Comfortable on the edges

Denver Fringe Festival set for its biggest year yet

Think of a continuum of theatrical choices where, on one end, you’ve got something like The Odd Couple or The Sound of Music and on the other, a guy in a tutu and an Apache headdress reciting lines from the second season of The Brady Bunch whilst squirrel puppets gambol about his feet.

If the first set represents a 1 on the continuum and the other a 10, most people would be happy somewhere around 3 or 4 — judging by most of the production choices by Colorado theatre companies these days. Those artistic directors would tell you, accurately, that safer fare puts butts in seats, and if the theatre organization is to survive, they need to cater to the middle.

But that leaves a big gap for creatives who want to do something a bit edgier, which is where the Denver Fringe Festival steps in. True, it’s only once a year, but it offers artists and audiences a chance to experience theatrical works that haven’t been vetted by a theatre board, an artistic director or an audience survey.

There are hundreds of Fringe Festivals around the globe, but there wasn’t one in Denver until Ann Sabbah took up the cause after attending the original Fringe in Edinburgh in 2017.

“It just blew me away,” Sabbah said. “It’s truly a remarkable experience to go and see that much live performance happening. And it’s completely open access for anyone who wants to participate.”

The idea to start one in Denver hit her while standing on Edingburgh’s historic Royal Mile, and she said she just whipped out her phone and secured the domain denverfringe.org right then and there.

Sabbah, a longtime arts supporter and Denver native who has a background in journalism and project management, figured Denver would be a logical place to try to recreate that magic. In early 2020, the newly formed Denver Fringe Festival had about 25 performers lined up for an inaugural season when IT happened. So the first Denver Fringe kicked off as a virtual event, with 19 shows being performed over Zoom or live-streamed in some way. In 2021, it was a hybrid, with both live and virtual performances.

This year’s Denver Fringe Festival, set for June 23-26, is all live, finally. Easy access, Sabbah said, is key to the event.

“Fringe really is set up to support independent artists. So it’s all new work, all original work. You’re not going to see Neil Simon and you’re not going to see Shakespeare.”

And, she adds, making it affordable is a big goal.

“We want to allow more people to experience live performing arts, so the ticket price is set at 15 — with 70% of ticket sales goes back to the performers.”

The venues range from art galleries and breweries to outdoor areas and more traditional performance spaces. Festival-goers will have the chance to experience everything from one-act plays and circus-style shows to kids’ stuff and free workshops. In keeping with the original Fringe parameters, most shows are just under an hour.

An aerial performance at least year’s Fringe.

One of the shows is the comedy My Friend Kyle Has a Brain Tumor by Benjamin Ross Nicholson. It’s the kind of title that might cause audiences at a traditional theatre to stay away in droves, but it’s exactly the kind of thing embraced by Fringe.

Nicholson joined Sabbah on this OnStage Colorado interview and said participating in the Hollywood Fringe Festival got him excited for the Denver version now that he lives in Boulder.

“My experience at Hollywood Fringe was incredibly transformative in terms of being a performer and a playwright,” Nicholson said. “Some of the shows that end up at Fringe maybe skew a little more conventional, but by and large, they’re these strange kind of interventions into the kinds of theater and theater spaces that people wouldn’t really get to do in any other context. And so that’s kind of what really made me want to participate in Denver Fringe.”

Nicholson’s piece is based on the real-life challenges his friend Kyle Hossli, a local Denver artist and arts teacher, who is combatting a brain tumor.

“It’s basically looking at some of the effects and responses in his work and in his relationships to having some meaningful changes in the way that his body and mind work,” he said.

The show features a slideshow of Kyle’s work, and the script allows for him to annotate, correct and rebut what’s seen.

“He can say ‘you got this wrong,” Nicholson said. “It’s kind of a riff off of solos show in that it’s kind of about someone, not myself, but then ends up being also about our relationship.”

My Friend Kyle has a Brain Tumor is showing at various times at the Redline Contemporary Art Center at 2350 Arapahoe St., and Nicholson mentions another show in that space by Flora Le, whose piece Sadec 1965: A Love Story is about Le taking a motorcycle trip across Vietnam.

Fringe, he said, allows for smaller shows like this to find an audience in a format that doesn’t require a larger cast or crew. Meeting other artists is also a big part of the appeal.

“A huge part of Fringe, for me the most important part, is seeing other people’s work and getting to meet them and you can end up collaborating and having relationships that can last years,” he said. “Fringe has this longitudinal feel to it, where people want to be part of a community long term and not just do their show and leave.”

Fun stuff

Sabbah said some of the more interesting shows this time around include Halvies, an improv piece where two performers who’ve each written half of a play perform them together without having seen either one’s half before. In Un/Packing, solo performer Nicolas Shannon Savard asks the audience to guide them through time, space and gender.

“It’s kind of an exploration of gender identity,” she says. “And the audience can make choices that lead the performer down different tracks. There are like 20 different options that the performer has to be prepared to follow.”

She said some of the aerial performances are a lot of fun to watch, such as the Soul Penny Circus show Desiderium Dream.

“They do these really beautifully devised and themed productions with costumes and gorgeous some set pieces — even though most Fringe productions have limited set pieces.”

And while many of the Denver Fringe performances may be debuts, some have been around a bit longer. One of these is Josephine, a one-woman show about Josephine Baker performed by French artist Tymisha Harris.

For Sabbah, presenting these types of unique shows and the community that forms around them are what makes Fringe special.

“I was just in Florida at the Orlando Fringe Festival, which has been there for about 30 years. And it’s just the whole aspect of community … people come back year after year and they anticipate, ‘What are we going to see this year? Who’s coming this year?’ Maybe it’s some of the same performers and artists. Maybe it’s new people that haven’t experienced ityet, but it really becomes a part of people’s tradition every summer. And it’s a part of the art scene in that city that’s kind of a beloved entity and community.”

As the third year of Denver Fringe gets ready to kick off, she says it’s what she’d like to see happen here.

“Fringe itself, I see it as a really important part of the arts ecosystem. Independent artists are the lifeblood of a thriving arts scene in my mind, and I think the Fringe Festival is really a perfect platform to support that.”