Choose from four different covers featuring local Fringe fans
Rochester, NY – The free, 120-page 2019 KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival Guide is now available at 40 Rochester locations, including Fringe venues and sponsors, coffee houses, restaurants, and hotels. For a full list, please visit: https://rochesterfringe.com/visitor-info/festival-guide.
This year’s Guide features four different covers, each showcasing a different – and very expressive – local Fringe fan: Olivia Mabelis, Nina Miguel, Jane Njoku, and Querell Strong. With photography by Erich Camping and creative direction by Bonnie Miguel, the covers also feature the 2019 theme, “Leap a Little,” along with one of four titles: Be Dazzled, Don’t Blink, Get Funky, and Let Loose.
“We really wanted to focus on the audience experience this year and inspire attendees to try something new,” explains Festival Producer Erica Fee. “There’s such a variety at Fringe and it’s all so simple to sample that we’re hoping to encourage visitors to be just a little adventurous.”
Additionally, the printed Guide will be distributed to the campuses of the University of Rochester (River Campus, Eastman School of Music and URMC), RIT, SUNY Geneseo, The College at Brockport, Nazareth College, and St. John Fisher College at the end of this month. Then, in late August/early September, the Guide will be inserted in CITY Newspaper, Democrat & Chronicle, New York Times (Western New York), Buffalo News, and distributed by Ithaca Times.
This year’s KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival (Tuesday, Sept. 10 – Saturday, Sept. 21) runs for 12 days, and will feature more than 575 performances and events in 20+ venues in downtown Rochester.
More than 150 of those performances and events are free, including the return of French street theatre company Plasticiens Volants (pronunciation here), which made its U.S. debut at Rochester Fringe two years ago with a show called BIG BANG to more than 20,000 enthralled audience members. On Friday and Saturday on the Fringe (Sept. 13 & 14), they’ll turn downtown Rochester into a giant aquarium with another U.S. premiere: Pearl: Secrets of the Sea. Using their giant inflatable puppets, Plasticiens Volants’ two 8 p.m. performances will begin with a 20-minute street promenade, as sea creatures – including a 60-foot whale – “swim” to their destination at the City’s vacant Parcel 5. There, a dramatic story involving a gigantic sea serpent, an enormous octopus, and a precious pearl will unfold for audiences of all ages.
Fringe Finale Weekend (Sept. 20 & 21) will feature the return of 2018’s headliner, the U.K.’s Massaoke. This year, the sing-along sensation will perform its signature rock-anthem show, Massaoke: MixTape, on Friday, Sept. 20, and its Massaoke: Night at the Musicals show – the North American premiere – on Saturday, Sept. 21 on the new Chestnut Street Stage, with Chestnut and East Avenue closed to traffic.
The Spiegelgarden, a public, pop-up, outdoor lounge at One Fringe Place (corner of East Main and Gibbs Streets), will feature free KIDS DAY activities (Saturday, Sept. 21) and Pedestrian Drive-In – a free, nightly, big-screen movie series that kicks off with a special showing of RBG, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary. Other free Fringe favorites – including the exciting, all-styles dance battle featuring teams from all over the Northeast called Fringe Street Beat (Saturday, Sept. 21) and Gospel Sunday (the best of the Rochester gospel scene in Kilbourn Hall on Sunday, Sept. 15) – will also return. Many venue-curated performances and events are also free.
Turning to ticketed events, Fringe’s 2019 comedy headliner is award-winning comedian, actor, director and author Mike Birbiglia in An Evening with Mike Birbiglia in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre on Friday, September 20 at 7:30 p.m. Fringe will also present Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace, a Peabody-nominated history podcast, in The Memory Palace Live at the Eastman School of Music’s Kilbourn Hall on Thursday and Saturday, Sept. 19 & 21, as well as The Memory Palace On-Site Listening Experience at High Falls, a free, site-specific show running throughout the festival. Both events will feature a specially commissioned Rochester story.
New in the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent this year will be the fifth world-premiere comedy/variety show created especially for Fringe by Las Vegas masterminds, Matt and Heidi Morgan – Cirque du Fringe: D’illusion – along with a brand-new Shotspeare show for late-night entertainment, this time a bawdy remake of Macbeth. Another late-night Speigeltent sell-out, Silent Disco, returns, along with its equally popular, daytime edition: Disco Kids. This year, Fringe debuts Drag Brunch, featuring RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants Mrs. Kasha Davis and Darienne Lake, Keke Velasquez Lord, and Wednesday Westwood in the Spiegeltent on Sunday, September 15.
A new Fringe partnership with Gateways Music Festival has resulted in A Celebration of the Life of Paul J. Burgett Through Music at the Eastman School of Music’s Hatch Recital Hall on Saturday, September 14. Burgett was a beloved board member of both organizations, and a driving force in the success of these and so many other wonderful community initiatives. Also new to Fringe this year: the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2019-20 season opener, Scheherazade .2, is part of the Fringe. Additionally, Fringe is partnering on special events with ImageOut: The Rochester LGBT Film & Video Festival and Rochester’s Puerto Rican Festival.
