The Tartan Online: Imagine yourself fresh off the bus from Pittsburgh to New York. You have a bag of clothes and a bag of puppets, props, and makeup. It’s one week before you perform in the New York International Fringe Festival, the largest multi-arts festival in North America that features around 200 shows in a two-week period.
4 comments:
The Fringe festival is a great way to show any range of productions and to get your work out there to show the rest of the world. The drama department is a very tight knit group and it is really true when we say, the regulars always come to our show and the seats are almost always filled. Fringe definitely makes you work and it keeps you aware of the audience. Sometimes, there will be friends and family, other times there are walk ins off the street seeing a play for the first time, and other times there could be some serious theater goers or business people looking for the next new talent. You never know what kind of crowd each show will bring out and that part can become very exciting. I think that each show did an amazing job and I hope more playground pieces will enter themselves into the Fringe Festival. It is worth it and the school is starting to get a fairly strong reputation in the actual festival.
I personally really like the first part of this article about the bag of puppets props and makeup. Behind the badge didn't have to worry about puppets just a bag of tactical gear and varying weapons including 3 prop 19-11's and a prop shot gun. Getting on the subway dressed in black carrying that duffle bag was an interesting experience for my first trip to new York.
Police harassment aside fringe was an incredible experience getting to direct and do the lighting design for behind the badge. Once we got to our tech rehearsal at the Living Theatre it finally set in while I was watching Lachlan and Marrick rehearse a physically detail heavy scene that we were in new york putting on our own show. It truly was a once in a lifetime experience and our entire team did a fantastic job
FringeNYC was definitely a unique experience I'll remember forever. Taking the ferry to and from Staten Island to rehearse in a Catholic boys' school basement late at night really paid off. The venue directors at The Living Theatre were a bunch of characters and I'm so happy to have shared this experience with them, as well as the opportunity to share our show with the public. Since we extended and added more stories to Behind the Badge, it allowed for more opportunities for Sean and Becca to get creative with sound and lights. Getting to stage manage it all for 5 nights was a dream come true, and I couldn't have asked for a better team to work with.
The Fringe was an amazing experience. I have been helping with Ilove stuff since we took it to Vermont and it is amazing to watch the process of a show as it evolves and gets more and more polished.
The one thing I didn't like about the festival was that they hired supervisors who didn't know the space or know anything about the space or anything theater related at all. It was a hassle and they were very unhelpful and distracted us constantly to talk about their day or about how people outside were rude...
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