The 12th annual Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, which will run from August 29 - September 13 will feature an innovative and highly interdisciplinary program of performances by acclaimed U.S. artists from Philadelphia and New York, and internationally renowned artists from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, Poland, Spain, and Sweden. Celebrated international and Philadelphia area directors, choreographers, and performers will collaborate to create new work exclusive to the 2008 Festival. Twenty-two artists will present works of dance and theater, including sixteen world or U.S. premieres, which showcase a diverse range of styles and structures in a variety of traditional and unusual performance sites throughout the city.

Tickets are on sale now for the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival at www.livearts-fringe.org. A full schedule and tickets for the Philly Fringe, which runs in conjunction with the Live Arts Festival, will be announced in July.

Collaborations between international and Philadelphia artists will bring a world view to the Festival, exposing local artists and audiences to a diverse range of cultural influences. Festival Producing Director Nick Stuccio says, "We are extremely fortunate to have a group of world class artists in our city, and we're excited to cultivate new collaborations between world renowned contemporary art makers and our hotbed of local talent. Among these projects are chances for a fantastically talented pool of Philadelphia-based artists to create work with two of the most sought after director/choreographers in the world, Jo Strømgren and Jérôme Bel. This marks the first time they have created work with actors or dancers outside of their own companies, and it provides new opportunities to inspire one another and to continue to spread the word about the amazing art being made here in Philadelphia."

French choreographer Jérôme Bel will set his Bessie Award-winning, internationally renowned contemporary dance epic, The show must go on, with a cast of local dancers from the Pennsylvania Ballet, Rennie Harris Puremovement, and student performers from The University of the Arts. Renowned Norwegian theater artist and choreographer Jo Strømgren (creator of The Convent, Live Arts 2006) will return to Philadelphia to work with an all-star cast of five local actors to create the world premiere of The European Lesson, which will showcase Strømgren's sharp, comedic, and highly physical style. Dan Rothenberg, Artistic Director of Pig Iron Theatre Company, will collaborate with Swedish music-spectacle group Teater Sláva to create an all-acoustic tale of the life and death of California union activist and radical songwriter Joe Hill in Sweet By-and-By.

Antwerp-based director and choreographer Jan Fabre will debut Another sleepy, dusty Delta day, marking the Festival's first international commission. Fabre's choreography is widely recognized as the most provocative work in contemporary dance today. This year will also mark the Festival's first presentation of New York choreographer Miguel Gutierrez and his company, The Powerful People, who will present the fun, spontaneous, and infinitely surprising dance work, Everyone.

Several performances for the 2008 Festival will take place in unique and unusual spaces. At Last Drop Coffeehouse, England's Rotozaza will invite audiences to simultaneously observe and participate in Etiquette, an intimate, audiovisual performance for an audience of two, guided by a script fed through a pair of headphones. Norwegian collaborative Verdensteatret will present louder, a highly experimental audiovisual installation in a vacant warehouse that will incorporate video art, sculptural scenery, puppetry, and live music.

The premiere of local choreographer Kate Watson-Wallace's Car, seen as a work-in-progress at last year's Festival, will take place in and around a moving vehicle in a parking garage. In Nichole Canuso Dance Company's Wandering Alice, performers will lead audience members through a multi-media installation at Old City's Christ Church Neighborhood House. Both performances will feature diverse casts of emerging artists in Philadelphia's dance community.

Viennese choreographer Willi Dorner will create a traveling outdoor dance with a cast of local dancers who will perform in various familiar outdoor spaces for audiences and passersby alike. Matsune & Subal, an Austria-based performance duo, will take over a small store front in Old City where they will sell performance art during usual business hours throughout the first week of the Festival. Former Pig Iron member and creator of Madame Douce-Amère (Live Arts, 2005) Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey will present the world premiere of Oedipus at FDR, a modern re-imagining of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, set at the legendary FDR skate park in South Philly. Admission for all three of these unique performances will be free.

2008 marks an important year for some of Philadelphia's most innovative local theater and dance artists. Dancers, actors, musicians, puppeteers, and video artists are collaborating across disciplines to create some of their most imaginative, provocative work to date. Presenting the sequel to her 2006 Live Arts hit, Suburban Love Songs, choreographer Karen Getz will return to the Festival with Disco Descending, a comic actor's ballet that blends Greek mythology and disco fever. The Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental/Thaddeus Phillips will return with the third and final installment in Phillips' Americas trilogy with THE MeLTING BRiDgE, a time-traveling adventure set in Mexico City that explores the rise and fall of the indigenous cultures of the Americas. Pig Iron Theatre Company member Geoff Sobelle (Amnesia Curiosa, Live Arts 2006) will collaborate with local actress Charlotte Ford to create Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl, a collection of darkly humored fairy tales told using stop-action animation and taxidermied animal puppets.

Longtime Festival favorite Leah Stein will collaborate with the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia in Urban ECHO: Circle Told, a mesmerizing integration of 100 singers with eight dancers moving together within the crumbling grandeur of West Philadelphia's Rotunda. St. Lucia-born dancer and choreographer Tania Isaac will present stuporwoman, an operatic and humorous fairytale that draws on culture, class, and the expectations of twenty-first century motherhood. Storytelling artist and puppeteer Sebastienne Mundheim (Currently Franklin, Live Arts 2006) will invite audiences of all ages into a fantastical world of video imagery and life-sized puppets to tell the story of her mother's childhood in an Eastern European displacement camp in Sea of Birds.

The Festival will offer numerous opportunities for audiences to learn more about the artists' work through the Festival Plus program, which will host a series of post-show talks in addition to two full-length panel discussions on broader issues in the international contemporary performance community. And as always, each night of the Festival will end at the Late Night Cabaret where all Festival goers over twenty-one are invited to enjoy cheap drinks, live music, DJs, and special performances by Festival artists.

PROGRAM INFO/TICKETS
The Philadelphia Live Arts and Philly Fringe Festival runs from August 29 - September 13, 2008. Tickets for most shows cost between $10 and $25. Some shows are free. This year, ticket buyers who purchase tickets to multiple shows can save 20% when they buy tickets to 2 or 3 shows and 25% for 4 or more shows. Students and Festival goers 25 and younger pay $15 for Live Arts Festival tickets and receive $5 off Philly Fringe tickets.

All Live Arts Festival tickets are available for purchase now at www.livearts-fringe.org, or after August 18 by calling the Box Office at (215) 413-1318, or visiting in person. The Festival Box Office location will be announced in early August. Philly Fringe tickets will go on sale online in July. The Festival guide, which includes descriptions of each performance, in addition to dates, times, locations, and other Festival information, will be widely available throughout the city beginning August 1, 2008.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival features performances by acclaimed contemporary dance and theater artists who are selected and invited to the Festival by Producing Director, Nick Stuccio. While some Live Arts artists are based in Philadelphia, many come from other parts of the U.S. and from around the world. The Philly Fringe is the "unfiltered" portion of the festival, where new and established artists of all kinds may choose to present their own work, free of a selection process. Together, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe bring audiences sixteen days of the most stimulating, provocative new art being created in Philadelphia, across the U.S., and around the world.

To request press kits, photos, interviews, and more information please contact: Megan Wendell, Canary Promotion + Design, office: (215) 242-6393, email: megan@canarypromo.com