Please join us this Saturday at the Washington Avenue Pier in South Philadelphia from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. We are more than midway through The Quiet Circus, a year and half long residency at the Washington Avenue Pier, a complex and riveting site in South Philadelphia along the Delaware River. Among the many histories of occupations and abandonment whose layers become visible under close observation, the pier was the point of entry for immigration into Philadelphia at the turn of the 19th Century. The Quiet Circus performances accumulate through an open participation, public practice at the Washington Avenue Pier. This Saturday will be our last Spring performance until we begin again in September.
There are three interlocking scores that make up The Quiet Circus. Here are glimpses of two of them from last week when we resolutely and ecstatically danced in the chilly rain for an audience of one human and a half dozen pairs of birds who would pause for a moment or two in their water-logged mating activities to see what was going on. This is from “making refuge” in the Island score:
And here are some glimpses from The Luminous World :
The third score is The Landscape Game and you are invited to play at either of the two installations that we’ve embedded in the landscape of the pier. You may have seen QC designer Maiko Matsushima play The Landscape Game recently at a River Charrette event we curate with Philadelphia Contemporary that was held at RAIR, a residency center further up the Delaware River that is nested inside a commercial recycling center that processes over 400 tons of construction waste every day. When you come to play this contemplative game on Saturday you can observe yourself observing. Or you can observe Maiko playing with Billy Dufala in a 5-ton excavator here first:
If you would like to do more than see the performance on Saturday, I invite YOU to join our rehearsal on Friday from 4pm to 7pm at The Washington Avenue Pier. We will teach you simple ways to begin to participate in the scores for a deeper level of engagement on Saturday. Don’t be shy! Just give us a heads up that you would like to come: jillian@thequietcircus.com.