Launching the second year of Cannonball, the Almanac Dance Circus Theatre opens up spaces for diverse performance artists to reach new audiences at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival this September. Here are some of the shows we can look forward to next month!

Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, the Philadelphia-based performing arts ensemble,  dives back into the Philadelphia Fringe Festival this year with the return of Cannonball. This second annual festival is an independently run Fringe Hub. Running September 1-30, including a week of performances before the official start of Fringe, Cannonball features more than 300 performances of over 65 shows, spanning circus, dance, theater, film, and more. Cannonball returns to the Maas Building in Philadelphia from September 8-30, and for the first time will present programming at the nearby Icebox Project Space at Crane Arts from September 1-18. Events will take place indoors and outdoors.

Cannonball presents risk-taking independent artists in back-to-back performances next to delicious lounge spaces, fostering creative collisions and community conversation. Cannonball disrupts traditional arts presenting models by centering artist-to-artist curation, pooling, and redistributing resources to provide small-scale, high-impact production opportunities for wild, underresourced performances, and building a sustainable arts ecosystem from the ground up. In its inaugural year in 2021, Cannonball produced 28 unique works over 21 days for 150 performances in a single venue during the Philadelphia Fringe, welcoming over 2500 audience members and winning three overall Fringie Awards. This year Cannonball is offering even more production and presentation opportunities for independent artists from Philadelphia.

“There’s a magic you can feel in the air when you are standing in the Cannonball Beer Garden, enjoying a beautiful Philadelphia September night, surrounded by the energy of independent artists – risk takers who leave it all on the stage, sharing their particular visions, crafted with love and intention – and art-dazed audience members,” said Almanac Company Co-Founder Ben Grinberg. “It’s a space that we are purposely crafting to build community connections, start conversations, and buzz with the energy of Fringe.”

Highlighted performances include a new piece from Almanac, works by the recipients of the Cannonball BIPOC New Work Presentation track, and a line-up of works ranging from comedy, dance, theatre, circus, the OVERBOARD!  cabaret and more. Audiences visiting the IceBox space can enjoy nightly gatherings at PunchBuggy Brewing while at the MAAS Building a nightly beer garden will be open. Both spaces are within a 10-minute walk of each other allowing audiences the ability to enjoy multiple performances nightly.

Highlighted performances from the festival include:

Me and Jesus and Prince and Captain Jean-Luc Picard in a One Bedroom apartment in the Bronx
Shavon Norris
A solo performance from choreographer and facilitator Shavon Norris that explores the sounds, words, doctrines, people(s), places, and objects that flooded her development. A love letter and a challenge to the biological, cultural, and historical artifacts and fossils in her blood and in her vision.

Overboard Cabaret at Cannonball 2022
OVERBOARD! is Cannonball’s FREE nightly offering of music, cabaret, sideshow, circus, storytelling, strange anthems to pirate lords, and ecstatic participatory rituals that are sure to be the perfect end to your night at the Fringe. Located in the beautiful Maas Garden Bar, check out the Cannonball website for the details of each night’s cabaret, as well as Cannonball’s mainstage shows, community events, workshops, and more.

mío/ tuyo/ nuestro – Carne Viva Dance Theatre
The unfolding of the human love catalyst through the lens of queer folk. As you move through the intimate acts of playing, the sharing of secrets, and the rebellious act of community in celebration, you will be transported towards eight different experiences. It is liberating, it is unapologetic. It is your own personal love catalyst.

I Hear You and I’d Like to Respond – Almanac
A circus of words, a flight to nowhere, a desperate attempt to make meaning in an unrelentingly confusing world. Almanac’s newest–and largest-ever–ensemble acrobatic show explores the lengths we’ll go to change our language rather than change ourselves.

cooning into the metaverse one day at a time hopefully !!! – Crackhead Barney
Called “the greatest performance artist of our generation” by adoring fans and “an enemy of Christianity” by Tucker Carlson, risk-taking provocateur Crackhead Barney comes out of the street and into the theatre for a three-night only stand in Philadelphia. Expect different guests every night in this talk show from hell—no one will leave unscathed.

The Most Important Place In The World! – Naked Empire Bouffon Company
Two fabulous tricksters celebrate the USA’s love affair with Puerto Rico. With in-your-face physical comedy, lip sync, puppetry, outrageous costumes, and an anything-goes relationship with the audience, they invite you into a joyous and disturbing whirlwind of biting anti-colonial satire.

Green Card Project – Sohrab Haghverdi
An interactive installation/theatre experience that takes the audience through the process of applying for a Visa as experienced by an Iranian Citizen, opening up questions about what is truly valuable to America and what sits at the core of today’s immigration policies.

Outside Your Expectations – The Reclamation Dance Project
Outside of Your Expectations is a healing, interactive art exhibition in the form of a video installation and live performance. It explores the social constructs that are put upon Black women and the ways that these can affect their mental health.

Vehement – a. dance theatre
Dark, sexual, and passionate. Come on a journey that will capture the facets of growing up and fighting personal demons, breaking generational cycles, and navigating relationships with lovers, others, and yourself. Featuring raw and introspective works that chronicle the quest to find who you are.

