RileSmith Arts Blog

Tangle Movement Arts is a brainy 8-woman aerial dance company that brings a narrative-charged, politically thoughtful twist to the traditional burlesque-influenced genre of circus aerials. Read more about them in my recent Penn Gazette article, The Critical Circus.

I saw a preview of Half-Life, their upcoming show, in January at Performance Garage in Center City. Performance Garage, Tangle’s regular rehearsal space, has low ceilings for aerials, presenting a choreographic challenge for the troupe, not to mention some heart-stopping moments for audience members not used to watching low-flying aerialists.

Tangle premiers its full-length, high-flying version of Half-Life on June 1st and 2nd at Philadelphia’s newest venue, The Funicular Railway Station, on Coulter Street in Germantown. (From what I can tell, the name “Funicular” is a pun on “fun” and the idea of cables, pulleys and rigging– after all, the nearby Queen Lane Station, on the Chestnut Hill West line is at a perfectly normal elevation.)

Founder Lauren Rile Smith describes Half-Life as “inspired by complex machines, survivalist propaganda, and the animal kingdom… an exploration of utopian visions, strategies for getting through the apocalypse, humans vs. robots, systems, time, and decay. We named this new work Half-life in reference to the decay of radioactive matter. We wanted to explore what happens when established structures—buildings, mechanical bodies, even a network of friendships among people—break down over time, and what new life can emerge from the ruins. In this show, we travel into the apocalypse—and survive!”