Show time for Rochester Fringe

It took dancers jumping off buildings for people to finally
“get” the magnitude of the inaugural First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festival.

“Another festival?” is a common refrain in Rochester. It can
be hard to get excited about a new project when the area is already so flush
with celebrations of everything from Turkish culture and lumberjacks to the
environment and local restaurants (all festivals taking place within the
current week).

But at the February press conference officially announcing the
Rochester Fringe Festival all it took was footage of Bandaloop,
a world-renowned aerial dance troupe that performs vertical routines while
suspended on the sides of buildings, for people to realize that Fringe was not
just “another festival” — it has the makings to be a very big deal. Dancers,
dangling from ropes, swinging, leaping, twirling
against a bright blue sky: that’s not something Rochester has ever seen before.

The group is one of the headliners of the premiere edition of
the Fringe, and will twice perform excerpts from its piece “Bound(less)” on the
side of the 21-story One HSBC Plaza. And it’s only one of the dozens of acts
that will be taking over downtown as the Rochester Fringe Festival makes its
debut in more than 20 venues from Wednesday, September 19, through Sunday,
September 23. The event will showcase a mix of local and national performers
putting on 180-plus shows over five days, covering visual art, theater, dance,
comedy, magic shows, film, music, and family-friendly fare.

Organizers have been working on the festival for nearly four
years, and the project is backed by a Who’s Who of Rochester’s cultural elite. The
road to the festival hasn’t always been easy to navigate, and the festival has
its challenges. But Fringe is finally here, and Rochester better get ready.

If flying dancers aren’t enough reason to take
Rochester Fringe seriously, consider the festival’s pedigree. It was initially
the brainchild of University of Rochester President Joel Seligman, who in 2008
started having informal meetings with various cultural groups, politicians,
businesses, and other potential stakeholders for what was then being referred
to as a summer arts festival to take place in downtown Rochester. Eventually
the festival became its own nonprofit entity, and its board of directors now
includes Mark Cuddy of Geva
Theatre Center, Grant Holcomb of the Memorial Art Gallery, Ruby Lockhart of
Garth Fagan Dance, and Heidi Zimmer-Meyer of the Rochester Downtown Development
Corporation, as well as representatives from George Eastman House, RIT, Eastman
School of Music, and other organizations.

In 2009, Erica Fee — a UR graduate who carved out a
successful theater career acting, directing, and producing in London and at the
Edinburgh Fringe Festival — was brought onto the project, and eventually named
festival producer. Along with board chair Justin Vigdor,
Fee is widely regarded as the major force behind making Rochester Fringe a
reality. (“The key reason we have a Fringe festival is Erica,” says UR’s
Seligman.)

One of the challenges facing the Rochester Fringe Festival is
explaining to audiences exactly what “Fringe” means. When you hear Greek
Festival, you know you’re getting “Opa!” and
spanakopita. When you think about Jazz Festival, at the very least you know
you’re going to get a range of music. But Fringe? Not so obvious.

The allure of a Fringe festival can be best explained by Paul
Burgett, vice president of the University of
Rochester and a member of the Rochester Fringe Festival board. Two years ago,
as he and his wife were touring the South Pacific,
they had a stop in Adelaide, Australia, home to Adelaide Fringe, the second-largest
Fringe festival in the world. (There are more than 200 Fringe
festivals worldwide; the first — and still largest — is the Edinburgh Fringe in
Scotland, founded in 1947.)

When Burgett arrived in Adelaide,
the festival “was in full blossom,” he says, “and I was absolutely captivated
by what was going on. The streets were alive with all kinds of performers —
jugglers, musicians, actors, performers, magicians. People on
15-foot unicycles, art shows in galleries along the mall. We were there
for four to five days, and I was just mesmerized, awestruck by all the
activity. The streets were teeming with happy people, and the city was full of
energy, excitement, and surprises.”

More specifically, Festival Producer Fee explains that Fringe
means, “a multidisciplinary, multiday festival that is
not curated by a centralized artistic board,” she says.

