At a Fringe Festival, there are few gatekeepers. A rigorous selection and awards process? Not even close. Rules? As few as possible.
“It’s a community of artists who want to support each other, grow, take big risks, try new material, so it’s the joy of the surprise,” says Chase Brantley of Athens. At this year’s Atlanta Fringe Festival, beginning May 28, Brantley performs “Don Toberman: Pingpong Champ,” a one-person show in which he plays a manic game of pingpong with the audience using an invisible ball.
Just as some of the performers take big risks, the Atlanta Fringe Festival is taking its biggest ever when it expands this year from five days and seven venues in 2024 to 11 days and 10 venues.
“We are definitely taking a big swing with our giant expansion this year,” says Diana Brown, executive director of Atlanta Fringe Festival.
Credit: Atlanta Fringe Festival
Credit: Atlanta Fringe Festival
Fringe Festival originated in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1947, when several theater troupes arrived uninvited to the Edinburgh International Festival to perform their unconventional acts on the “fringe” of the festival, which frequently meant local pubs. The Edinburgh Fringe still runs every August as the mother ship of all Fringes; last year it sold more than 2.6 million tickets.
The term became an umbrella for independent arts festivals that often traffic in the offbeat or avant-garde.
Atlanta is part of the worldwide Fringe phenomenon of more than 200 festivals across the globe. Festivals take different approaches to selecting who can perform, but it’s rarely a centralized decision-making process.
In Atlanta, performers submit their names and are selected at random in what is called an “unjuried lottery” (basically pulling names from a hat), sometimes based on only the briefest idea of what the performance will actually be.
This year there were 135 applications for 62 slots.
Credit: Atlanta Fringe Festival
Credit: Atlanta Fringe Festival
Among those appearing in the next two weeks at venues scattered throughout Little Five Points, Poncey-Highland and the Old Fourth Ward:
- “How the Grinch Reversed Racism” by an Atlanta trio who call themselves You Should Feel Bad;
- Edgewood Avenue, an improvised puppet variety show;
- “E-Race-D” (“Erased”), a new one-hour play by Atlantan Jacquay Waller in which Black and white characters drink a magic potion that causes them to switch races, followed by interaction with the audience;
- “Parkinson’s: The Musical”;
- Plus performances featuring a trans woman talking about her changed body, hip-hop, stand-up, spoken word, dance, extreme silliness and pointed polemics.
“Everybody gets a chance,” says Waller. “Everybody’s putting their hearts out there.”
Shows have warning labels where appropriate for nudity, violence and/or language; it’s up to parents to police attendance, Brown says.
The festival runs on volunteer labor and free venue space, and the performers keep their own ticket sales.
The seeds for the Atlanta Fringe Festival were planted in 2006 at the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Brown had graduated from Georgia State University with a theater degree and started a small Atlanta company called Twinhead Theatre. Some Twinhead players went to Minnesota and were entranced by the Fringe culture.
“They said, ‘I just have never felt this kind of energy around theater ever. We leave the show, or we’re on the way to our show, and everyone we pass has seen a show, or they’re on their way to a show, or they’re talking about a show that someone else should be seeing.’
“So when they came back,” she continues, “we thought it was like a franchise thing, maybe we can open a chapter here. And come to find out, Fringe is like, if you’re crazy enough to start one, you go for it, baby. You don’t need to get permission from anyone.”
Brantley — who attended the prestigious Ecole Philippe Gaulier, a French clown school that is in the vanguard of contemporary clowning (think fewer red noses, more Mr. Bean) — is a popular fixture on the international Fringe circuit. His performance as goofy pingpong obsessive Don Toberman has won multiple awards at international Fringes.
Credit: Paul Westbrook
Credit: Paul Westbrook
“If you do Hollywood Fringe, or New York Fringe, or especially Edinburgh Fringe, those environments can be difficult because there is an illusion that you could become famous at them,” he explains. “And so, there’s a bit of this competition that is an undercurrent that can be toxic. You have to hustle.
“The beauty of the Atlanta Fringe is I don’t think anyone has the illusion they’re getting famous,” Brantley says. “And so, we’re here because of the pleasure of the work.”
Atlanta Fringe is run by a team of about 15 people who are paid by the nonprofit Twinhead Theatre. The pay is so low that they are practically working as volunteers for the love of Fringe, acknowledges Brown.
She went to Edinburgh Fringe for the first time last year and met with other festival directors. She also attended the World Fringe Congress in Stockholm.
“It was really cool because I started this, and I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I still kind of feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m still doing it,” she says.
“People told me, ‘We all know about Atlanta. People want to go to Atlanta. We definitely need to get y’all to be a little bit bigger.’”
It was that encouragement that promoted festival organizers to double the number of acts for 2025.
Meanwhile, Brown believes Atlanta Fringe has one benefit that none of the others have: an audio program.
“Our Fringe audio podcast program is completely unique to Atlanta, and you can hear it from all over the world.”
Unlike the unjuried lottery for the festival itself, the audio portion has a panel of judges who select 21 programs to air and there is a cash award of $200 for the best podcast.
“A lot of them are radio dramas, full plays or comedy hours or any number of things,” Brown explains.
According to Brantley, the Fringe philosophy of inclusivity and risk-taking is essential to making art.
“If Fringe didn’t exist, it would be harder to find ways for artists to break the mold,” says Brantley.
“I always say,” he continues, “if you want to have incredible art, you have to be willing to fund bad art, because that’s the only way that people are going to find new ways of expressing themselves. That’s the power of Fringe.”
EVENT PREVIEW
Atlanta Fringe Festival. May 28-June 8. Multiple venues. Times vary. Most tickets $18. Some performances not suitable for children. atlantafringe.org.
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