Experimental theater falls so far off the beaten path in the Denver-Boulder area that the only time it even approaches the fringe of mainstream metro consciousness is . . . well, the Fringe: the annual Boulder International Fringe Festival.
With the LIDA Project as the only fully committed experimental theater company in the region, it’s a wonder Boulder’s annual gathering of theatrical misfits makes the creative and financial impact that it does.
In its sixth year, the BIFF draws on average audience of 20,000 over 12 days of live theater, dance, circus art, cinema, spoken word, puppetry, storytelling, workshops and more in venues all over Boulder. Executive director David Ortolano’s surveys indicate his fest generates about $700,000 in annual revenue for the city of Boulder. Each year more than 300 artists share about $55,000 in stipends from festival revenues.
As the 2010 fest prepares to launch Wednesday, we caught up with Ortolano to talk about all things fringe:
Q: I’ve always thought “fringe” to mean truly experimental, or “out-there” theater. But I’m always surprised at how accessible most of the acts at your festival turn out to be.
A: “Fringe,” by definition, refers simply to the location and staging of the events — another way of looking at it would be “site-specific.” The very first Fringe Festival was called Fringe because it happened on the doorsteps of buildings, taxi cabs, buses and wherever artists could stake their claim in public. In the Canadian model, fringe means four things: Unjuried, uncensored, accessible to the whole community and 100 percent of proceeds go directly back to the artists.
The Boulder International Fringe Festival is a platform for independent working artists to engage the community in a creative dialogue. This can be very mainstream and very experimental by nature, and rightfully so: Artists have the opportunity to create work that is not dictated by an artistic board, review committee or a director with a particular agenda.
Q: Why do you think truly avant-garde theater has had such a tough time gaining a wider audience foothold in the Denver-Boulder area?
A: Too much risk, and limited funding. It’s hard for conservative funding sources to take risks with taxpayers’ money. They want to make sure that art is “excellent” and “high quality” to keep the funding in place — of course, this makes a lot of sense to the beholders that judge and rate the work. But I’ve always had some serious questions about what qualifies the “jury” in most of our funding organizations. On top of that, most people don’t really understand the economic impact of arts programming. All it takes is a little bit of research to see, though — where the arts thrive, businesses boom. Yet city, state and federal support for the arts in the U.S. is very limited, and historically, Colorado has been one of the states with the least funding for the arts. This appears to be changing rapidly under Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. He seems to have a pretty smart handle on prioritizing the arts. Just as fringe festivals are gaining a foothold in more than 100 cities around the world, I believe the Boulder Fringe will continue to grow and create a venue for the avant-garde in Colorado.
Q: You have an open submission process, with inclusion ultimately determined by random lottery. What are the pros and cons?
A: We accept applications from whomever applies. If that happens to be all Republican performance troops, and if they all happen to get in through the lottery, then that’s the majority of our festival that year. That makes the festival fun and unpredictable, fair and nondiscriminatory. It really creates the space for unique, creative voices in the community to be heard. I’d like to challenge our culture to think out of the box and be more accepting. Paradoxically, that means working with conflict and disagreement as fertile ground for growth. I don’t know of any other festival or artistic initiative that is as equitable and truly open to everyone in the community.
The “con” is that the community isn’t always prepared for that level of freedom. Many people are conditioned to think they need something more mainstream to feel fully entertained — they are used to being manipulated and taken on a journey that is ultimately to make them feel better about themselves and put money in all of our pockets — so that we can attain our dream of independence and security. The Fringe festival challenges us all to focus less on conditions of freedom and more on the freedom itself. This is very frightening for most of us – it takes us out of our comfort zone and makes us think about what we really want, as opposed to what we’ve been told we want. How un-American of us!
Q: But there are risks that come with random fairness — one year it seemed like the whole festival was 10 days of one-woman monologues.
A: Fairness is fairness. One could very easily confuse fairness with chance. Anyone can apply to the festival. And if 90 percent of the festival artists in a particular year were Catholic nuns in one-woman readings from the Bible, then I think that would be a very powerful statement about our performance culture. Yes, there do tend to be a lot of one-woman shows in our festival — and rightfully so. I haven’t seen many other places for women to speak up and have creative voices in our culture.
Q: Lest we give the impression that you don’t also get freaky, what’s one representative out-of-town act that’s sure to, let’s just say, widen your audience’s theatrical horizons?
A: I think this guy named Seth Lepore from Brattleboro, Vermont, is very good at crossing boundary lines into the “freaky” while still being able to speak directly to a mainstream audience. His show is called “Losing My Religion: Confessions of a New Age Refugee,” and it plays in the Wesley Chapel.
Q: And you offer much more than live theater. What’s one non-theater group we might find of interest?
A: I’d recommend checking out the Chitty/Freedman Dance Collective. They’re from Boulder, and they’ll perform “Isadora’s Free Play” at Settler’s Park. Also, BB Black Dog is an unusual music act from Germany and England. They’ll be playing some good old hair-band-style rock ‘n’ roll in the window of Topo Ranch clothing store on Pearl Street.
Q: At the end of the 2010 fest, it looked like you would be losing your home base at the Dairy Center. How did that all turn out?
A: We have always had an administrative office at the Dairy Center and still do. And we are considered a “resident company” there. But last year, the Dairy raised their rent for theater spaces during the festival to nearly three times our budget from previous years. We pitched a sponsorship deal to them and they could not come into budget range for us, so we found alternate spaces. This year, the Dairy approached us to have us back, and we agreed to use one of their theaters at a sponsorship rate (the East Theater.) The city of Boulder also sponsored part of the rental with a grant. There are still some difficulties to working with the Dairy, but they are making a valiant effort to work with the community – and the Fringe is flexible in terms of space.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
Boulder International Fringe Festival
Twelve days of live theater, circus art, performance art, spoken word, puppetry, music, dance, multimedia, film, visual art, storytelling, workshops and special events. Events begin from various afternoon hours until late, at 15 venues around Boulder. The Laughing Goat Coffee House, 1709 Pearl St., serves as the main box office, but day-of-show tickets are available at each venue up to one hour before the show. Festival runs Wednesday, Aug. 18, through Aug. 29. Ticket prices and packages range from free to $240. 720-563-9950 or