After Rochester Fringe established itself as a nonprofit
organization, it reached out to a variety of arts and cultural organizations
and community leaders. It signed up more than 20 venues, ranging from
traditional performance spaces like Geva Theatre
Center and Blackfriars Theatre to smaller stages like
The Little Café and Writers & Books and quirkier spaces like Black Radish
Studio and Java’s. The participating venues booked their acts themselves, based
on artist submissions that came in through the Fringe Festival’s website this
spring.

The festival’s participatory aspect was perhaps lost
on Rochester at first — the idea that area performers could actually have their
work be part of this enterprise. But eventually,
people got it, and Fee says the website was flooded with submissions — she was
still getting pitches six weeks out from the festival — with more than 180
fully fledged acts looking to get booked. That “far exceeded” the organizers’
expectations for Year 1, Fee says.

Those submissions varied greatly. Some were new shows by
local artists, like Method Machine’s play “The Gay Fiancée.” Others were edgy,
existing works looking for a wider audience, like Kimberly Niles’ “The Isle of
Dogs.” Some of the submissions came from out-of-towners, like Chicago-based
musical comedian Matt Griffo or the Fringe circuit
favorite, “The Event.” And taking advantage of the area’s rich academic scene,
many of the productions are original collaborations between local college
departments and arts groups, such as the intriguing “Astro
Dance” by choreographer Thomas Warfield, RIT/NTID Dance Company, and the Thomas
Golisano College of Computing and Information
Sciences. [See adjoining article for City Newspaper’s critics’ picks for the
best bets at the Fringe Festival.]

After the submissions arrived at the festival, they were
routed to the individual venues at which the artists hoped to perform. Kris
Ashley, who handled the Fringe booking for Rochester Area Performing Arts on
East Main Street, says that RAPA’s East End Theatre received around 75
submissions — second only to Geva, she says. For her,
the process of deciding what made it into their Fringe offerings included
reading the applications, going through artist websites or videos, and, in
several dozen cases, giving the artists a tour of RAPA’s recently overhauled
theater spaces.

Ashley says her primary concern was the quality of the acts,
and whether they fit the RAPA mission, which includes family-friendly and
educational offerings. The final schedule at RAPA includes a variety of dance
pieces, some theater, and even a night of very adult comedy.

The festival’s programming process has not been
without its detractors. Certain venues not directly involved in the festival
have organized their own non-Fringe “fringe” series of events. (Ironically,
that’s how the Edinburgh Fringe Festival itself began.) Some artists objected
to having to pay to participate in the festival, and others complained that the
programming features some out-of-town artists, or isn’t “fringe”
enough.

“A Fringe festival doesn’t mean that you’re on the fringes of
society,” Fee says. “You don’t have to be in the fringes of society or the
fringes of art to participate in a Fringe festival. Sure, you can do edgy work.
You can also do a revival of a Shakespeare play. One of the most successful
shows of the Edinburgh Fringe was called ‘Shakespeare for Breakfast.’ It’s at
9:30 a.m., it’simprov, most
of the audience is over 70 years old. But I’ll tell you right now, you show up
and you can hardly get a seat.”

As for artists having to pay to be involved, “Fringe festivals
by nature all have registration fees,” Fee says. “You perform at the Toronto
Fringe Festival, you have a $750 registration fee. I
think that our registration fee of $100 to $150 is a very, very good bargain.
And the fact that we’re taking such a low percentage of ticket sales — 10
percent of them come back to us. With New Orleans Fringe, I think it’s a 50-50
split. Most Fringe fests take far over 10 percent, and if they don’t take that,
they have a huge registration fee upfront. We’ve tried to keep that super
competitive.”

Regarding the criticism that the festival
includes artists from outside Rochester: “I’m not going to pander to a
xenophobic approach to the arts,” Fee says. “The venues have programmed
themselves. The venues have decided what they want in their own venues. If they
want a group coming in from San Francisco, and that group wants to come to
Rochester to perform, more power to them.”

