Fringe Fringe Fringe Fringe Fringe Fringe Fringe May 18, 2009
Posted by Ryan in : Local, bloggingfringe, Events, Fringe, marketing, Orlando, whuffie ; add a commentYes, it’s true. I can never shut up about the Orlando Fringe. Fringe is what BarCamp will be in 50 years, becuase they have the same humble beginnings. Actually, if you take Internet Years into account, we are more like 3 or 5 years away from having unconferences that last 2 weeks and appeal to a wide audience. (I know because I want to create one)
photo from orlandosentinel.com
Of the 67 shows at this year’s Orlando festival, a majority are from out-of-town (USA or International), OR have never appeared at the Fringe before. The festival is spread across 8 venues in Loch Haven Park, so everything is within walking distance. The proximity of the venues, along with the staggering quality of all the shows, makes this one of the premier unjuried theatre festivals in the world.
Half of Orlando has no idea this is happening. It’s even worse for tourists.
Fringe has been going on for 18 years, longer than any other US fringe, longer than the crappy Music Festival, and just as long as the Film Fest.
On top of all these things, 100% of ticket sales go directly in the artists’ pockets. No exeptions, substitutions or refunds. The only things the festival makes money on is the Button (everyone must buy one, $8), merchandise, Beer and Wine, and Donations. A huge part of their budget comes from Grants and Donations. They have several full-time and part-time staff. (donate something, yo)
Happy Hour Monday
If you’ve EVER read this blog before you’ll know I wrangle the herd of cats known as Florida Creatives. Well, once a year I try to inspire this group (you can’t tell these kids what to do, just suggest) to make the pilgrimage to Loch Haven Park with me and drink beer 3 miles from their normal gathering place. Last year, we enjoyed some marginal success, and one guy actually came to see a show with me! I know a few other folks came out on the weekends, brought their kids. Good thing too. Fringe has a great family atmosphere if you’re looking for it.
Blogging Fringe
I love this festival so much, I go there every day for 2 weeks, and I started an entire project (I don’t think of it as just a website any more) where I blog about Fringe, take photos, make videos, and try to inspire people to do the same.
The big change this year is I’m not really trying to aggregate anything, just evangelize. The most I’ve really done to that end is to try and filter twitter posts about Orlando Fringe, which grows in complexity (and annoyingness) all the time. The coolest thing about the recipe I’ve built is that it works with the global twitter community, which is still fairly easy to navigate. I can’t say the same of the blogosphere, especially since so many people are posting to private Facebook and MySpace accounts. The openness of twitter (which almost sounds like a joke) is a strength I am exploiting, and I’m trying to wield in a meaningful and usable way. Not everyone uses Twitter Search or TweetDeck, so I made one for them.
Herding theatre patrons
This year marks the 4th festival since I started doing Blogging Fringe, and I don’t feel as though I’ve gotten very far in getting other people to blog on my site. So this year I wanted to let them create content where they are most comfortable, and have them act as advocates for something bigger than Blogging Fringe or even a single instance of the Orlando festival.
We’re talking about the community.
Just as with my love for Drupal, your reasons for staying at Fringe are not always the same ones that made you come in the first place.
Normally, a friend will drag you to some show or other, or perhaps you know someone in a show, or a second- or third-degree friend is in that situation. At Fringe, the Kevin Bacon game is too easy. The circle is much smaller and the bonds are often stronger. There are plenty of people I only know during Fringe, because they live in Seattle, Canada, or the UK. I have actually taken one of these Fringe Friendships to the next level, by visiting some actor friends up in New York a few years ago.
Just like making friends online, sometimes Fringe Friends can become your friends in Real Life. This is sometimes true of locals, but not often.
Another crazy thing is that this village only comes together for two weeks. I’ve heard similar things about Burning Man. Another characteristic they share is a Gift Economy.
Whuffie at the Fringe
Orlando Fringe has an invention they call “Fringe Bucks”, which is a social currency you can touch. When you volunteer for Fringe, you get 1 Fringe Buck per hour. 4 Fringe Bucks gets you into a show, for free. Your used Fringe Bucks then go to artists, who in turn use their Fringe Bucks to get into other shows. Artists also often “comp” their friends and other artists. Up to 10% of any show is filled with people who didn’t pay money to be there.
Fringe Bucks
Volunteers also get a free Button, so if you are willing to spend time at Fringe (which is natural for many people), you can get into all the shows you want, for free, within reason.
