Postcards From the Fringe

Was it magic? Mentalist Alain Nu's show, "Circus of the Mind" -- one of many offered during the Capital Fringe Festival -- may leave you wondering. The festival continues through July 30. (Mark Finkenstaedt - For The Washington Post)

Although Zimmerman hadn't originally intended to sing, he was persuaded to dare his own stunts, so to speak (he's a pop-ish high baritone and relies on the lower notes in his music to "cue" his mental pitch). He uses prerecorded tracks with background singers on all but one song, which he performs solo at the piano. There will not be a sign language interpreter, but he will do some signing during the show.

-- Eve Zibart

JAY ALAN ZIMMERMAN'S INCREDIBLE DEAF MUSICAL Friday at 7:30, Saturday at noon, Sunday at 5:30, Wednesday at 10 and Thursday at 5. At the Canadian Embassy. $15.

For Two Dancers, Lofty Aspirations

It all started with a walk through Penn Quarter. Dancers Sharon Witting and Andrea Burkholder were looking for inspiration in the neighborhood's physical context.

Naturally they looked up.

Naturally because Witting and Burkholder are directors of Arachne Aerial Arts, a dance company that defies gravity by hanging from rafters using trapezes, hoops and lengths of Chinese silk. "When we took our first walk, as far as the eye could see there were cranes, there was scaffolding," Witting says. Immediately the pair saw both opportunity and metaphor in the heavenward reach of construction equipment at work changing the city's face.

Though initially they wanted to perform dangling from construction cranes, they couldn't get past a few District regulations. Instead "Luxury Lofts Coming Soon!" will float above the audience at Woolly Mammoth Theatre's main stage.

"We connected with the idea of displacement and vulnerability, of people being caught in the rubble," says Burkholder, who notes that she recently felt the ramifications of redevelopment when her District-based Pilates studio, Pure Joe, was forced from its downtown quarters to make way for office space.

"This idea of luxury," Witting said, "comes at a significant cost to the residents being forced out. Progress and redevelopment has to happen to revitalize, but you can do it responsibly."

Burkholder wondered: "If all developments are Class A, what happens to the middle class and the artists?"

-- Lisa Traiger