It was sort of a miracle the way Cannonball erupted onto Philly’s theater scene in 2021 – Nick Jonczak and four of his theatery-circus friends trying something new after the COVID awfulness.
That first year, Cannonball, a subset of Philly’s Fringe Festival, offered 150 performances of 28 shows at a former brewery turned trolley car repair garage turned performance hub. In 2022, there were 300 performances of 65 shows at two hubs. In the heart of it all, four of the five founders (not Jonczak) were incapacitated by COVID. Aargh.
By 2023, the founders and a growing crew produced 587 performances of 154 shows in four venue hubs. Satisfying by the numbers, yes, but overwhelming for the organizers.
Jonczak needed a rest. They all did.
But what should they do? Should they just abandon all they had built? The Cannonball, which offers theater, dance and circus artists technical support (lighting, sound, box office) and places to perform, had become an important part of Philly’s experimental theater ecosystem.
They decided to rest.
That simple. That difficult. That profound.
“Never again, at that size. It was too big. It was a lot to manage,” Jonczak explained, doing the 2023 math. On any given weekend night, there’d be three to four shows at each of four venues, 12 to 16 shows total. Weekends were even more intense.
“I was the guy that ran all the box office managers and dealt with the ticketing issues. I felt really responsible for the smooth running of the audience experience at four venues happening simultaneously,” Jonczak said.
At the end of the 2023 season, co-founder Ben Grinberg presented his colleagues with a fabulous pizza and, more importantly, a four-year rotation plan meant to protect the producer cohort from burnout.
Newcomer associate producers would help with all aspects of the Cannonball festival. Second-year core producers assume responsibility for selecting artists and for overseeing all the production requirements. Third-year mentoring producers would train the newcomers.
And the fourth year? “They REST. It’s mandatory,” says Cannonball’s website.
“I was hungry – not for a break, but for a small reprieve,” Jonczak said. So, in 2024, he negotiated part-time hours at his IT day job, relinquished his Cannonball leadership roles, and spent the time working on playwrighting, his artistic passion
“I felt I had put my artistic career on hold,” he said.
Rest, for Jonczak, wasn’t exactly rest, but a stepping away from feeling responsible for everything and every show. Instead, he oversaw just a component of Cannonball.
In 2024, while “resting,” Jonczak landed a spot in The Foundry, a three-year playwrighting mentorship program affiliated with PlayPenn. He went to 50 Cannonball shows – more than he had seen in the previous three years combined. “I learned more of what it is like to be an audience member.”
For this year’s Cannonball, Jonczak has returned to a hybrid role as core and mentoring producer, making a deliberate effort to step back so others make decisions.
Along with preventing burnout, the idea of stirring the decision pot is part of what Grinberg envisioned in devising the rotation.
“We are really interested in not recreating models where there is one central group of people making all the artistic decisions,” he said, telephoning from the granddaddy Fringe festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. There, he was joining alums from Philly’s Circadium School of Contemporary Circus to present “I Think It Could Work.”
(If Grinberg hadn’t been able to step aside from his responsibilities, he wouldn’t have been able to be in a show across the ocean in the frantic weeks leading up to Cannonball’s Sept. 1 opening night.)
Static leadership, Grinberg said, can lead “to the same artists being platformed all the time and the same work being platformed all the time,” making the Cannonball less responsive to changing dynamics in the artistic community.
Both he and Jonczak say that the break has given them fresh perspectives. For example, Jonczak said that as an audience member, he saw how important it was for shows to start on time, despite Cannonball’s more laidback vibe. Punctuality mattered to audience members trying to see multiple shows in a night.
“There is an intrinsic value with rest,” Jonczak said. “I had thought that I had to deserve rest, but there’s value in being required to take rest after a set period of time. I think being forced to take rest has shocked my system. You have to go and rest before you are ready, but it is when you go before you are ready that you find what you really need.”
Speaking of rest, we couldn’t let Jonczak rest without asking him for a preview of this year’s Cannonball.
Cannonball runs Sept. 1-28 with about 140 shows and 400 performances at four venues – two theaters at the Drake in Center City, the Icebox Project Space in the Crane Arts Building in Kensington, and three performance spaces at the Asian Arts Initiative in Chinatown, plus more shows at Christ Church Neighborhood House and Smith Memorial Playground.
Many independent artists bring their shows to Cannonball, but Cannonball also distributed $40,000 in grants to artists producing work in particular genres: new performance work from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color artists; SWANA awards for artists of Southwest Asia and North African descent; support for artists creating work for children and families; CSAW awards for circus artists of color, support for artists doing immersive work, and scriptwriting and development support in partnership with the Philadelphia Theatre Co.
What should you see? Here are a couple of Jonczak’s suggestions:
Reminiscenia: During Jonczak’s rest year, he traveled to a theater workshop in Spain where he saw Chilean artist Malicho Vaca Valenzuela perform his one-man show. Valenzuela uses digital platforms to tell stories that span three generations, including his grandparents’ love story – all the more poignant as his grandmother slides into dementia. Next stop for this show? Lincoln Center in New York. Sept. 15-16, Icebox Project Space Gallery, 1400 N. American St., Phila.
Ethiopian Dreams: Circus Abyssinia, a 14-person circus troupe from the UK, tells the story of two young Ethiopian boys who wish upon a moon to join a circus. Cue jugglers, acrobats and contortionists. Sept. 15-22, Icebox Project Space Gallery.
Spank Bank Time Machine: “Angels in America” meets “Snakes on a Plane” in John Michael Play’s one-man show that includes a theatrical tutorial on how to use NARCAN. Sept. 12-17, Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks St., Phila.
I Found That The Sun Will Rise Tomorrow: Jonczak said he appreciates Anna Snapp’s fresh perspective on her struggles with sexual trauma and her mental and physical health challenges. Sept. 13-27, The Proscenium at The Drake, 302 S. Hicks St., Phila.
An Evening With Complicity Huffman: A one-woman show from Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, an Israeli-American poet who intermingles literary capitalism, settler colonialism and the crisis of the Palestinian people. Sept. 11-16, Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake.
Zap: From the Antihero Theatre Co., a detective murder mystery involving magic and the laws of the universe – completely acted in American Sign Language with an English voiceover. For Jonczak, this is part of Cannonball’s effort to make the festival accessible to more kinds of people. Sept. 2-28, Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake.
Americannibal: During his rest year, Jonczak expanded on an earlier version of this dark musical comedy produced during the 2021 Fringe. The plot? A Washington, D.C. server kidnaps U.S. Sen. Joe Mansion (D-PA) and eats him, piece by piece. Sept. 12-20, Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake.
You can search shows on both the Cannonball and Fringe websites. Tickets are available online via the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. The Fringe Festival, with a total of 1,197 performances of 340 shows, including Cannonball’s, runs Sept. 4-28.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
