Chris Davis's The 40-Year-Old Ballerino
Plus Gene Farbe's And the skies were not cloudy all day
The Inquirer published a Fringe recap looking back at some shows they liked, but I wonder, as they didn’t review anything during the festival, what’s the point? Especially with a show like Poor Judge, which had a thorough run of eleven shows after opening night. Part of the reviewer covenant is to publish within a reasonable time frame after seeing a show. When it’s still open, if possible. I’ve made a good faith effort to do that whenever possible1 (which is maybe not even a great idea for so many new Fringe shows, which often have a work-in-progress element opening night—but that’s another question).
Journalistic nonfeasance, if you ask me, and a real failure to serve both artists and audiences during this year’s festival.
The 40-Year-Old Ballerino
by Chris Davis
directed by MK Tuomanen
Every Saturday in September, plus the last Sunday, at Amy Novinski Ballet as part of the Philadelphia Fringe festival. Encore presentation at Studio 34 on October 4th. Davis is also listed as appearing with Ballerino for Case Comedy, upstairs at Abyssinia, on October 15.
Recommended
Shoeless and crammed into the ad-hoc seating arrangement at Amy Novinski Ballet studio in the Bok building, the sell-out crowd watches on as Chris Davis monologues and drills ballet positions. “Doing this show, it’s impossible,” he says, “there’s no way I can do this show.” Davis is talking about the difficulty involved in dancing and speaking at the same time. But there he is, doing it. Ballet lends 40-Year-Old Ballerino both a formal and presentational quality to Davis’s consistently compelling performance, by turns both comic and moving, though some of his physical maneuvers were difficult to fully take in from my row.
Often positioned front and center, drilling at a free standing barre which he occasionally repositions, Davis tells us how he replaced his bad addictions with a good addiction (ballet). He observes that though one is good and the others are bad, they are the same to him. He tells us about his ballerina ex, and his romantic fantasies around reconnecting, which are also bad, but drilled into him from being from the 90’s (your relationship to the 1989 teen romance Say Anything may have an impact on how much you get out of some of this). He tells us about going to see the ballet Coppélia, whose plot concerns dolls, about therapy, and of the inevitable encounter with his ex. This is a show about doing the difficult work of growth and figuring out how to live a healthy life, striking a balance with your vices and patterns and past that doesn’t fuck up your shit. To this end, Ballerino uses the form to make much of its point.
Davis does an admirable job of keeping all of this connected, always grounded with another ballet position, and with the occasional crossing the floor, makes good use of the space under MK Tuomanen’s direction. He also makes good use of the space as setting, the literal ballet studio where he studies and practices ballet compulsively, down to referencing the Philadelphia skyline out the window. For better or worse, that also keeps him under the lights of the ballet studio for the length of the show. The space offers both literal and figurative depths, which Davis and Tuomanen make the most out of, even as it poses a few challenges by not being built out as a performance space. I don’t think the show relies on the space per se, and it could readily transfer out of it.2 Which is to say, if you missed the Fringe run, tonight’s performance at Studio 34 is for you.
There is a lot I like about Ballerino. The various narrative threads, however, don’t quite come together to a fully satisfying conclusion. Somewhere in the final sequence the metaphor of the doll borrowed from Coppélia gets a little confusing, I got a little lost, and it didn’t land for me with the emotional impact that I think Davis is going for. Or maybe it’s because I belong to a different micro-generation than Davis’s xennial—I haven’t seen Say Anything—but I know what I would want to integrate into a revision. Ballerino is a good, solid show, and I think it’s one draft away from being a great one—stage lights or no.
And the skies were not cloudy all day
by Gene Farbe
Christ Church Neighborhood House, Great Hall, part of the Cannonball Festival. Friday September 13, 20, and 27.
And the skies were not cloudy all day wins the award for strangest show of my Fringe experience this year. Ushered into the hall after having our IDs checked and hands stamped, there's a bit of a club atmosphere while a couple dozen of us mill around the speakers and DJ booth waiting for the show to begin. When it does, blasts of club music are tempered by And the skies were not cloudy all day (Gene Farbe) greeting and welcoming us to their drop party for their EP, album drop. But they quickly derail the event, distracted thinking of their open layout home and the view out the window. Without a wall, And the skies tells us, they don't know where to put the couch. They ask for a volunteer to be the couch and position them in the room so they can envision it. They have them move, have another audience member join them. They ask someone to be a chair, to be a lamp (“Can I turn you on?” they ask before turning on an actual lamp they're positioned next to).
What unfolds over the next 30 or so minutes involves one person after another in either playing the role of furniture or helping prepare for a pastoral dinner party for Mr. Edwards, a guest who's running late (and who may or may not exist), including sending one audience member with instructions outside to find a cabbage. The experience doubtless varies greatly here depending on how active a task audience members get, from churning butter to being the table on which buttered rolls are being served. When the cabbage finally showed up, there’s a classic bit of physical comedy when Farbe drops it and keeps kicking it when they bend down to pick it up. This is all very unexpected, given the framing we entered in with. It’s a rewarding surprise, and the juxtaposition of club culture with pastoral Americana—and the skies were not cloudy all day is itself, of course, a line from “Home on the Range”—is rich. Farbe works compellingly with speeches that are dumb, but maybe also a little profound, speaking of, for example, wanting to be big and small at the same time.
Despite this fertility, and the merch table, and the skies felt like a study rather than a complete event. Part of this is probably due to the cavernous room in the Neighborhood House being extremely un-club-like, alongside low production values and its short length, and in part also to the see-through disposable face masks (so you can see our smiles!) required to comply with the Cannonball mask policy, which are close to worthless as protective equipment. The show does a solid job of setting expectations for participation with its directness, which lots of events screw up. Farbe is clever and may be drawing a line between bimbo and tradwife, but and the skies isn’t yet deeply exploring that connection. I’m curious to see what they do next.
It’s going to be a beautiful weekend, so catch Bread & Puppet Theater on Sunday, 4 pm, at Liberty Lands for The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus. Their last tour through Philly earlier this year featured some of the most beautiful work I’ve seen from Bread and Puppet. 90-year-old company founder and director and living legend Peter Schumann says this one features, “the blue horses of the peace and harmony terrorists of the Northeast Kingdom breaking through the wall of threatening clouds that hide the truth from the population and then galloping over the ruins of the truth industry.” And it’s a circus!
Show up with cash to donate and buy cheap art.
At least in the cases where I requested reviewer comps
As I write now, I wonder what the show would look like under stage lights in a space like Christ Church Neighborhood House, where I saw so many Cannonball shows