I was reminded of Fringe Bucks when I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Printing Money, Whuffie Style
Other than volunteering, several other ways exist to earn social capitol at Fringe. “Hug a volunteer”, is a mantra that’s heard and acted on often. Billeting artists (giving them a place to sleep) actually earns you a SuperPass, which gets you in to any show for free. Buying someone a beverage at the Beer Tent is often proffered as a reward for a favor, a free ticket to a show, or just as an excuse to get some face-time with your favorite artist.
My mission this year was to try and capture some of that implicit social capitol and have everyone make the festival better by participating in a game. I often describe it as a scavenger hunt, but it’s not really correct to call it that.
I was inspired by Akoha, which is a game where you are given a physical card with a unique “Mission ID” or a deck of missions, and the whole thing is tracked online. The idea is to “play it forward”. One card will pass from person to person, as you perform small kindnesses to other people, making the world a better place.
Akoha at TED
The Game Itself
Each participant gets a small booklet containing a piece of paper with several “challenges”. Some of these are easier than others, but initially they were designed to be things you could do for free, and especially to generate a story you could then tell to others. The best one so far was a bizarre hula-hooping mishap… involving a girl wearing a skirt.
The Game, Manifested
Each mission is worth 10 points, with modifiers for fun reasons.
- Drink a beer with a Canadian (drink a beer with a Floridian, -5 points)
- Donate to the Fringe (1 point per $1 donated)
… and so on.
In order to get players engaged right away, I invented the idea of your first mission being something you’d have to carry out right away, with two added bonuses:
- The First Mission always involves a 3rd party, who has not yet started playing the game.
- You must convince said 3rd party to complete your mission without speaking to them.
This makes the first challenge, well, challenging, and gets you from zero to one as a player right away. Now, you also have to explain to your friend what the heck you just did when the mission is over, thereby spreading the game virally.
Choose Your Own Adventure
I had originally wanted to do this game more like Akoha, with an online registration for missions, players and points. Anyone could create a mission, assign a mission to someone, or gift points in recognition of “going above and beyond”. It would turn everyone into a facilitator of the game, and in a perfect world, it would have been great.
In the end, I chose to use paper and online photos as the medium, because it’s more accessible and there’s a lot less overhead (this is a free time project).
Any player is still invited to invent their own challenges, either by having me write them down, or by printing out their own sheets. You just need a 4 1/4″ square piece of paper, and you can write anything on it.
Artists often use printed fliers to promote their shows, so I thought this would be a good chance to make the fliers useful beyond just saying the show times. Now every flier you hand out is interactive and viral, and it inspires your patrons to share something related to your show.
We have designed a platform.
Measuring Success
As players are encouraged to use whatever platform is most comfortable for them (Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc.), measuring will be just as difficult as with most social media campaigns. My Blogging Fringe twitter bot helps a bit, and Google Alerts help a bit more, but the only (simple) way to be able to see all these posts will be to have all these people add me as a friend on the relevant network and look at their Activity Streams.
This is where open standards would really help. They could make aggregating this content easy, but Facebook and MySpace are inherently closed to the average Joe, and that’s me.
Luckily I know most of these people, or I’m getting to be Fringe Friends with them. In the future, scaling this game will be hard without a centralized web site to collect all the data, but for this year’s experiment, what we’ve got isn’t bad for the amount of time and money I put in to it.
The Goal
In coming up with my presentation for BarCamp, I stumbled across the mission for Blogging Fringe. Even though I had done it for 3 years prior, I couldn’t verbalize fully and succinctly why I was doing it. I came up with the following:
To inspire entertaining and unexpected interaction between patrons of the arts, artists and arts organizations.
Everything I generate now for this project and future iterations of Blogging Fringe will take this statement into account, and give me the razor-edged accuracy I need to make this free time project greater than the sum of its parts.
There’s a lot I haven’t covered here, but that’s the way with this project, it really is quite deep and nebulous. It took me more than 3 years to understand it, and I feel like I’m learning and re-learning new things all the time.
I’d love your feedback, or stories about similar campaigns. This will definitely come up in a future podcast, BlogOrlando, BarCamp or other session. I’d love to know what others can learn from my experimentation, and how I can make this project even better.
