Now that summer has ended and school is back in session, the calendar has rolled back around to one of Boulder’s most cherished shenanigans: The Boulder International Fringe Festival, in which dozens upon dozens of unusual, avantgarde and independent theatrical performances descend upon the city like a swarm of alternately comic and tragic locusts, taking over everything that can possibly be interpreted as a performance space, from stages to the back seats of cabs. A complete schedule can be seen at www.boulderfringe.com, or in the insert printed in Boulder Weekly, but know that it includes everything from burlesque to puppets to zombies to MTV.
And for this, its 10th iteration, Boulder Fringe Festival Executive Director David Ortolano says they’re doing things a little differently.
“All the front of house is being handled by The Dairy [Center for the Arts] this year,” he says. “So we have all the central activity happening there.”
The Dairy will be showcasing acts on seven stages as well as making use of the center’s amenities from 12 p.m. to 2 a.m. daily for all 12 days of the festival. It’s fringe central. Ortolano says that he and fellow organizers have wanted to run the festival in this manner for a while, but this year was the first viable opportunity.
“They’ve gone through a lot of management changes over the years,” he says. “And that made it difficult to work with The Dairy because the pricing structures go up and down and with management changes, some understand what fringe is, and some don’t.”
But Ortolano says The Dairy’s team and board currently in place don’t just get it, they’re actually running The Dairy somewhat in the manner of a fringe festival by focusing on independent and selfproduced acts in its multiple performance spaces.
Because of a potential interior overhaul, Ortolano can’t say whether or not Fringe Fest will continue at The Dairy next year, but it’s there for now, and it’s not holding back on the goods.
The festival will pack in more than 300 events at 10 venues between Wednesday, Sept. 17 and Sunday, Sept. 28, including music, dance, film, workshops, parties and all the theater you can shake the cutting edge of a stick at. There are acts coming from as far away as South Africa, Australia and Israel, as well as from all over the U.S. and Canada. Attendees can learn how to swordfight, do African dance, make a book, build a puppet and more. And then there are the performances covering everything from Hawaiian “bat cave cabaret,” to former President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“There’s some really oddball things that are happening this year,” says Ortolano.
One of them is Wanda and the Wave, a new piece from Public Works Theater Company that is adapted from the children’s book The Old Woman and the Wave, by Shelley Jackson.
“The story is about a wave that hovers over this woman’s house for her whole life and the wave
holds the promise of seeing the whole world, and she doesn’t understand
that,” says Sondra Blanchard, the playwright of the piece and artistic
director of Public Works Theater Company.
“And
the first thing I thought about was scale. How do we get a chance to
show this entire wave?” The conclusion Blanchard came to was to make
everything small, to use puppets. But as this was the first piece of
puppetry Blanchard had ever attempted, she didn’t realize just how
difficult that would be.
“All the elements of the world need to be created,” she says. “It took awhile to learn what materials to use for what.”
Beyond
just creating everything in the show by hand, Blanchard needed to make
sure it was lightweight and portable as she has plans to tour the show
through Greece. But she took to it like a champ, and the production even
won a $3,000 grant from the Henson Foundation.
“It’s
not a huge amount of money, but in terms of being qualified to receive
the grant, it’s prestigious,” she says. “They hold a high standard for
puppetry.”
Another act that Ortolano is particularly interested in is the “tiny cinema” that will be parked in front of The Dairy.
“It’s basically a mobile home that’s been converted into a cinema,” says Ortolano.
It will show a series of super-8 mm film and digital shorts on a loop that anyone can pop in and see — if there’s room, anyhow.
Ortolano also admits that he’s a bit biased about the performance he’s most excited about, An Evening With the World’s Greatest Actor, by Michael Perrie Jr. See, Ortolano directed it.
“I
was called by this director friend of mine who wanted me to direct him
in a piece,” he says. “He’s in UNESCO, on the United Nations theater and
performance committee. And he calls me and says he wants to come do a
fringe festival, to do this
piece
about an old washed-up actor in New York who’s had to resort to doing
fringe festivals. I asked, ‘Are you serious? Do you want to do this?
’Cause it will make you look like that guy.’” The friend, Peter
Goldfarb, was serious. And Ortolano is more than pleased with how the
play came out.
“In the middle of the show, he mentions, ‘Can you believe it? I have to stoop down and do a fringe festival,’” says Ortolano.
But meta as it may be, Ortolano says that’s the point.
“The
fringe was designed and made to be a place where artists can find their
voice, but also produce in their work unjuried, uncensored, to ask what
does it mean to have your own voice in the world,” he says.
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