18 3/4 Anniversary Season | 2011
Photo: Steve Belkowitz
Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad Street
Philadelphia Inquirer
January 20, 2011
By Merilyn Jackson
Hanging around, dancing
Local choreographer and spectacle-creator Brian Sanders will celebrate 18 3/4 years with his dance company, JUNK - slithering, sliding, tumbling from all kinds of found objects.
If you've been a regular at the annual Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe or Shut Up and Dance performances, you probably have been mesmerized by dancers hanging from fences, flipping their bodies in the air like trapeze artists, cocooned in plastic beneath the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, or costumed like liquid robots. This inventive choreography, in such pieces as The Gate, Flushdance, AdShock, Sanctuary, Urban Scuba, and Patio Plastico, is all the work of Brian Sanders, spectacle-creator, repurposer of found objects, and dance-hijinks master.
In the last two decades, Sanders, 44, has become one of Philadelphia's most enduring and beloved dance-makers. His prolific, daring, and mischievously fun-loving work has endeared him to audiences far and wide, and to the local dance community. Dancers with gymnastic backgrounds or aspirations vie to work with him; other companies commission his choreography; critics fight to review his pieces.
Now, Sanders and his company, JUNK, in typical disregard of convention, are presenting an "18¾ Anniversary Season" through Sunday at the Arts Bank, featuring a work from each of their 18 years since 1992.
Sanders' unflagging ebullience belies the fact that he has been living with the knowledge that he is HIV positive since 1988. His first years after the diagnosis were less than lighthearted, as he sorted through all that it meant.
As a boy growing up in Princeton, he had studied gymnastics with his two brothers, and later ballet and modern dance, continuing his studies at what is now the University of the Arts. After his diagnosis, he left school to travel for a while, but eventually returned and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree; he now is a faculty member there.
In 1992, the 25-year-old Sanders formed Archetype Dance Company (later renamed JUNK, for its extraordinary ability to find inspiration in debris and discards) and within two years had presented two warmly reviewed concerts. In one of them, he mocked drawing his own blood with a yard-long syringe, using typically exaggerated props in a witty commentary on the daily trials of living with the virus.