Breaking Boundaries: Phoenix Fringe Festival

A "Fringe Festival" is a term shared by cities all over the world that explore and showcase, in concept, the edginess of modern theater. While visiting artists come from all over the country to perform at Fringe Fests big and small, there is always a good local presence to represent as well. And this year's Phoenix Fringe Festival will cater toward the local patrons as it aims to get the audience more involved with the artists than in previous years, said PHX:fringe director Daniel Roth.

"We don't want the barrier to be up that people can't talk to artists before or after the shows," Roth said. "We want to make it a real community event."

The festival is making it new this year with tales that twist classics, take on political topics in abstract ways and charm with risqué comedy that can't be found at prim and proper playhouses or even a community stage.

"Phoenix is really an up-and-coming theater city," Roth said. "It's got a few great professional houses and a couple great community theaters, but kind of the intermediate level only has a couple representatives, so we really see ourselves as providing a venue for shows that maybe couldn't be on the target for Arizona Theater Company or Phoenix Theater and maybe a little too weird for the local community theaters, so we're kind of like a launching pad and a testing ground for the next generation of theater."

This year's festival will be a little smaller in terms of performers. However, this allows for the scheduled performances to be spaced out, allowing for visitors to catch more shows than last year, Roth said.

Festivals that deal with the avant garde are expected to push "newness" to the fringes every year. However, Roth has a deeper goal for the festival.

"Some of the things we hope to come out of the Phoenix Fringe Festival are: one, we want artists to be able to start making a living in the city of Phoenix, which is very difficult; two, we want to give a platform for voices that wouldn't be heard otherwise or wouldn't have this great venue; and, three, we want to bring attention to the fact that our town has a thriving arts community and has venues for that art," he said.

The local scene is featured on a few different levels with the festival's kick-off event at the Phoenix Art Museum. The performance, an "urban intervention" made possible by a $5,000 grant from the Herberger Institute of Design and Arts is a collaborative work-in-progress by Logan Phillips and Rachel Bowditch, whose Transfix show has been a Fringe Festival staple. As has Bowditch, who is also an assistant professor at ASU and was the adviser for the festival's artistic director, Patrick Demers, and helped get the Fringe started.

Bowditch and Logan's multimedia performance, "Unreal City: Remixes of the Arizona Landscape," will recreate a conceptual, abandoned urban landscape with the help of three projectors. The characters of Transfix will interact with the evolving landscape to the sounds of original poetry by Phillips and provide a completely new artistic look at sustainability with the visual and metaphorical juxtaposition of Phoenix's fate and that of the 450 ghost towns already in Arizona.

"[‘Unreal City'] transcends from the Wild West notion of a ghost town all the way to the recessionary ghost towns," Bowditch explained. "'Unreal City' really stuck with us in terms of we shouldn't be living in the desert, really. It's very unrealistic. […] The only reason we exist here is because of a very complicated canal system. […] So it's the idea that Phoenix is really an illusion and that it's not sustainable in the long-term as much as developers try to convince you otherwise […]."

Despite the "uplifting" tone of ‘Unreal City,' it only highlights that there's something thriving in the fringes of the desert – and that may just be the theater scene.

THE VENUES

Space 55,636 E. Pierce Street, Phoenix, 602.663.4032

Modified Arts,407 E. Roosevelt Street, Phoenix, 602.462.5516

Soul Invictus,1022 NW Grand Avenue, Phoenix, 602.214.4344

Bragg's Pie Factory,1301 NW Grand Avenue, Phoenix, 602.391.4016

Phoenix Little Theatre,100 E. McDowell Road, Phoenix, 602.258.1974

Phoenix Art Museum,1625 N. Central Avenue, Phoenix, 602.257.1222

Third Street Theater,1202 N. 3rd Street, Phoenix, 602.262.4627