Fringe Festival 2024: Medieval nuns, Aimee Mann, ‘Ulysses,’ and 306 performances across Philly

Choreographer and dancer Nichole Canuso has been a regular performer at Philadelphia’s Fringe Festival — the annual experimental theater extravaganza returning Sept. 5-29 — since it began in 1997. This year, though, will be a family affair. Her husband, Michael Kiley, is the sound designer and their 19-year-old, Simon Canuso Kiley, will be one of eight dancers in The Garden: River’s Edge, an immersive performance at the historic Arch Street Meeting House.

The show, which invites six audience members at a time to don headphones and join the movement, premiered at Fringe in 2013. Canuso, who runs an eponymous dance company in South Philly, thought that would be a one-off production, but it has since toured around the world; she calls it “the most-beloved piece I’ve ever made.”

Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” she transports the audience to a labyrinthine journey that exemplifies the Fringe Festival’s signature showcase of boundary-pushing work in a location with historical significance to the city.

“The heart of this piece is that everything is choreography,” said Canuso. “It invites people into a more expansive version of choreography than they might normally think about. Think about the coordinates of all the people you know, as choreography, think about the constellation of your memories as choreography.”

The Garden (Sept. 7-22) is one of nine curated shows for the 2024 Fringe Fest, which boasts 306 productions spanning comedy, opera, circus arts, dance, and more running throughout the month, with dozens of performances at FringeArts in Old City.

Unlike last year, which saw multiple concurrent mini-festivals taking place at sites across the city, this year’s festival will have a slightly smaller footprint. Fringe will only have three hubs: Cannonball, where more than 100 wacky, eccentric shows — from interactive to improv to circus — will descend on venues in and around Northern Liberties; Circus Campus in Mount Airy, where a dozen circus and variety shows will unfold in a restored church; and the newcomer Glen Foerd in Northeast Philly, an 18-acre public park and mansion on the Delaware.

First up is the ambitious and buzzy production Ulysses (Sept. 5-7), which travels south following a critically acclaimed premiere at Bard College in upstate New York. Known for its epic adaptation of The Great Gatsby, New York’s Elevator Repair Service has now taken on the challenge of putting James Joyce’s 700-plus-page novel on the stage, to raunchy, hilarious, and dazzling results. Running at FringeArts, the show is presented in association with the Rosenbach Museum & Library, which holds the original Ulysses manuscript.

Philadelphia audiences will also see three world premieres and one U.S. premiere. Poor Judge (Sept. 11-22 at the Wilma Theater) comes from the creative mind of Dito Van Reigersberg — the beloved local actor best known as drag queen Martha Graham Cracker — who returned to the stage this spring after undergoing leukemia treatment. Billed as a “live music mixtape,” the show from Olde Kensington-based Pig Iron Theatre Company (which Van Reigersberg cofounded) combines a Hollywood audition, a spy tale, and a romantic tragedy through fresh arrangements of alt-rock singer-songwriter Aimee Mann’s catalog.

Nosejob (Sept. 7-21) takes the phrase “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” as a prompt for a satire that draws parallels between a ninth-century medieval nunnery fighting off Vikings and a modern Catholic university where sorority sisters seek revenge on sleazy, predatory jocks. The production from local theater company Lightning Rod Special runs at Theatre Exile.

Philadelphia native and Grammy-nominated composer Missy Mazzoli brings her opera The Listeners (Sept. 25-29) stateside after an Oslo premiere in 2022. The libretto from Pulitzer Prize-winner Royce Vavrek focuses on a middle-aged woman (soprano Nicole Heasto) who has the unique displeasure of hearing a mysterious hum that no one else notices. She finds relief in a community of listeners only to realize it harbors cultlike tendencies under its leader (Kevin Burdette). Coproduced with Opera Philadelphia, where Mazzoli was once composer-in-residence, The Listeners will land at the Academy of Music.

The final world premiere won’t open until November, though it is still produced under the Fringe Festival. We Have Gone As Far As We Can Together (Nov. 1-9) promises a ritual opera in a collaborative performance that invites the audience to sing mantras in a chorus of voices, inspired by “the sonic and spiritual resonance of artists like Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra.”

The curated programming also features concerts from avant-garde clarinetist and vocalist Holland Andrews (Sept. 19-20 at Solar Myth), who is also participating in the Whitney Biennial this year, and dance performances from Trajal Harrell and the Zürich Dance Ensemble.

They will combine pianist Keith Jarrett’s legendary live album The Köln Concert and the folk songs of Joni Mitchell through movement at FringeArts (Sept. 28-29). Brooklyn-based choreographer Reggie Wilson will present a historical interpretation of his own with his Fist and Heel Performance Group in POWER (Sept. 20-22), inspired by spiritual leader Rebecca Cox Jackson, a free Black woman in Philadelphia who led a Shaker community in the 1850s. See it at FringeArts.

Tickets for the 2024 Fringe Festival go on sale on Aug. 1.