Minnesota Fringe Festival
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The Minnesota Fringe Festival is a performing arts festival held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, every summer, usually during the first two weeks in August. The eleven-day event, which features performing artists of many genres and disciplines, is one many Fringe Festivals in North America. Minnesota Fringe is the largest nonjuried festival in the United States[1] and the third-largest Fringe festival in North America. In 2005, the Minnesota Fringe featured 167 shows with a total of 855 performances in multiple venues around the city.[2] In 2007, the festival featured 162 performing groups presenting 874 performances in 22 venues around Minneapolis. In 2007, attendance and box office revenue were adversely affected by the collapse of the I-35W bridge the day before the festival opened. Advance ticket sales are handled by a third-party vendor, Uptown Tix
The typical Fringe show is less than an hour and appears in an official venue supplied by the festival for five performances stretched out over the festival's eleven days. The normal venue is a black-box space or proscenium stage that contains a small (fewer than 200 seat) house. Past venues include Minneapolis Theatre Garage, Mixed-Blood Theater mainstage, Theatre de la Jeune Lune's side stage and the three stages at the University of Minnesota's Rarig Center for Performing Arts.[3] Normally, four to five different shows will share a venue. Companies may elect to pay extra for venues with extra features, such as overhead rigging, extra performance time, video projectors and larger houses.
Performing companies that participate in the Fringe split a share of the ticket revenues with the festival and pay an application fee. Currently, the artists' share is 65 percent of the box office revenue.
2008 will marks the fifteenth annual festival. Much of the recent success of the Minnesota Fringe has been attributed to the leadership of former executive director Leah Cooper, who stepped down from her post at the end of the 2006 festival. Cooper was replaced by Robin C. Gillette, who came to the job after working as the marketing and community relations manager at Mixed Blood Theatre Company in Minneapolis.[4]
The 2008 Minnesota Fringe Festival is scheduled for July 31-August 10, 2008.[5]
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[edit] Features of the Minnesota Fringe
Non-Juried Entry
Minnesota Fringe Festival is nonjuried; that is, the performers and shows are not vetted by a panel of judges ahead of time, as do some other U.S. Fringes. Companies that wish to perform submit applications and are drawn by lottery, a practice that recently replaced the festival's former method of "first come, first serve."
Performance Categories
The festival is open to all performing artists. There are various subcategories of performance which are chosen by separate lotteries outside of the general lottery. These include but are not always limited to kids' shows (which includes shows both for and by children), teen shows (by and for teenagers), artists of color, national and international groups, and longer shows (which run 15 minutes longer than normal shows, and are available at a particular venue).
Accessibility
Each venue is wheelchair-accessible and the festival has begun to offer ASL-interpreted shows and close-captioned shows for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, as well as audio-described shows for the blind.[6]
"Bring Your Own Venue"
Minnesota Fringe provides an option for companies to produce site-specific work outside the official venues. The Bring Your Own Venue (BYOV) option is only available for shows that could not normally fit into a traditional theater space. Past BYOV shows have been staged in places such as a clothing store dressing area, a swimming pool, an art gallery and a coffee shop. In recent years, this option has become extremely popular with performing companies, and some have been accused of using BYOV as a way to circumvent the lottery process. In 2006, 23 shows, a record number, performed in BYOV slots.[7]
Website
The Minnesota Fringe Festival Website operates year-round. All of the shows in the yearly festival are up for review by any audience member who registers on the site. Shows are rated on a scale of 1/2 star to 5 stars along with a written review. Each show is assigned an overall star rating based on the average of all the reviews received. Minnesota Fringe also retains a staff of photographers who attend shows and return photographs for the festival's daily slide show and a retinue of Fringe bloggers, the "League of Extraordinary Fringers." During the 2007 festival period, the site received 201,840 pageviews, had nearly 10,000 registered users, and offered 1,967 audience reviews.
[edit] Statistics
Shows
2007: 162
2006: 163
2005: 168
Performances
2007: 874
2006: 867
2005: 855
2004: 800
Ticket Sales
2007: 37,752
2006: 44,692
2005: 44,626
2004: 44,189
Average Attendance per Performance
2007: 43.4
2006: 51.5
2005: 52.2
Gross Box Office Revenue
2007: $264,384
2006: $337,910
Total Artist Payout
2007: $171,850 2006: $219,642[8]
[edit] External links
- Minnesota Fringe Festival Website
- Papatola, Dominic; "Gillette will lead next year's Fringe fest"; Saint Paul Pioneer Press; 12 August 2006
- Huyck, Ed; "Minnesota Fringe Festival"; Talkin' Broadway website; retrieved 3 January 2007
[edit] References
- ^ Minneapolis Arts Facts; Minneapolis.org website; retrieved 28 December 2006
- ^ Combs, Marianne; "The Fringe Festival Takes Center Stage"; Minnesota Public Radio website; 4 August 2005
- ^ "Minnesota Fringe Festival"; KARE11 website; 7 July 2006; retrieved 3 January 2007
- ^ Combs, Marianne; "The Fringe from the inside"; Minnesota Public Radio website; 4 August 2006
- ^ Kleiman, Jaime; "Gillette to Head Minnesota Fringe"; Backstage.com website; 6 September 2006; retrieved 3 January 2007
- ^ "Accessible Fringe Festival Returns for Thirteenth Season"; Access Press; Volume 17, Number 7; 10 July 2006
- ^ Papatola, Dominic; "Wrinkle in the rules requires some fringers to get a place lift"; St. Paul Pioneer Press; 3 August 2006
- ^ press release: 2006 Festival final numbers; Minnesota Fringe Festival press release
