The show begins with a call on your cell phone. Over the course of the next hour a disembodied voice guides you on a mission to discover "the hive." Bobbing, weaving and skipping along with cell phone attached, you make your way through the streets, cobbled alleys, warehouses and businesses of Old City. Along the way you have a series of strangely affecting encounters that are both bewildering and enlightening.

In one section a trio of dancers mirrors your own movements. At first you feel self-conscious and clumsy, but as the dance progresses you begin to see the elegance in your own simple everyday movements. A mysterious and gently engaging experience that's both personal and communal, Cell connects a pedestrian's individual movements to those of Philadelphia as a whole-an experience that remains with you long after the show is over. Cell reveals the subtle and graceful dance of a city always on the move.

If you enjoy being trapped in small, dark spaces watching inscrutable dance-theater, you'll love People Burning Inside Hotels, the first part in director Juan Souki's The Uhaul Trilogy. Staged in the rear of a U-Haul truck and utilizing fragments of text, Souki's frenzied, vaguely feminist work is described as a movement piece about dysfunctional relationships.

The three dancers who leap on and off tiny chairs are accomplished, and for a few minutes the work's concept of exploring performance in a confined space holds your interest. But the venue feels like a gimmick. Eventually you become more preoccupied with the truck's dwindling air supply than the performance itself.

A more genuine example of site-specific theater is Kaibutsu's The Guided Tour. First presented in 2004 and remounted for this year's Live Arts Festival, playwright Bruce Walsh's script is a deeply autobiographical tale of a young man who despises his job as a tour guide in Philadelphia.

Performed on an actual tour bus (the kind that absurdly attempts to masquerade as a historic trolley), the in-transit play recalls Walsh's miserable days leading tourists about the city. Guided shrewdly mixes interior monologue, narrative and dialogue to delve into both Walsh's mind and the soul of the city.

Our guide/actor Bruce moans about the scripted "rap" he spews forth everyday to camera-wheeling tourists. Mildly amusing at first, Bruce is a fountain of trivial information, at one point informing us that William Penn's likeness atop City Hall has 14-inch-wide lips and 5-foot-long feet.

But as the bus departs Center City and drives down the streets of Point Breeze past bewildered pedestrians (it's not every day a tour bus rolls down Tasker Street, apparently), the play takes a darker turn. Walsh paints a picture of a man and a city broken and impoverished.

Unfortunately, when we return to Center City, the play loses momentum and reaches an unsatisfactory conclusion. Nevertheless, Guided is worth a trip.

Azuka Theatre has been around since 1998, yet the new production Azuka One-Acts marks the company's first appearance at the Philly Fringe. A collection of seven short plays, One-Acts is staged in-promenade (meaning the audience moves with the show) at a variety of Old City locations. After a strolling monologue down Third Street, the production then progresses to a sidewalk cafe, a phone booth, the roof of the Painted Bride Art Center and a dog park before concluding on the stage of the Actors Center.

The locations are all aptly suited for each play's subject matter, but overall each production lives or dies depending on the talents of the playwright. Some are better than others; Seth Kramer's Speak Now and Alexander E. Dremann's The Cheever Tapes are the duds in the bunch. Far more entertaining is Ross Berger's hilariously silly Catty Corner. Even better is Rolin Jones' alternately amusing and supremely disturbing parody of suburban life Sovereignty.

The evening concludes with nationally recognized playwright Tom Donaghy's It Takes an Orchard. In a satirical updating of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Donaghy imagines Chekhov's 19th-century heroine Lyubov Andreyevna amid a host of 21st-century technology. Featuring a terrific performance from Sarah Keifer, Orchard concludes Azuka's first Fringe production on a decidedly upbeat note.