St Lou Fringe
The St Lou Fringe Festival will go virtual for its ninth season as it continues to unleash original, uncensored and independent voices of artists around the world. From August 15–23, there will be a variety of acts that explore the virtual performance medium while taking inspiration from current events related to Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and transgender rights. An opening day celebration with acts performed from the driveway of an undisclosed location will kick off the festivities on August 15. Tickets go on sale at noon on today.
The national headline act, “HERstory of HIStory,” is a performance poetry show from Chicago award-winning slam poet Heather "Byrd" Roberts and Greg Reggrard that explores what it’s like to be a man and woman of color in America today. “I wanted her voice to be a headline act this year because she’s a powerful writer, and with everything going on recently she totally changed her set to focus on the unrest,” says Matthew Kerns, producing executive director for St Lou Fringe.
The local headline act is an opera show from Nika Leoni and Kathryn Favazza titled “The Making of Flame and Shadow: The Passion and Pain of Sara Teasdale.” It’s a biopic opera about the poetry and life of St. Louis native Sara Teasdale, who was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. “Since it’s a work in progress, we’re pulling the drapes back and letting the audience into the room to see how operas are made, how the storylines unfold, what music comes into play and to ask for feedback,” says Kerns. “Then next year it will headline again as a fully finished opera.”
Javier Oddo
Returning to St. Louis as the late-night headline act is Audrey Crabtree as fictional film star Deenie Nast. In “Quarantini with Deenie Nast,” she will welcome all of her adoring fans into her home during quarantine for a drink, a song, and some pandemic laughs. “This specific show sees Deenie dealing with COVID-19, so think of a narcissist who constantly needs attention and has been trapped with her musician and nurse,” says Crabtree. “Now she's going to perform. She thinks she’s doing it for the audience because they’ve been struggling, but it’ll come out clearly in the context of the show that she’s struggling.” Crabtree says she tries to always do a topic that’s cathartic for both herself and the audience.
St Lou Fringe will also be hosting free Zoom conversation forums throughout the festival covering topics like developing work for the virtual space, the state of the independent arts community and improvisation in the virtual space. Finally, the festival presents each work as a part of a series for easy exploration, such as The New Works Series, The Performance Art Series, and The Queer Series.
Kerns dubs this shift to virtual performances as the era of the independent artist. “A lot of what we’ve been seeing in the arts is shutdowns and lost opportunities,” says Kerns. “As independent artists, we’re much more flexible because we aren’t tied to entities that are going to stop us from producing and distributing our work.” Crabtree says she will still play with live audience interactions virtually, and that she's been practicing techniques online and learning from other artist's experimentation as well. "I always try to be able to express some of my personal thoughts, and hopefully some of the audiences as well," says Crabtree.
The original Fringe Festival started in 1947 as an alternative festival that played concurrently with the Edinburgh International Festival. In what would soon be the spirit of the Fringe Festivals worldwide, artists came to busk and perform in the alleys and streets, using any venue they could find to entertain audiences. The St Lou Fringe Festival took a firm root in the Grand Center Arts District, where it began as a response to a need for avant-garde performance.
