Gunnar Montana’s Live Arts productions are immersive performance experiences that combine dance, music, visual art, and theatrical design. His work often blurs the line between performance and installation, transforming spaces into environments where the performance unfolds all around the audience.
PRODUCTIONS
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The shows are typically 60 minutes of pure dance, athleticism, performance art, and spectacle. Gunnar spends years developing each concept, which have ranged from neon-drenched gay motels and underground bathhouses to cannibalistic witch forests and nightmarish basements. He brings these worlds to life with a local troupe of professional dancers, drag queens, burlesque performers, and other artists.
Gunnar Montana Productions has developed a cult-like following in Philadelphia’s arts scene, with some audience members having not missed a single show in the 15 years Gunnar has been making work. He is known for keeping audiences on their toes and challenging what they expect from live performance. No two shows are the same, but they are always physical, strange, funny, sexy, unsettling, and unapologetically provocative.
BLACK WOOD: WINTERBORN
2024
Created for the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, BLACK WOOD: WINTERBORN followed the success of BLACK WOOD, returning audiences to the forest for a standalone sequel that expanded the mythology of Gunnar Montana’s Witch Coven as winter took hold.
BLACK WOOD
2023
Created for the 2023 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, BLACK WOOD was a dark journey through fear, adversity, and finding strength within your tribe. The production introduced Gunnar Montana’s Witch Coven, a fierce band of forest-dwelling women bound by ritual, survival, and a shared hunger for revenge.
BATH HOUSE
2022
Created for the 2022 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, BATH HOUSE drew from the history of bathhouses as spaces where queer sexuality could exist freely and without shame. The production celebrated desire, connection, and the freedom to experience pleasure on your own terms.
MOTEL MONTANA
2021
After a long break from live performance, Gunnar Montana Productions returned for the 2021 Philadelphia Fringe Festival with MOTEL MONTANA. The historic Latvian Society was transformed into a retro motel filled with neon, saturated color, and rooms waiting to be explored.
BASEMENT
2019
Presented as part of the 2019 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, BASEMENT was a complete reimagining of Montana’s first production of the same name, originally created in 2013. Six years later, Montana returned to the work with more experience and a larger production behind him, transforming Philadelphia’s historic Latvian Society into a sprawling subterranean nightmare.
WROUGHTLAND
2016
Created for the 2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, WROUGHTLAND transformed Philadelphia’s historic Latvian Society into an overgrown fairy tale world where familiar stories had lost their innocence.
RESURRECTION ROOM
2014
Created for the 2014 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, RESURRECTION ROOM was Gunnar Montana’s second major production. Montana created an alternate universe where technology had the power to rebuild life.
HYBERNATE
2014
Premiering in March 2014 at Philadelphia’s historic Latvian Society, HYBERNATE was created during an especially brutal Philadelphia winter. Montana described the idea as “reverse therapy on the season.” Instead of trying to escape the cold, he decided to exaggerate it and build an entire world inside of it.
BASEMENT
2013
Created for the 2013 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, BASEMENT was Gunnar Montana’s first independently produced work. The show came out of the end of a relationship and explored the irrational and disturbing emotions that can surface while trying to move through young heartbreak.