Radio Rickshaw! April 7, 2009
Posted by Ryan in : Podcast, Video, BarCamp, bloggingfringe, Fringe, live, qik, radio rickshaw ; add a commentJohn, Dan and Corey rock it out in the Rickshaw Boy studios.
http://rickshawboy.com/radiorickshaw
Howto: Yahoo Pipes Auto-retweet recipe for Twitter February 3, 2009
Posted by Ryan in : HowTo, Fringe, pipes, Twitter ; 5 commentsI have 5 or 6 twitter accounts, and some of them are only meant to serve as a discovery point for a blog, podcast, or community. That’s why I cooked up this little pipe recipe to auto-retweet around two possible keywords, but NOT to retweet my own retweets if I did so from another account. Get it? Well, I’ll explain:
Yahoo! Pipes is a free, web-based, visual programming environment. Those of you familiar with node-based editors like Shake or some other graphics and sound programs will feel right at home. Each “module” represents an input or output, or most importantly, ways to process and filter data as it travels through the pipeline. Pipes takes as input just about any feed or structured data – in this case, the river of tweets from a particular user’s friends.
It’s pretty easy to register for Pipes and create a new pipe. When you’re done, you get a big blank piece of graph paper, and the list of sources, operators and other junk you can drop in on the left side.
The first thing you need to do is go ahead and grab the twitter feed. In the left sidebar you want to find Sources > Fetch Feed and drag it on to the working area. In addition to the url to your friends list, you have to provide your username and password, because Twitter’s API requires authentication.
Like this:
http://user:pass@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.atom
At this point, if you take the output from the
Fetch Feedmodule to thePipe Outputmodule, you have a working Pipe. But what you want to do here is filter out results based on certain keywords, so the output can be used to help you track a conversation.
The next module you’ll want to take a look at is under Operators > Filter. Drag this one out and take a look – this one reminds me of the Smart Mailbox rules in Mail.app, and it works in much the same way.
In this case we are going to:
Permit items that match all of the following Rules
item.title Contains fringe
item.title Does not contain bloggingfringe:
What does this mean?
- The first rule just pulls out tweets that contain a single word or phrase you’re looking for – in this case, “fringe”.
- The second rule filters out tweets by a particular user. In this case, the username contains the word you’re filtering on, so you try to take that into account.
Again, you could connect the
Fetch Feedto theFilter, and then to thePipe Outputand have a working version of the Pipe. In fact, I ran the pipe like this for a long time without anything else. But this is a two-keyword tutorial, and there are some other tricks I’d like to show you.
The next phase of your retweeting script is going to prepare the text of the tweets so they give a link back to the original author. You’ll also remove a few precious characters by removing your own username from an @reply.
RSS and Atom documents coming out of your twitter friends feed give the title and body of each item the following format:
liberatr: @bloggingfringe I think it's really cool how you're retweeting our posts about fringe automatically!
This is the format you’re going to pay attention to when you apply some simple regular expression replacement to the titles.
To give all of the retweets a more trational RT @user message format, you’re going to grab the Operators > Regex module next. There are two rules you’ll use:
In item.title replace : @bloggingfringe with :
In item.title replace ^ with RT @
- On the first rule, we are just cleaning things up in the case of a reply. Check i to ignore capitalization, so the rule matches @bloggingFringe or @BloggingFringe as well.
- The second rule just adds a few letters to the beginning of the outgoing tweet.
Adding the second keyword
At any given time, there are other cultural events happening, not just fringe, so you might like to make two pipes, one pipe to track each event. If both keywords are going to the same account, you can use the Split and Union operators to apply different kinds of filters.
You need to use Split and Union in this case because your filtering has too many AND and OR questions:
If someone is tweeting about "fringe" AND it wasn't written by @bloggingfringe, OR
If someone is tweeting about "arts fest" OR "artsfest" AND not "fringe"
It’s important to add the “and not fringe” to the end, because we don’t want tweets appearing twice if someone mentions artsfest and fringe in the same tweet.
I’m going to gloss over a few steps here, because they are simple, and you’ve already done a few just like these: 
- Create two new
Filtermodules - The first filter looks for your keywords, in my example the word could have spaces in it, so I needed a whole filter to spell out each variation
- The second filter makes sure you’re not duplicating tweets in the final pipe output
- Put the
Splitoperator at the very top, just afterFetch Feed. attach one of the outputs to the very firstFilterand the second to the new keywordFilter. - Put the
Unionoperator just above yourRegexoperator from before, with your two filtering decision trees going into the top, and the output from theUniongoing to theRegex, and that module’s output the thePipe Output.
