Ever since her high school senior play in 1954, Houston Roberts has wanted to be a performer. But her stage dreams took a back seat to her real life as she went on to get married and have kids. Roberts found herself at a turning point in her early 40s when she went through a painful divorce. All of a sudden, she was in a bad job and back in the dating game. But as Roberts says, from disaster comes discovery, and she found salvation in an unlikely alter ego: a clown named Ribbons.
“My life was just at a point of real crisis. Nothing was going well,” she says. “I’ve always known myself as a creative spirit, but I was really surprised. I never in my life wanted to be a clown. … I felt so good being Ribbons and I realized, now, why. Ribbons was keeping safe characteristics about myself that I felt had been trashed. I look back at Ribbons as saving my life, keeping my characteristics safe until I could claim them again.”
Performance continues to play a major role in Roberts’ life. In her one-woman show, Victory for the Recycled Virgin, she talks about her own evolution, makes a guest appearance as Ribbons, and even has an onstage orgasm. At the ripe old age of 79, Roberts is performing what she calls a show filled with simple truth. She says she’s excited to be doing what she’s always wanted to do.
“Aging is a time to recover abandoned dreams and recover your playful spirit,” Roberts says. “I’m a very spirited older woman, and frankly I’m very honest in this show.”
Victory for the Recycled Virgin is just one of the many shows planned for this year’s Boulder International Fringe Festival (BIFF). Through Sept. 27, BIFF will storm the streets and take over the city. Performances will be at various times, happening at myriad locations including the Dairy Center for the Performing Arts, Shine Restaurant and Gathering Place, Boulder Creek Path and more. As always, subject matter spans any topic imaginable and each performance will provide insight into a special world.
The Fringe Festival serves as a nice reminder of the plethora of artists — local and international — who yearn to breathe life into the day-to-day grind.
“To prepare a show and not have anywhere to perform would be very sad,” Roberts says. “So fringe festivals are wonderful avenues. Not only for performers but also for people to see wonderful performances. We get so tied to our TVs and phones and so forth that live performance is refreshing.”
She’s grateful to have the chance to showcase her work, because it’s through her art that she has been able to explore herself.
Throughout BIFF you’ll find different iterations of self discovery. Another example is seen through Eric Davis who plays the Red Bastard. While his show is hard to fit in a box, he says it’s like being in a room with a dangerous, seductive comedy monster. For close to 10 years he’s portrayed this character he calls the buffoon, who is a cousin of the archetypal clown. The character allows Davis freedom to be more outlandish than normal.
“It’s how I get to touch areas of myself that I wouldn’t use so much socially, because they wouldn’t be appropriate,” he says. “But on stage, it’s a space to play. I can be playful with the underused aspects of my personality.”
Every performance at BIFF is a question Various locations times. Through full schedule go fringe.com mark of entertainment. It’s not prepackaged or corporatized. It is extracted deep from the mind of the creative and serves to challenge and to push both the artist and the audience.
“It’s important to have a place where artists can go and create original work and not just something that is a known commodity already,” Davis says. “You know you’ll get something interesting at the fringe, something unusual.”
It’s that spirit of the festival that serves as a spark for inspiration for many. It was BIFF that gave Cindy Brandle some personal direction, for example. For 10 years she’s run the Cindy Brandle Dance Company, and right before she signed up for this year’s festival, she was contemplating its future. The financial woes of running a dance company were worrying her, and Brandle was conflicted. But with some introspection she decided to keep her company going, using her insights in the show she created for BIFF, In The Absence of Clarity.
“On a walk I realized it is who I am. It is what I do. I’m here to present art to people,” she says. “The show is about continuation, embracing past events, embracing what’s happening now and looking forward to the future.”
Previously, she’s gravitated to more full-length performances with no breaks in between numbers, but this time she opted for something new. For BIFF, Brandle has choreographed seven different dance numbers, but the order will be up to the audience, who will randomly draw the names of the pieces out of a hat, creating the chronology for the show.
“I needed a change for my own self in how I created the work and how I put it all together,” she says. “It feels like it’ll be fresh and new for the cast every night. So we’ll have to be on our toes more. … I think that’s the beauty behind the fringe. It inspires a different type of creativity and a new way of looking at something.”
Throughout the festival, there are shows that appeal to everyone’s sensibility, from the modest to the cheeky, like Jon Bennett’s show, which teeters on the line of inappropriateness.
“You’re not appealing to a commercial audience,” Bennett says. “You’re appealing to an audience who doesn’t know what’s going to happen so you see really weird shows. I’ve stopped thinking that my show is weird. It has no effect on me anymore.”
Hailing from Australia, Bennett’s show Pretending Things are a Cock, might sound straightforward. And in fact, it does contain those title elements — pictures of Bennett pretending his genitalia are anything from monuments, to airplanes, to rainbows, to even Machu Picchu. But beyond that, the show is Bennett’s own story and how this project has affected his life.
“It started as a stupid thing my housemate posted online,” Bennett says. “And it got quite popular and went from there. The show is how it happened to me. I’m not really the kind of person who does this sort of thing. But after it got popular I had to keep doing it, and it sort of got a life of its own.”
He says the show has taught him to see how things unfold and embrace the unfamiliar. It has allowed Bennett to travel around the world and make friends across the globe. One place he meets people are through other fringe festivals, of which he’s done 18 this year already.
“Every city has this little community of artists, and I like the community side of fringe festivals, especially,” he says. “When you do it so you can get entrenched in what’s happening in that particular city in the art scene.”
Looking at the lineup for this year’s festival, it’s clear that Boulder’s art scene is thriving. The program is packed with variety — many shows where you don’t know what you’ll get in the end. But the mystery is part of the fun. For Red Bastard’s show, he says anything can happen. He does have a written script but can alter it or throw it out depending on the crowd that night.
“It’s kind of like going on a date with an audience,” Davis says. “Sometimes you have an expectation of what the person is going to be like but the person’s a little different, so you have to make adjustments.”
The real success of the Fringe depends on the audience. The first duty is to attend the show, then be willing to buckle up and go along for the ride.
“Creating a show is like creating a party in your own home. You make the menu, you clean your house, and you make it beautiful. Then you’re afraid if people are going to come or not,” Brandle says with a laugh. “I’m just hoping people show up to the party. “ No matter what show you go to, even if you love it or hate it, it will be a beneficial experience. Supporting the local art scene helps to flourish inspiration for future projects on and off the stage. The artists have assembled to provide a performance, and now it’s show time.
“I want to give the audience a different experience that day from their regular life,” Davis says. “That also applies to me. I get something different to happen to me in my life that day, which is a great gift. Who knows? Maybe something magical will happen.”
ON THE BILL: Boulder International Fringe Festival. Various locations and various times. Through Sept. 27. For a full schedule go to boulderfringe.com
