Life on the fringe
Every city has a nitty-gritty underbelly, including our very own conservative Calgary. Infiltrating Inglewood, Calgary’s original downtown core, is the annual dose of the odd and unexpected on stage, known as the Fringe Festival. Now in its fourth year the festival is prepping for nine days of performances by 30 local, Canadian and international artists.
For those uninitiated to the Fringe, festival director Michele Gallant explains.
“Basically how a Fringe Festival works is that anything goes. What artists do is they submit an application and all the applications go into a lottery draw. Because of that you just don’t what you are going to get. You can have a musical, you could have a comedy, you could have a kid’s show, you could have a free-standing, naked, reading a phone book in the middle of the stage.
That’s why it’s called a Fringe –— anything goes.”
This year’s collection features a play titled Drunken Fu@#er, by local artists Sean Bowie and Stan Janz of Ground Zero Theatre.
It’s described on the Calgary Fringe website as “an exploration into one man’s battle with alcohol from first drink to last and beyond!”
For the more mature crowd Dance Naked Productions from Portland, Ore. has Inviting Desire. Described on the site as “a theatrical exploration of the erotic imagination. An ensemble of actresses that has created a thought provoking, playful aphrodisiac of a performance piece using the topic of women’s sexual fantasies.”
From the titillating to the educational and emotional, the Calgary Fringe Festival is sure to entertain with a selection of works from emerging and established artists. Show times have not been confirmed as of yet, but the festival is slated to run July 31 to August 8 at various venues in Inglewood. New this year is the addition of Fringe street performers at the Inglewood Sun Fest, which takes place on August 1.