The last rule you’re going to apply is one final Filter module. Since you’re retweeting any tweet that mentions these keywords you care about, you may end up catching some retweets yourself, if your friends decide to share what you wrote. In the example, I have this filter appearing in between the Union and Regex modules, but you could also put this at the very top, above the Split.
Block items that match any of the following Rules
item.title Contains RT @bloggingfringe
item.title Contains Retweeting @bloggingfringe
Finishing Up
Once you get all your filters connected, splits and unions, regular expressions, feeds and outputs in order, you should have something that looks like this:
Please note the output (in the gray area at the bottom), and how it took the original tweet and just added 4 text characters to the beginning, adding a bit of context.
Now you have to make sure you Save your pipe, and finally click the link at the top saying Run Pipe... The only thing I want to warn you about is Publishing your pipe. Please remember that your twitter password is in there!
Pipes will format your output as RSS or JSON (or serialized PHP objects), as well as hooking into your favorite RSS aggregator and Yahoo! Alerts. As if that wasn’t enough, think about all the RSS-to-Twitter applications that exist. My personal favorite is Twitterfeed.com – which is a free service, but I encourage you to donate a few bucks via PayPal, because it’s just a fantastic thing to do!
Edit: also check out the excellent TweetBots, another way to get feeds to twitter, but it also has auto-follow and a cool way to allow multiple people to update the account using direct messages.
Gotcha: Make sure you select “Title only” in twitterfeed’s interface, or the first few words of short tweets may be repeated!
I’m sure there are lots of other ways to filter your friends’ tweets, and tons of ways to create a retweeting service, but this is one that works for me, and I just wanted to share with anyone looking for a little help.
Update: Double-retweeting
Since retweeting is so widespread, you may come across several instances where you are retweeting a retweet. Most times this will be pretty innocuous, but if you get into a situation where several of the people you’re following retweet the same message, it’s probably best to avoid those.
Example of the bad behavior:
RT @Obsessionful: I have been retweeted by @VociDance and @bloggingfringe. I'm awesome. xP: Obsessionful: I have.. http://tinyurl.com/bewhqwRT @VociDance: RT @Obsessionful: "I think the thing getting me through this mountain of homework is the fact tha.. http://tinyurl.com/dx3x4g
RT @Obsessionful: I think the thing getting me through this mountain of homework is the fact that Arts Fest is t.. http://tinyurl.com/br65e5
No need to retweet it a second time.
Therefore, add one last Filter module just before the Pipe Output.
Block items that match any of the following Rules
item.title Matches regex RT.*RT
That should take care of most double retweets.
After I first made this script, I was thinking about setting up two accounts that just retweet each other all day, and call them “echo” and “chamber”…
RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT...
You get the idea…
Orlando Theatre Pot-Luck July 14, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Local, Blogging, Events, floridacreatives, Fringe, OrlandoScene, Theatre ; comments closedBack in April, a bunch of local theatre folks got together to have dinner and meet up. Tonight was the second installment in what seems to be a 3-or-4-times-a-year event, held in local theatre spaces. The April 6th pot-luck was hosted by Mad Cow Theatre downtown, and today’s was held in the lobby of the Orlando REP.
From the Wikipedia page on Potluck:
Folk etymology has derived the term “potluck” from the Native American custom of potlatch; the word “potluck”, however, is actually of English origin. It is a portmanteau word formed from (cooking) pot and lucke. The earliest written citation is from 1592: “That that pure sanguine complexion of yours may never be famisht with pot lucke,” Thomas Nashe. As this shows, the original meaning was “food given away to guests”, probably derived from “whatever food one is lucky enough to find in the pot”, i.e. whatever food happens to be available, especially when offered to a guest. By extension, a more general meaning is “whatever is available in a particular circumstance or at a particular time.”
Potlatch is actually a good custom from which to derive this kind of dinner – the potlatch is often celebrated at special events, like births, celebrations of the harvest, and weddings. It is a show of wealth and prosperity, where the person holding the potlatch holds a feast, and trades some prized commodity for things they might need.
The tech community’s BarCamp and the PR and Media community’s BlogOrlando could be seen as a kind of potlatch – we’re trading ideas and experience.
The idea for the Theatre Pot-Luck was originally spawned by local actor John Baker via Elizabeth Maupin’s Orlando Sentinel theatre blog, which is also the best place see announcements for other upcoming events. The Orlando Arts Blog is another good place to check. Apparently, the Orlando Shakes has volunteered to hold the next one in a few months. Right now there is no organizer, it just sort of happens as someone steps up to offer space – which is, in my opinion, as it should be.