“We are – above all – a true community festival run by a Rochester non-profit with local board, staff and support, and each year, we work hard to engage more and more of the community we serve,” adds Rochester Fringe Festival Board Chairperson Justin L. Vigdor.
The vast majority of Fringe performances and events are booked by the venues themselves from applications received from shows during the spring submission process: The Avyarium, Blackfriars Theatre, Central Library of Rochester, Eastman School of Music, Garth Fagan Dance, George Eastman Museum, Geva Theatre Center, Java’s, Joseph Avenue Arts & Culture Alliance, The Little, The Lyric Theatre, Multi-use Community Cultural Center (MuCCC), Nox, RIT City Art Space, RMSC’s Strasenburgh Planetarium, School of the Arts, and Writers & Books. Additional site-specific venues this year are: High Falls, Memorial Art Gallery, Merriman Street (between Atlantic & University), Rochester Dance Theatre, UUU Art Collective, and Village Gate.
Information and tickets for all shows are now available via rochesterfringe.com. The free app will be available in August.
From its five-day debut in 2012, the KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival has become one of the fastest-growing and most-attended fringe festivals in the U.S and the largest multi-genre arts festival in New York State. A bifurcated festival, it allows for a combination of curated, headline entertainment and an open-access portion programmed by the venues themselves. Renowned among the world’s 200+ fringe festivals for its large-scale, outdoor, free-to-the-public performances – including the U.S. premieres of Canada’s Circus Orange (2014), France’s Plasticiens Volants (2017), and the UK’s Massaoke (2018) – Rochester’s Fringe was also the first fringe festival in North America to feature a Spiegeltent, which is now an annual attraction. From comedy to theatre, from music to dance, from visual art and film to spoken word, and from children’s entertainment to multi-disciplinary collaborations, the festival’s diversity also extends to venues that span the gamut from parked cars to grand theatres.
Rochester Fringe Festival connects and empowers artists, audiences, venues, educational institutions, and the community to celebrate, explore, and inspire creativity via an annual, multi-genre arts festival. The not-for-profit, 501(c)3 corporation was pioneered by several of Rochester’s esteemed cultural institutions including Geva Theatre Center, the George Eastman House and Garth Fagan Dance; up-and-coming arts groups like PUSH Physical Theatre and Method Machine; and higher-education partners such as the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology. The organization’s overarching mission is to make arts readily accessible to audiences, as well as to provide a platform for artists to share their ideas and develop their skills, while stimulating downtown Rochester both culturally and economically.
Rochester Fringe Festival is made possible with support from New York State through Market NY/Empire State Development under the Regional Economic Development Council initiative. Other 2019 Fringe sponsors include: KeyBank; I Love New York; New York State Council on the Arts; University of Rochester; RIT; Rochester Area Community Foundation; Waldron Rise Foundation; City of Rochester; Ames Amzalak Memorial Trust; National Endowment for the Arts; Imagine Monroe; Estate of Marianne L. Rohack; Richard U. & Elaine P. Wilson Foundation; Daisy Marquis Jones Foundation; Nocon & Associates; Konar Properties; SUNY Geneseo; Ronald Fielding; Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; Hyatt Regency Rochester; The Pike Company; Louis S. & Molly B. Wolk Foundation; Big Slide Creative; 13WHAM TV; CITY Newspaper, D&C Digital; Broccolo Tree & Lawncare; McCarthy Tents & Events; Nazareth College; The College at Brockport; St. John Fisher College; The Rubens Family Foundation; Genesee Beer; Wegmans; Fred & Floy Willmott Foundation; Gouvernet Arts Fund at the Rochester Area Community Foundation; Visit Rochester; Wilson Foundation; ESL Charitable Foundation; Hamilton A/V; Scott Miller; House of Guitars; City Blue; Yelp!; WXXI; KidsOutandAbout.com; Midtown Athletic Club; Mary Cariola Children’s Center; Canandaigua National Bank; and the YMCA of Greater Rochester. Also supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.
About KeyBank: KeyBank’s roots trace back 190 years to Albany, New York. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, KeyCorp is one of the nation’s largest bank-based financial services companies, with assets of approximately $144.5 billion at June 30, 2019. Key provides deposit, lending, cash management and investment services to individuals and businesses in 15 states under the name KeyBank National Association through a network of approximately 1,100 branches and more than 1,500 ATMs. Key also provides a broad range of sophisticated corporate and investment banking products, such as merger and acquisition advice, public and private debt and equity, syndications and derivatives to middle market companies in selected industries throughout the United States under the KeyBanc Capital Markets trade name. For more information, visit https://www.key.com/. KeyBank is Member FDIC.
Media please note: High-resolution photos, video and other press assets – including a link to request reviewer tickets – may be found at rochesterfringe.com/press.
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