Sanctuary | 2010

Photo: Steve Belkowitz

Warehouse on 6th and Green Streets
Philadelphia Fringe Festival

This is where the lost take charge.

Take a wall fourteen feet high and one hundred and twenty feet long and make it into a stage. This is the set for Sanctuary, a dance of intense movement, ritual, and mistaken assumptions about the past from celebrated choreographer and Festival favorite Brian Sanders. Sometime in the future, a group of people inhabit a blown out, old industrial architectural relic from the past. They have chosen this place as a safe-haven, looking to recreate something from the past that is missing from their lives: a previous, purer way of life—the ever-elusive sense of “the way things used to be.”

Sanders turns this wide visual expanse into an exquisitely choreographed mix of danger, force, and beauty, as his lost tribe brings to life a vision of what this place once was, with a new set of rules and rituals.