With Florida Creatives and BarCamp, the geeks are really fixated on a single person having all the ideas, and I think this is stifling the creativity and experimentation that could be happening if the organizations were more headless. One way we can do that with Florida Creatives is having chapters in other cities, which we are getting going in Melbourne/Brevard now, and hopefully more successfully in Jacksonville some day – the only stopping other cities is an initial organizer.
Yes, someone does have to take the reins, but only until it gains critical mass. Even when I tried to move the Happy Hour to the Fringe Beer tent some of the downtown folks still went to Crooked Bayou looking for their regular 3rd Monday beer-and-tots… funny.
I really meant to take some pictures, but when I was there, I just didn’t see an opportunity.
What goes on at a theatre potluck? Well I talked to Arwen Lowbridge from Fractured Atlas in New York – she’s down here visiting so she could check out Beth Marshall and Tod Kimbro’s My Illustrious Wasteland – they were both also there, along with Betsy Maupin, of course – I ate dinner with them and (for a few minutes) John DiDonna, but he had to run.
Arwen and I waxed delicious about non-GMO, CSA farms, picking your own fruit, and having fresh food delivered to your house. I also had my first face-to-face meeting with Maupin, who said something to the effect of “You look bigger than on the Internet”.
I later moved over to a table with David Almeida , Marcie and Stephen J Miller from Here Be Dragons. There were some interesting threads there too, like one about experimenting with different roles while you’re in school, because once you’re out, you get cast as yourself for the rest of your life. The other hot topic was nudity, since David had done a play at Fringe with an extended nude scene.
I also got to hear about the history of this event, which is really important to me. The more I get into this, I see myself leaning more towards the role of documentarian and historian. I’m actually thinking about shooting a 20-25 minute documentary in a few weeks if I get the logistics figured out – I also hope that I will be able to get the help with editing that I’m hoping for… more on this later.
Looking forward expectantly to the next Pot-Luck – next time I promise to bring something. Betsy’s chicken and David’s brownies were great, and I heard good things about some lo mein and Stephen’s apple pie too.
Did you get enough Fringe Crush? May 31, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Local, Video, Arts, Blogging, bloggingfringe, Events, Fringe, Orlando, OrlandoScene, Podcasts, statistics, Web Sites ; comments closedThis year I thought I’d employ a bit of science to my Blogging of Fringe – I was worried the site had turned into all Fringe Crush, all the time, and completely about local acts instead of National and International. I was mostly right.
Here are some handy graphs to point out why we suck:
Here we see Text only posts at 10%
VoiceMail Reviews and audio at 13%
Any non-Fringe Crush videos at 37%
Fringe Crush takes it home with 41%
My second criticism is that we favored local, and the numbers don’t lie:
International 6%
National Acts 13%
On the Fringe 38%
Local Artists 43%
This scale is even graded on a curve, because I counted Bric-a-Brac as national because they’re from Austin, but they all used to live here, and they were produced by Beth. And the only things in the “On the Fringe” category were folks who were not in shows, but many of them have been in the past.
That means we had a distribution like this:
I guess 19% isn’t bad for Long Tail content. I’d like to do better. It’s a mission of mine to keep that number above 20% all the time, so I guess we did pretty well this time.
The Videos and Audio did have some categories we threw them in:
The new Fringe Moments were 11%
The VoiceMail Reviews at only 13%
The favorite Fringe Crush with 41%
Everything else this year with 35%
Also, I was very proud of us when I found out Beth would be presenting a Fringe Crush award for the show with the most crushes. Denna counted up the results, and by no surprise, VarieTease won! I think that’s a challenge to the cast of Oral to do some more campaigning for next year.
One last statistic, of the 32 shows I saw, 55% of them were not local.
Again, we’re counting Bric-A-Brac and Parlour Games as National, because they are… sortof.
2008 Patron’s Picks at the Fringe May 24, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Local, Events, Fringe, Trends ; comments closedPatron’s Pick is the only accolade our Fringe Festival bestows on shows, whether local or out of town. I think all of the Picks this year will end up being local, which is a crying shame. I should check previous years and see if out of town shows have earned this honor in the past.
Patron’s Pick day is great – you have the day off of work, you have already sort of seen everything you want to, and you’re also not rushing from one venue to the next and worried about scheduling things, because there is only one show playing at any given time – this makes parking a bit easier, too, from what I can remember.
