People Sing Amazing Poetry Really Loud!

Our first of two offerings in the 2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, People Sing Amazing Poetry Really Loud! is an online screening of our production Insomnia/Whitman Portrait for the newly formed Digital Fringe. It will be available to watch all day September 10, 11 & 14. This was no everyday art song premiere. We put the ARTCy stamp on two fantastic new works by composers Tom Cipullo (winner of the 2012 Guggenheim fellowship) and Philadelphia-favorite, acclaimed composer Jeremy Gill. Both pieces are song cycles written for several singers and piano that explore our interconnectedness through poetry, music and time. Cipullo’s Insomnia is set around a night-time tableau narrated by the texts of varied poets. The neon and lamplight-tinged feelings that emerge in the hour…s of a sleepless night tell stories: a man listening to the sounds of his home as if it were alive, a virgin dares to dream of a lover, a hilarious ode to snoring. Gill’s Whitman portrait uses the humanist poet Walt Whitman’s own words alongside brilliantly crafted music to paint a picture of the self-scrutinizing man through his private thoughts, obsessions, expressions of eroticism and existential meditations.  READ MORE…

 

Fire In My Bones

Tickets available through the Philadelphia Fringe Festival Box Office.

For our second offering in the 2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, a ONE NIGHT ONLY SHOW on Saturday, September 24th at 6pm, we invited our very own Cookie Diorio and Jillian Zack to do what they do best: make some truly amazing music! Inspired by traditional southern style gospel music and the events of her own life, Philadelphia based drag artist Cookie Diorio has a truly unique story to tell in a way that only she can. Fire In My Bones: A Gospel Jubilee is a musical narrative of Cookie’s hilarious, poignant and deeply spiritual, of course, personal anecdotes and life lessons. A lineup of sacred songs delivered with the utmost respect and highest musical quality is well balanced with a hearty dash of energetic wit and down-to-earth charm that will appeal to the religious and nonreligious alike. She opens up to explore the topics fear, adversity, triumph and joy as they have shaped her extraordinary experiences in the worlds of music and theater performance as well as in the LGBT and faith communities.  READ MORE …