With its classic tiled roof and soaring, arched windows, The Rotunda (4014 Walnut St.) sticks out amid the polished metal and stone that has become the west side of the intersection of 40th and Walnut Streets.

Built in 1911, the one-time Christian Science church turned neighborhood arts and culture venue is 100 years old this year. It’s celebrating with three days of performances by the wonderful Anne-Marie Mulgrew & Dancers Co., which has designed a production specifically for The Rotunda’s sanctuary space.

Most events at The Rotunda are held in a black-box theater in the rear part of the building that once served as a Sunday school when the building was a church. Occasionally, a performance warrants opening the much bigger sanctuary space, which sits under the buildings distinctive round roof.

This weekend’s unique performance, entitled Le Dada Va Gaga Dans 2011, is part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, which continues through May 1.

This description of the performance comes from the dance company’s website:

The program consists of a dozen short theatrical vignettes, dances and art installations inspired by the architecture of the space and the festival theme, Paris in 1911 moving towards 2011. Highlights include video projections on walls juxtaposed with live performance, a 2011 installation inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s notorious Etant Donnes, dancers clinging to doorways and walls, a pew dance, characters such as the lighted-hat lady who drops Kleenexs from the choir loft, a re-imagined version of Mulgrew’s 1992’s Earthborne featuring a woman on a ladder watching a stick dance, carousel like-dances using the fallen chandelier as a
sculpture, unexpected scenarios and audience interaction.

Performances on Friday and Saturday begin at 7:11 p.m. Sunday’s performance begins at 3:11 p.m. If you arrive 11 minutes before the show, you can watch a “pre-show” performance outside The Rotunda. There will also be refreshments and discussion in the black-box theater following the show.

Tickets are $15 General Admission, $10 Students/Seniors/DancePass holders. Tickets can be purchased on the PIFA website www.pifa.org, in person at the Kimmel Center Box Office, or by phone at 215-546-PIFA or 215-790-5800.

Below is an interview with The Rotunda’s director, Gina Renzi, about the building and this weekend’s performance.

Rodney Camarce, an artist in the city’s Mural Arts Program, will lay down some urban flair on eight pairs of sneakers today at 34th and Walnut from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Camarce’s custom paint jobs are part of the Keds company’s “How Do You Do?” road trip to colleges across the country.

The stop at Penn will also feature live music and, we suspect, many things sneaker related.

The Community Education Center, a non-profit and community based arts center in West Philly, needs your help. All you need to do is click a button. If enough of us do that the center will receive a $50,000 grant.

The voting is part of Kraft Foods/Maxwell House Drops of Good Community Houses grant competition. The CEC is one of 10 locations across the country vying for a $50,000 grant. Five will get the grants and the CEC is currently fifth in the voting by a fairly slim margin. Go to this page to vote. They will ask you for your e-mail address to make sure that you are a real person (don’t worry, no marketing) and then you’re done.

Rebuilding Together Philadelphia is helping with the grant. The community online magazine Flying Kite has a nice feature today on CEC Executive Director Terri Shockley.

Here is the CEC’s video pitch for the competition:

Gladiators will battle it out in Penn Museum‘s Warden Garden on Saturday as part of “Gladiator Day,” which will also include a talk by Harvard Latin professor Dr. Kathleen Coleman (and consultant on the Russell Crowe film “Gladiator”) on “The Virtues of Violence: Gladiators, Beasts, and Public Executions in Ancient Rome.”

The event will run from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Gladiators from the Ludus Magnus Gladiatores (The Great School of the Gladiator) will fight every hour beginning at 1 p.m. In between bouts they will give workshops on weapons used back in the day. Wannabe gladiators can make their own helmets at the family craft table.

Dr. Coleman’s talk begins at 2:30 p.m.

The gladiator extravaganza is in conjunction with the museum exhibition Worlds Intertwined: Etruscans, Greeks and Roman. Admission to the museum is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $6 for students and children and free for children under 6 and PennCard holders.

The First World Theatre Ensemble will stage a performance of “Sojourner” on Saturday at The Rotunda (4014 Walnut St.) to help raise money for the Community Education Center (3500 Lancaster Ave.) and the The Paul Robeson House (4951 Walnut St.), two important West Philly-based cultural institutions.

The play features Zuhairah McGill as the abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth. Born into slavery in Swartekill, New York as Isabella Baumfree, Truth escaped with an infant daughter in 1826 and became one of the first African American women to win a court case against a white man when she sued to have her son returned from a slaveowner in Alabama.

The performance begins at 7 p.m. General admission tickets are $25. Tickets for students and seniors are $15. Tickets can be purchased online at: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/168495 or at the door one hour before the perfomance.

Philly jazz musician Warren Oree will play a family-friendly concert today at 2 p.m. at the Lucien E. Blackwell West Philadelphia Regional Library (52nd and Sansom).

Oree, a bassist, is the leader of the Arpeggio Jazz Ensemble and director of the renowned West Oak Lane Jazz Festival. He has produced and recorded several jazz records and has toured throughout Europe, South America and the Caribbean. Oree also leads workshops on jazz for kids and families.

The concert is Free and open to everyone.