the African Methodist Episcopal church, founded here by former slave Richard Allen, Old City is also home to the Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, built in 1890.