Festivals!
September 2024 Newsletter
Festivals!
Close your eyes, take a deep breath, now exhale.
Not the usual way I experience a theatrical performance. Last month, I inhaled 17 shows at Fringe, an almost month-long festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, where you can see thousands of plays, theater events, live experiences, street artists, and all sorts of performers doing everything from eating fire to inviting you onstage. This year, I spent four days with my friends who belong to a curious group called The Future of Storytelling, where Explorers attend 17 events out of the 3,500 events offered this year. FOST curates the shows and invites performers, producers, and directors to share their insights on their performance, their business, and process. It’s a mind-blowing experience that takes me months to ponder and discover what I learned.
Fringe is a place for artists to experiment with their stories and form. It’s an uncommon incubator, of sorts, to test an idea for later expression on a more public stage, in a larger space, often scaled to reach bigger audiences. As with an incubator, the performers meet each other, workshop ideas, and create connection. Performing at Fringe requires artists and performers to work with constraints of both time and space. The turnarounds in between performances are tight and inflexible. The venue spaces are often predetermined, and small, often requiring a performer to reimagine a performance to fit both the time and space limitations.
One thing I learned was that performers want me to engage with them, not just watch them. Breathing together was just one way they drew me closer, more present with their stories.