The First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festival has announced the
lineup of its 2015 event, which will include more than 500 performances, four
new venues, and a larger Spiegeltent. The festival, which will be in its fourth
year, will take place Thursday, September 17, through Saturday, September 26,
in and around downtown Rochester.
This year’s
Friday on the Fringe — the festival’s stand-out, free headliner show — will
take place September 18 in Martin Luther King Jr. Park and will feature
Grounded Aerial, a New York City-based aerialist troupe that will perform on
the side of the 21-story HSBC Plaza as well as on the park’s “Tribute to Man”
metal framework.
British
actor and impressionist Luke Kempner will perform “Upside Downton” as the
Fringe’s comedy headliner this year. In the award-winning show, Kempner
recreates more than 30 characters in a parody of the TV series “Downton Abbey.”
Performances will take place Friday, September 25, and Saturday, September 26,
in the Eastman School of Music’s Kilbourn Hall.
Also in
Kilbourn Hall: a Gospel Sunday performance on Sunday, September 20. The event,
featuring Pastor Melvin Cross Jr., Glory House International, and Lewis Banks, starts at 2 p.m.
Fringe
organizers also announced the return of the Spiegeltent to the corner of East
Main and Gibbs Streets, this year as a new, larger venue. The Aurora tent, from
The Netherlands, will make its US debut, replacing the Magic Crystal tent of
the past two festivals. Two world-premiere shows will run inside the tent
during the course of the festival: “Cabinet of Wonders,” which will include
comedy, contortion, aerial, and a one-legged tapdancer; and “Princess
Wendy’s Late Nite Tease Room,” a comedy and burlesque show for adults about a
down-and-out birthday princess. Comedian Jamie Lissow — who opened for Patton
Oswalt and Jay Pharoah at previous festivals — will perform in the Spiegeltent
on Saturday, September 19, at 9:30 p.m.
And the
surreal Silent Disco (which has sold out in 2013 and 2014) will return at 11
p.m. on both Fridays. The lunchtime version, Brown Bag Disco, will take place
at noon on Friday, September 25.
Returning to
the Spiegelgarden, which flanks the Spiegeltent: the Pedestrian Drive-In —
free, outdoor movie screenings using Silent Disco headphones — and the ticketed
site-specific shows “Dashboard Dramas” (taking place in four parked cars) and
“Bushwacked” (inside a camping tent). A new site-specific show, “Hot Tub: The
Musical,” will make its debut.
Incorporating the cityscape into the
show, Rimini Protokoll’s “Remote Rochester” will take a crowd of people wearing
radio headphones along a carefully planned urban route. This will be the second
US-based “Remote X” show from Rimini Protokoll, a Berlin-based, site-specific
theater company. A voice in the headphones will direct the movements of the
crowd while music plays, turning the journey into a sort of personal film,
organizers said.
Free
entertainment — bands and street entertainers, show highlights, and chalk art —
and food and drink vendors will be on Gibbs Street both weekends.
All of the
above events were selected by the Fringe itself, but the majority of the
festival’s more than 500 performances (up from 380 in 2014) are organized by
the venues themselves. Artists submitted their performance proposals to the
venues earlier this year, and those venues curated their own lineups.
This year
the festival has added four new venues: The Strong National Museum of Play; Abilene
Bar and Lounge (153 Liberty Pole Way); the new Lyric Theatre (440 East Avenue),
with two performance spaces; and RAPA at the School of the Arts (45 Prince
Street), with five performance spaces.
Those venues
join returning Fringe spaces at Bernunzio Uptown Music, Blackfriars Theatre, the
Eastman School of Music’s Kilbourn Hall and Sproull Atrium, Gallery r, Garth
Fagan Dance Studio, George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre, Geva’s Fielding
Stage, Java’s Café, The Little, MuCCC, Rochester Contemporary Art Center,
Theatre ROCS Stage, and Writers & Books. Events at these venues will be
diverse, falling in and out of all genres of art, from theater, dance, music,
and comedy to interactive installations and site-specific performance pieces.
The 2015
Rochester Fringe Festival’s full schedule and all tickets — including the
Fringe Fanatic Pass ($190) — are now available at rochesterfringe.com.
This article appears in Jul 15-21, 2015.
