I started my third day of the Fringe Festival by heading over
to the Little Theatre to catch the RIT School of Film and Animation Student
Honors Show. Speaking before the screening began, Administrative Chair
Malcolm Spaull explained that the program was curated
by faculty members to incorporate each type of film (narrative, documentary,
experimental, along with 2D, 3D, and stop-motion animation), with works by
students from every year of the program — from first year BFA students to those
in their final year of their Masters — being represented. It was great seeing
the work of this next generation of filmmakers, and there were some truly
impressive pieces on display.
While I realize the show’s true purpose is to let the student
filmmakers see what their peers have accomplished (most of the audience seemed
to consist of first year RIT students), since the show has been rolled into the
Fringe Festival, it’d be great to make the event a little more manageable for
theater-hopping festival-goers. Seeing a 5-hour block of time listed in the
program surely kept more than a few people away. Though the program included an
intermission, over two hours for each half is still fairly daunting — as it
was, I had to duck out early. Maybe next year, organizers could break it down
even more, scheduling several shorter programs throughout the day, making this
worthy program a bit more enticing to Fringers.
Unleashed! Improv’s “Trending” aims to take the traditional improv show format and
give it a fresh spin by incorporating some newfangled social media into the
act. But as with most early technological advancements, the results were a bit
buggy. The group had an assigned “webmistress” to sit off to the side of the
stage, collecting hashtagged audience suggestions
from Twitter, throwing memes up on a screen, and generally controlling the
course of the show. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to have been much
planning for how those components were going to be incorporated into the skits,
often making them feel completely extraneous from what was happening on stage.
One particular sketch utilized live polling, in which the
audience used their phones to vote on several choices provided by the
webmistress about what direction the skit might take next. Great idea, but in
practice this left the cast members frozen, waiting for their next move to
come. And the last thing you want in an improv act is
dead air. Still, there were some chuckles to be had, and hopefully with the
first show now under its belt, Unleashed! Improv will
be able to work these kinks out the next time around.
Unleashed! Improv will perform
“Trending” again on Friday, September 26 at The TheatreROCS
Stage at Xerox Auditorium. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10.
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2014.
