July 7 – 31, 2016
Capital Fringe Performance Awards:
- Best Overall Show in 2016 Festival: Over Her Dead Body, presented by Pinky Swear Productions
- Best Comedy: Let Trump Be Trump, presented by John Krizel
- Best Drama: Too Close, presented by Luigi Laraia
- Best Musical Theatre or Opera: Over Her Dead Body, presented by Pinky Swear Productions
- Best Dance or Physical Theatre: Kick Before you Drown, presented by Steal a Step
Each year, the Capital Fringe Festival showcases innovative and avant garde artists making one-of-a-kind immersive experiences for audiences. One production this summer pushes that axiom to its limits. What happens when a Political Philosophy professor collaborates with a company member of Synetic Theater? A production so stunning it cannot be missed!
Justin J. Bell (Synetic Theater) combines eloquent storytelling through movement with Gabriel Hudson’s (George Mason University) densely philosophical and poetic script. The result is a transcendent night of theatre that challenges audiences to confront universal questions within the human experience. Root of All Knowledge tells the story of a typical relationship through the prism of the Hegelian dialectic. Ten performers breathe life into a narrative of seeking, longing, learning and loss, bringing truth to the show’s tagline, “The search for love begins and ends with the self.”
Root of All Knowledge, presented by Atramental Arts, opens July 9, 2016 at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H St. NE in DC and runs through July 23. Confronting life’s greatest mysteries has never been more entertaining.
Full Schedule:
7/9 6:15pm
7/13 9:30pm
7/17 6:30pm
7/22 8:25pm
7/23 6:15pm
An exciting show coming to the 2016 Fringe Festival….
This July, the D.C. Capital Fringe Festival will include the world premier of the new rock opera “Song Reader” based on the work of the same title by the Grammy Award-winning alternative musician Beck. Rolling Stone named the album, Song Reader, as one of the top 50 albums of 2013.
Song Reader was released as 20 songs worth of sheet music and more than 100 pages of art by Beck. Song Reader was later made into an album with performances by an all-star group of musicians, each putting their own spin on Beck’s work. Collaborators Harvey Droke and Daniel Hornal created a conceptual story to accompany the beautiful music and received a green light from Beck’s management company to write a new musical from the material. When director Clare Shaffer read the libretto to the rock opera, she signed on with a vision to help shape the working draft into a sincere exploration of taboo trauma.
The story centers on a conservative, sheltered new Army recruit who meets a jaded stripper—Ziz— at a club the night before his deployment to Iraq. Just as their relationship begins, it is brought to a violent halt when the soldier is beaten and thrown out by the club’s jealous owner, Larcen, who rapes Ziz in retaliation for her “betrayal”. What follows is a story of missed connections as Ziz works to overcome the trauma of her abuse, just as the soldier starts to experience extreme trauma of his own on the front. The musical is an exploration of how we deal with events that shake us at our very core, and how our personal traumas can re-shape us and our relationships with those we were once close to.
Song Reader the Musical, which premiers at the Fringe Festival, parallels the characteristics of war trauma and rape trauma using various genres of music, paired with versatile and creative choreography by Patrick Murphy Doneghy. The talented fourteen-person cast compellingly brings these new characters to life for the first time in this world debut feature, accompanied by an eight-person ensemble of musicians from the Washington D.C. Temple Orchestra.
Shows will be held at:
The Atlas Performing Arts Center
1333 H. St NE, Washington D.C. 20002
Performances: 7/10, 8 p.m.; 7/12, 5:45 p.m.; 7/17, 6:15 p.m.; 7/20, 8:30 p.m.; 7/23, 2:15 p.m.