“The majority of our acts are from Western New York,” says
Fee. “This is absolutely a reflection of our community. But I think we are
allowed to have outsiders come into the community and succeed. I think it
creates a real cross-pollination of ideas, too. I think it’s fantastic for
Rochester-based artists to work alongside artists from other communities. Not
only do they learn from the artists, the artists from other communities learn
from Rochester. We want a festival that is exciting, entertaining, enthralling.
And we don’t care where they come from in the end.”

With more than 150 shows taking place at 21 different
venues, the range of acts involved in the first Rochester Fringe is larger in
number and more diverse than any of the organizers say they had hoped for.

“I don’t think anyone on the board thought there would be
more than 100 different performances. That’s extraordinary,” says Geva’s Mark Cuddy. “And there’s
such an eclectic range, a melding of high-brow and low-brow. There are populist
events and yet some serious work and some comedy, as well as classical music.
It’s really the range. And I’m hoping that people in our community that don’t
think of themselves as cultural attendees will attend something, or several somethings, or just come on downtown to have a good time
and check it out, and realize, ‘Oh, it’s OK, I fit in.’ I’m hoping we grow
audiences for the rest of the year. We’re only going to do that if we do
something really wonderful this one week and get really turned on.”

“There will be something for everybody, I think,” says UR’s
Paul Burgett. “Rochester is a festival town. In May
we have the Lilac Festival, built around the magnificent lilacs in Highland
Park. Memorial Art Gallery has Clothesline, built around the artistic efforts
of 400-plus artists. The Corn Hill Festival is a quintessential American urban
festival of vendors, some entertainment, but mostly vendors selling their
wares. But Fringe Festival is not about selling products, it’s about
entertaining, educating, exciting the festivalgoer with a panoply of
activities, from Bandaloop to Harlem Gospel Choir to
just a whole array of activities. The other festivals in town offer what they
offer — usually a specific offering. Fringe Festival offers a much broader
array of entertainment and activities than, I think, our other excellent
festivals.”

As for helping people understand exactly what “Fringe” means
to Rochester, “It’s very much about educating the community about what a Fringe
festival is about,” says Fee. “You can see many shows and exhibits within a
short period. You can really feel enriched. You can laugh, you can cry, you can
watch dance, whatever, all within that period. You can really judge for
yourself. You can watch new work, you can watch revivals. You can make your own
Fringe, as we say. It’s a smorgasbord of the arts.”

To ensure that as many people as possible stuff themselves at
that artistic smorgasbord, the festival has deliberately kept ticket costs low.
Most shows cost $10 to $15, and seats for the highest-priced headliner, geek-hero
comedian Patton Oswalt, run $15 to $55. There are
also dozens of free performances throughout the week, including a gospel
showcase on Gibbs Street on Sunday, and assorted street performers and other
acts performing around the festival footprint.

While people may not still fully understand Fringe,
organizers believe that once audiences experience it, they’ll get it. “I’ve
been saying all along that the explosion will actually happen after the first
year, because people will go, ‘Oh! That’s what that is,'” says Cuddy. “The first year is, let’s just get through it, put on a really good first-year festival. And then people
will understand what the possibilities are, and we’ll really get rolling.”

And just as that Bandaloop footage
at the first press conference really captured the room’s attention, Fee is
looking for a similar experience for Rochester en masse when the troupe
actually performs. “I think that when we have the community together watching Bandaloop dance on the side of HSBC Plaza, I hope the penny
drops,” Fee says. “I hope people realize that yes, we’re right here, right now,
and we can make a difference. I hope people recognize the potential of
Rochester and the potential, not just for this festival… I think that Fringe
festivals can really bring about a huge sea change in the performing arts. I
hope that what we find here is, artists can really be edgy, not just during the
festival, but they can try new things out year round, and that people are
accepting of those things.”

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This article appears in Show Time: The Rochester Fringe Festival.