Topside – Theater in Quarantine
Theater in Quarantine comes to Cannonball with a special, in-person run of Scott R. Sheppard’s Topside. Performed 5x a night by Drama League Award winner Joshua William Gelb in a durational feat of digital loop capture, Topside unearths two men stationed in a military-grade bunker, uncertain of their mission, uncertain how to survive each other’s company.

Man of La Manchin – Nick Jonczak
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III is eaten alive by a mysterious woman in this new satirical musical that’s not at all based on Man of La Mancha.

High Noon – Ninth Planet
You swallow the cowboy yonder demands in this speculative work of dance-theatre, where a group of interdisciplinary Black queer and trans artists takes on America’s poisonous lust for the Lone Ranger. Using live electronic and folk music, archival video, dance, and poetry, High Noon casts a long shadow on the cowboy under the heat of an unrelenting sun.

Stamptown – Zach Zucker
The New York Times’ Top Comedy Pick (2022). A raunchy, chaotic, and full-on fringe experience, Stamptown is a late-night variety show featuring the best alternative performance on the international circuit. Hosted by the bad boy of clowning, Zach Zucker, this show has sold out at Netflix Is A Joke, Just For Laughs, Glastonbury, Soho Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and off-Broadway in NYC.

Zach Zucker: Spectacular Industry Showcase
WIINNER of Chortle Comedian’s Comedian Award (2020). After touring the world five times as part of Zach and Viggo and a historic run of Jack Tucker: Comedy Stand-up Hour, award-winning clown and international bad boy Zach Zucker returns to Edinburgh with a brand new show! “Zach Zucker is.. popular” –The New York Times. “A rip-roaring hour of top-notch clowning” –EdFest Mag “Raucously hilarious” –60 Minutes

Reception – Nick Gillette
In 2014, the first interstellar object ever sighted near our sun mysteriously changed course and tumbled away. Soon after, voices purporting to originate from Vega poured uncontrollably from the mouth of a local performing artist. Probing the intentions of the audience, this channeling walks a tightrope between a supernatural or psychological explanation. From Nick Gillette, winner of FringeArts’ 2021 Audience Choice Award for Best Comedy.

DIRT TRIP – Alex Tatarsky
“A hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” (TheaterJones) and “one of the most exciting and hilarious performance artists around” (ArtSpace), Alex Tatarsky examines the links between clowns and compost. Contents include the ballad of an unemployed court jester and a lecture that decays into a heap of dirt.

One Man’s Trash: A Repurposed Circus – Cirque Us
Residing behind bins and beneath trash can lids, inventive acrobats, high-flying aerialists, and quirky clowns welcome you into their world for a junkyard adventure. Inhabiting a space of discovery and fun, this repurposed circus turns trash into treasure. Dive into our dumpsters to see how we recycle, reuse, and reinvent rubbish into a circus extravaganza.

Eat Me Baladi – Mette Loulou von Kohl & Leila Delicious
An evening of two artistic explorations that investigate the intersections between sexuality, sensuality, and Palestinian identity through the body, movement/dance, and food. Leila Delicious (Aya Razzaz) & Mette Loulou von Kohl will share their works in conversation to probe the spaces of dissonance and familiarity between their individual experiences in relating to their bodies as Palestinians.

Tribe of Fools – You Shouldn’t Be Doing What You’re Doing On That Ladder
Impossible feats! Amazing stunts! One mildly confident acrobat! Peter Nicholls and Charlotte Northeast team up to create a show about the high highs and low lows of life with depression that takes place on three differently sized ladders. Join Peter on top of the ladder to find the humor, the struggle. and the complicated humanity of mental health.

Stress Exorcist – Mary McCool
A hilarious new meditation on failure and resilience, based in clown and chaos magic. An anonymous, shambling creature (“a mighty marvel,” the Philadelphia Inquirer says) is your guide, conjuring an atmosphere in which loving your dark side makes magic possible. This is a comedy rite to literally change your life.

Pedestrian Circus – Rose Luardo
Splish splash! Pull back the shower curtain and enter the realm of the shapeshifter in this kaleidoscopic bathtub. This wet and wild metaphorical tub trip is all about glimpsing characters who are letting it hang out and don’t even know to cover it up. Drink the bathwater.

Myzrie House – Nicole Burgio and Mark Wong
Two people are thrust into a cell together for reasons unknown. Are they the last humans left on Earth? Can they escape? Are they meant to become friends, enemies, or more? Mark Wong and Nicole Burgio invite you to see dance, theater, merrymaking, and action. Welcome to Myzrie House.

Major support for Cannonball at Icebox Project Space is provided by Penn Treaty Special Services District. Co-producers: MAAS Building, LLC and Icebox Project Space. Additional funding support provided by the Wyncote Foundation and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund. Festival Associate Producer: Benjamin Camp and the Kelly Group. Honorary Producers: Donna Hunt & Chris Deephouse, Glenn Van Moffaert, Yair Grinberg & Liz Coyle, Acro&. Bar sponsors: Fergie’s Pub and PunchBuggy Brewing. Cannonball Festival is produced as a hub of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, produced by FringeArts. 

More information can be found at the festival’s website www.cannonballfestival.org. Tickets go on sale on August 8.

Main image: Almanac Dance Circus Theater Company. Left to right: Ben Grinberg, Nathan Alford Tate, Darren Rabinowitz, Mae West, Lauren Johns Photo by John C. Hawthorne.