THEATER PHOTOGRAPHY WARM-UP

Does your city have a Fringe Festival? When one of the most prestigious arts festivals in Europe re-started after World War II, they would not admit the odd, the experimental and the out-there. So those artists said bleep you, we'll have our own. And thus was the Edinburgh Fringe Festival born.

And now there are offshoots all over the world. The St. Louis Fringe Festival takes place in mid-August. I'm the house photographer and a member of the board of directors. It's the highlight of my image making year. We just had a taste last weekend. Our executive director, Matthew Kerns (MFA, mind you), starred in a production of An Act of God, assisted by actor-comedian-pediatrician Ken Haller. It's a provocative comedy by longtime Saturday Night Live writer David Javerbaum. Matt, as God, has had about enough of us and visits to announce a new set of rules relevant to what we have become. It made you laugh and think.                      

TWOFER - I K(no)W / Kellita Maloof- The Medicine Show / Dr. Ken Haller

To have a chance of posting images for most of the Fringe shows before Mrs. C and I leave on our next adventure, I decided to do posts that have two of the solo acts. First we have Kallita Maloof from San Francisco, who achieves a measure of peace through burlesque. She visualizes dialing up and down her body's knobs for energy, stress, pain, rhythm and fluidity while performing self-affirming and, shall we say, visually stimulating performances. She finds it helps to control her ulcerative colitis.

Below is physician Ken Haller, a local doc who has a fondness for Broadway and cocktail lounge song with lyrics turned quite topical. He is also a poignant story teller, describing his moments with a dying teen and his parents, as well as the experience of being a gay man in his medical residency in New York at the fearful dawn of the AIDS epidemic. BTW, I couldn't resist editing the last photo in B&W. So film noir

Both of these shows made me think of the pair of comedy and tragedy masks that symbolize theater. 

Oh, and yesterday was Ellie's sixth birthday. Gotta squeeze that in somewhere,