My First Fringe Festival: Indianapolis to Edinburgh
ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By Ernest Disney-Britton
It was organic, seemingly chaotic, and kind of like speed-dating. It was my first time, and I kept asking "What is a Fringe Festival?" This past Sunday, the theatre festival, formally known as the International Fringe Festival in NYC and the Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival in Indy both closed but their two different paths are the answer to my question. Their roots date back to 1947, when eight theatre groups showed up uninvited at the Edinburgh International Festival, and decided to stage their shows anyway. It has since become a world-wide August sensation, but remains centered on summer-time in Edinburgh.
IndyFringe is the uncurated version inspired by Edinburgh, with 8 different venues, 64 performing groups, and 384 uncurated performances. I also learned that long-lines signal popularity, and that you must pay cash for tickets (60% sold 30-min before show). FringeNYC, rejects free-for-all spirit of most fringe festivals, and winnows a field of about 850 applications down to 185 shows. The NYC path featured superbly reviewed Waiting for Godot and an Indy favorite was High Impact Infidelity Diet starring Paul Hansen. The helpful guidance of playwright Lou Harry got me there; but it was Christina Augello, artistic director of Exit Theater in San Francisco which produces the San Francisco Fringe Festival, that helped me understand what it is by contrasting it with what it is not: “The fringe is a noncurated festival by origin, and so anything else that curates or has a jury is not a fringe.”
By Ernest Disney-Britton
It was organic, seemingly chaotic, and kind of like speed-dating. It was my first time, and I kept asking "What is a Fringe Festival?" This past Sunday, the theatre festival, formally known as the International Fringe Festival in NYC and the Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival in Indy both closed but their two different paths are the answer to my question. Their roots date back to 1947, when eight theatre groups showed up uninvited at the Edinburgh International Festival, and decided to stage their shows anyway. It has since become a world-wide August sensation, but remains centered on summer-time in Edinburgh.
IndyFringe is the uncurated version inspired by Edinburgh, with 8 different venues, 64 performing groups, and 384 uncurated performances. I also learned that long-lines signal popularity, and that you must pay cash for tickets (60% sold 30-min before show). FringeNYC, rejects free-for-all spirit of most fringe festivals, and winnows a field of about 850 applications down to 185 shows. The NYC path featured superbly reviewed Waiting for Godot and an Indy favorite was High Impact Infidelity Diet starring Paul Hansen. The helpful guidance of playwright Lou Harry got me there; but it was Christina Augello, artistic director of Exit Theater in San Francisco which produces the San Francisco Fringe Festival, that helped me understand what it is by contrasting it with what it is not: “The fringe is a noncurated festival by origin, and so anything else that curates or has a jury is not a fringe.”
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