In the twenty-seventh year of Philadelphia’s Fringe Festival, the FringeArts building which sits just opposite the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, hosted funders, audience, supporters and artists, to roast retiring founder, Nick Stuccio. In 2013, he raised hundreds of thousands to renovate a vacant nineteenth-century water processing plant beside the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. It opened with a restaurant and bar (now FringeArts) on one side, a black box theater, and a capacious outdoor beer garden overlooking the Delaware River for dining and dancing to area bands. The site has become a center for the performing arts and community gatherings. Stuccio changed the balance of culture between center city and the river wards neighborhoods. But the opening of the FringeArts building saw a tangent between the uptown ballet. At its inaugural performance in 2014,“What I Learned About Outer Space,” guests were there as much to see the Pennsylvania Ballet dancers in new works as they were to party. It was a co-creation of (then) Pennsylvania Ballet, Curtis Institute of Music and Fringe Arts. 

The Gala for Stuccio was a night of hilarity with Martha Graham Cracker (Dito Van Reigersberg, also of fame as a founder of Pig Iron Theater Company) and Bearded Lady, John Jarboe, emceeing. The glitzier academy event took place on the following weekend at the grand old Academy of Music on Broad Street. It’s a wide corridor that divides our city by east and west and unites us from the northernmost end to our southernmost border with the section south of City Hall long ago dubbed the Avenue of the Arts. The Gala celebrated the sixtieth Anniversary of the Philadelphia Ballet (formerly the Pennsylvania Ballet,) Ángel Corella’s tenth year as artistic director, and the long awaited groundbreaking of the new black box theater at the ballet’s north Broad Street digs, “a dramatically expanded Center for Dance.” With it's black box theater north of City Hall on Broad Street, this promises yet another shift in the axis of our arts landscape.

The festivities included the bestowing of several awards, among them the inauguration of Board chair, David F. Hoffman’s eponymously named award for artistic achievement to Debra Austin, who, in 1982, became the first African American female principal ballerina of a major American ballet company, and to Barbara Sandonato, the Pennsylvania Ballet’s first principal ballerina in 1964. Her daughter, Gabriella Yudenich, who danced as a soloist from 2001 to 2013, accompanied her mother to accept the award. Yudenich looked like an exotic bird in a multi-colored floor length-sheath, split up one side to show her dancer’s leg. Sandonato’s husband Alexie Yudenich, Gabriella’s father, had also danced with the ballet. In the company’s early days many of the dancers lived in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia, some, like Yudenich and Sandonato renting apartments from my relatives.