"All Your Questions Answered" - Fringe Festival Context

I had the opportunity to attend a talk given by Erica Fee (Festival Producer) and Justin Vigdor (Chairman of the Board of the Fringe Festival), and learned a great deal about Fringe Festivals in general and the Rochester Fringe Festival, in particular, that helped put Geva’s offering into context for me.  The first fringe festival occurred in Edinburgh in 1947, when shows that didn’t make the cut decided to perform anyway – in any space they could find, on the “fringe” of the official festival.  There are now 50 Fringe Festivals in the United States, and although Rochester’s is only in its second year, the attendance at last year’s inaugural festival propelled it into one of the country’s top five! 

Several years ago, Joel Seligman, President of the University of Rochester, thought that our city should have a Fringe Festival, and he got local artists (including Mark Cuddy, Geva’s Artistic Director) together to discuss and plan the event.  They got sidetracked for a while, but when Erica Fee, a London theatre producer, was visiting her hometown of Rochester, she helped revive the concept, and moved home to run it.  Several of the area’s institutions of higher education (e.g., U of R, Nazareth, and MCC) are partnered with the Fringe Festival, which might explain the youth of many of the performers (including those in All Your Questions Answered).

One of the ideas behind a fringe festival is bringing together audiences and performers in non-traditional ways (and again, All Your Questions Answered fits this theme), to revitalize a city – to make it a better place to live. This year the festival is expanding from 5 days to 10, and will include 360 shows in 28 different venues around the city.  The Festival organization requests that shows be kept short, but otherwise does not participate in the selection process.  Instead, the venues review the applications themselves and decide which shows to sponsor.  The Fringe Festival only takes 10% of the ticket prices (and they encourage venues to set prices at or below $16 so that the shows are accessible to a wider audience).  Again, this explains why tickets to All Your Questions Answered are so inexpensive…

One of the highlights this year will be a Spiegeltent, which has been imported from Belgium.  In addition to performances in the round in that space, there will also be “silent disco”: a dance party with no audible music except through headphones!  Another will be the return of BANDALOOP in Manhattan Square Park (it’s estimated that 10,000 people attended the two performances last year, so let’s hope for good weather this year).

scene from Colleen Culley's "Foot in the Door"

It looks like I’m going to be in for a very busy 10 days, since I’ve circled a lot of performances in the Official Fringe Guide, including a friend’s offering called “Get a Foot in the Door:  the Dance of Late Capitalism” (if that isn’t “fringe” I’m not sure what is).  Hope to see lots of my friends at Geva’s All Your Questions Answered and at other shows throughout the festival. We might have to carpool – I can only imagine that parking is going to be stressful!