"The Mother" by Black Label Movement and Sod House Theater

My first show of the 2025-2026 #TCTheater season is a new work by two companies I've never seen before, and it set the bar pretty high for the season. Black Label Movement (a dance theater company) and Sod House Theater (specializing in site-specific theater) are combining forces on a music-dance-theater piece based on the 1906 Russian novel Mother by Maxim Gorky. This "punk rock dance musical" tells the story of striking workers in early 20th Century Russian in a way that feels modern and relevant. The intimate and immersive space at the historic Sokol Hall in St. Paul's West 7th neighborhood, a center for Czech and Slovak culture, makes you feel like you're part of the revolution, and the original music by Annie Enneking, who also plays the title role, is so inspiring. The Mother is a fusion of theater companies, artists, and art forms that really makes you feel the emotions of the story viscerally in a captivating 90 minutes. But it's playing for one weekend only - click here for info and tickets to the remaining shows (through Sunday).

Minnesota Fringe Festival 2023: "Dock Work"

Day: 9

Show: 32

Title: Dock Work

Category: DANCE - MODERN / DRAMA / PHYSICAL THEATER / HISTORICAL CONTENT /NON-VERBAL / POLITICAL CONTENT

By: Jackdonkey Productions

Directed by: Zach Christensen

Location: Rarig Thrust

Summary: A multi-media performance around unions and workers' rights using dance, music, spoken word, and scenes.

Highlights: This is definitely unlike anything else I've seen at Fringe. An experimental devised work like this is exactly what Fringe is for. Directed by Zach Christensen, performers Caiti Fallon, Tessa Dahlgree, and Sri Peck represent dock workers, and really all workers. Wearing black pants and tank top with an orange hat, they dance, perform repetitive movement like someone might do on a dock or in a factory, and perform spoken word or storytelling, alone or as a trio. They're all incredibly expressive, in their movements, facial expressions, and emotional delivery of text. The dances are accompanied by recorded music and later, a live rock band in similar costumes (Karsten Mink, Leo Lerner, and Clark Amann). The only set pieces are three stools, sometimes used as stools, other times as props, and a ball of red yarn that becomes impossibly entangled in the stools and forms a triangle for performance. The spoken pieces are poetry or stories, including the attempts at unionization at a Starbucks. With the prominent current strikes by TV and film writers and actors, it's a timely, powerful, and affecting show that explores the theme of workers' rights in an unconventional way.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here.