With the Philadelphia Fringe Festival 2020 getting ready to close on Sunday, October 4, and a Feastival readying its virtual meal plans, it’s crucial to get outdoors now for the Fringe’s fleeting few walks/shows, and online for its virtual presentations.
One long-running event coming into the home stretch falls somewhere in between those forms – outdoor/indoor, yet without movement on the viewers part, and behind glass in a neo-virtual manner – is “Nothing to Show,” live in a Center City window (1606 Chestnut Street), between 4 and 9 pm, nightly.
“Clowns keep irregular hours and are most awake when it’s getting dark,” writes the sad clown and lead project artist behind the glass, Alexandra Tatarsky, a New Yorker who moved to Philly, studied with Pig Iron and recently acted as dramaturg on their re-mounted for Zoom production of Zero Cost House.
Calling herself a performer at “the unfortunate in-between zone of dance, theater, comedy, and deluded rant, sometimes with songs,” Tatarsky – with director Eva Steinmetz, dramaturg Basie Allen, set/costume designer Andreea Mincic and lights/tech Shane Riley take the nightly work of a mournful clown behind glass seriously.
Originally planned as a Becket/Seinfeld-ian show about nothing, “Nothing to Show” was meant to be an event at FringeArts HQ with a dress rehearsal set for April Fool’s Day.
“This was one of those shows that had to pivot,” Tatarsky wrote to me the other night. “The original show [SIGN FELT] Ep: Sad Boys in Harpy Land was supposed to premiere at FringeArts in April as part of their new High Pressure Fire Service festival. Several weeks before opening, it was indefinitely postponed. When they asked if I would live stream it for this year’s Fringe Festival, it just didn’t feel right. The show was made to be very improvisational and responsive to a live audience, and to celebrate that strange theater magic of being in a shared space together.”
Shifting into Fringe Festival performance mode, Tatarsky began deconstructing the “lost weeks” of rehearsal – the “sad boy choreography, surrounded by the detritus of the show that will never happen” – and turned that into a public discourse on such sorrow with a Walnut Street storefront acting as a literal window into the artistic process.
“This experiment, ‘Nothing to Show,’ is a kind of public clown grieving ritual,” said Tatarsky. “I’ve been in the window at 1606 Chesnut Street since Sept 14 and have had many remarkable encounters. I love, love, love performing for the passerby of Center City! Some people stop by every day, sometimes for hours! Sometimes people write things to me through the window or sometimes we flap fake wings at each other, pretending to be birds. Every day is different. My favorite moments have been: doing a small dance for one woman who watched me be the branches of a tree for a long time. Or… crying endless tears out of blue painter’s tape and then pretending to drown in them. At that, two very small children walked by and giggled uncontrollably, pressing their faces up to the glass. This evening, there was a moment of true absurdity when the audience on the street all started laughing and crying back at me, and it was unclear who was performing for whom! I enjoyed that very much.”
What Tatarsky most enjoys about her current set up is that she can be in the 1606 space experimenting with all the unfinished material of the show that didn’t happen – the costumes, set, and props that had all been sitting dormant in a woodshop for 6 months – as a form of reclamation. “And I get to perform live again for people, but in this partial way, mediated by glass,” she said. “All day I watch and respond to the theater of the streets, which is such a marvelous thing to get to observe. And folks can decide for themselves their own level of comfort and how much they want to engage…”
“Everyone wears a mask and most people are already passing by on their way somewhere so there’s very little congregating. The crowd stays small and socially distanced and I share the exploration with whoever happens to be there. Sometimes my only audience is the security guard across the street. But whatta great audience! I feel very lucky. It is my experiment in finding ways to be together while being apart.”
Images: Johanna Kasimow, Lillian Ransijn, Dito van Reigersberg
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