TORRENT: DANCING IN THE CHURN To Premiere At Philadelphia Fringe Festival

As part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Torrent: Dancing in the Churn will premiere on Sunday, September 28, with performances at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. at CHI Movement Arts Center, 1316 S 9th St. The family-friendly production will feature new works by Evalina “Wally” Carbonell/Seed II Crown, Mijkalena Smith (Philadelphia), Jessica Warchal-King/JCWK Dance Lab (Reading), Karen Fox/Bella Deluxe Entertainment (Bethlehem), and Malcolm Shute/Human Landscape Dance (Washington, D.C.).

The program will present five different approaches to artmaking and survival in a hostile cultural climate. Smith explores the use of education as protest, keeping the arts alive through mentorship. Shute’s Waiting Room channels the restless anxiety of waiting for the next attack, with dancers twitching, shifting, and swarming before collapsing into uneasy stillness. Fox imagines activists as superheroes—truth tellers wielding words as weapons and inspiring hope across generations. Carbonell performs a ritual of regeneration, weaving spirals and undulating phrases into a meditation on renewal. Warchal-King turns to the body as a site of healing, creating rhythm and gesture-driven unison that beats a steady pulse across the floor and dancers’ bodies. Together, the artists reflect a shared belief in embracing multiple viewpoints and amplifying diverse voices.

Waiting Room, choreographed by Shute, further illustrates this theme through a fast-paced quartet that compiles anxious gestures tied to prolonged waiting. Dancers lean, slump, and shift uncomfortably on a bench, embodying the endless anticipation of news from a doctor, a principal, or a boss. In the context of today’s culture wars, the work resonates as a metaphor for waiting for the next blow to fall, whether through threats to the National Endowment for the Arts, the dismantling of healthcare protections, or the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights.

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