Genevieve says in today’s newsletter:
Here are the Patron’s Pick winners and their performance times on Monday. We are still waiting on Blue and Brown, as it is a very tight race! As soon as we know, it will be posted on www.orlandofringe.org!
Yellow Venue: Skip Peril and the Players of the Lost Trunk, 10:15 am
Fringe Fundraiser: T.J. Dawe’s The Slip-Knot, a benefit for the Fringe, 11:30 am in the Orange Venue
Red Venue: Alice in Wonderland, 1:15 pm
Green Venue: Dysfunctional Fables, 2:20 pm
Orange Venue: When Pigs Fly at 3:30, pm
Silver Venue: Reefer Madness, 4:20 pm
Pink Venue: Here Be Dragons, 10:00 pm
Radio Rickshaw Fringe Podcast
Posted by Ryan in : Local, bloggingfringe, Events, Fringe, Orlando, Podcasts, Radio ; comments closed
Greg and John, and someone else… maybe the tech?
Two years ago, John Valines and the Rickshaw Boy crew won the Fringe of the Fringe Award – last year they gave it to Blogging Fringe. Radio Rickshaw is a long-running podcast here in Orlando with a small network of shows, and a barbershop quartet.
Also hosting this episode is Greg Barris from the Heart of Darkness Rock and Roll Circus. I actually don’t know much about Greg, except he used to live in Orlando, and he was involved with SAK Comedy Lab. His show was part monologue and part stand-up comedy, and it was pretty good.
Sometime during the week, I bumped into John and Greg with the Marantz recorder interviewing folks, and they talked to me a bit. I talk about Twitter, USB Humping Dogs and Fringe Shows, and I might be on mushrooms.
Radio Rickshaw Episode 62: Fringe 2008
Listen to the show.
Final Weekend of Fringe May 23, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Local, Blogging, bloggingfringe, Events, Fringe, Links, Orlando, OrlandoScene, Reviews, Theatre ; comments closedOnly 3 more days! (plus Patron’s Pick Day) Looks like When Pigs Fly and Alice in Wonderland have already been announced as Patron’s Picks for their venues, which sort of makes sense. If you’re interested in supporting the Fringe AND seeing TJ Dawe, check out Monday morning at 11:30, when TJ will be performing the Slip Knot.
As we rolled into the weekend last night with some light rain and lots of folks crowding the Shakespeare Center, I noticed three college-looking kids soliciting people for photographs. I walked up to tell them about Blogging Fringe, and it turned out they were the Orlando Metromix “SHOCK SQUAD”! Is Metromix the Sentinel one, that’s going to be changing their name? It’s not CityBeat, is it? It’s one of those. I went to see what coverage they had of the festival, and it was exactly one article – recommendations based on watching the preview. Also, no comments allowed. They asked me to link to them, and in hopes that they link back, here we go.
Check out Orlando Metromix’s Fringe Photoset – lots of familiar faces in there.
Last night, I lost my festival program. Normally no big deal, but this was different – I had written all sorts of notes in my program, marked down page numbers of shows, kept my tickets inside, and started to feel like my program was a treasured item – sort of like a stuffed animal or something, now lost. I checked the Brown Venue, the Blue Venue, the Ticket Booth, and the Garbage Can too, but my program was gone. I went to the box office to get some tickets re-printed ( handy reason for using credit card or the internet to buy your tickets), and proceeded to go through the tickets I did have with the volunteer to make sure I wasn’t missing any others.
Apparently, I’ve seen a lot of shows:
- A Brief History of Petty Crime
- American Squatter
- Boom
- *Flamenco con Fusion 08
- Galapagos: The Directors Cut
- **Here Be Dragons
- *Mark Baratelli
- Move!
- MR. FOX
- *Mr. Marmalade
- **New Rochelle
- On Second Thought
- *once upon a time: The End
- Oral
- Parlour Games
- perfectly broken
- Power To Pleasing: The Sex Lives of Teenage Girls
- *Red, White, and Ignorant: An American Love Story
- **Reefer Madness
- Shadows In Bloom
- Skip Peril and the Players of the Lost Trunk
- *Swell
- The Boy’s Own Jedi Handbook
- *The Bric-a-Brac Vagabond Vintage Variety Show
- The Cody Rivers Show presents: Stick to Glue
- The Greg Barris Heart of Darkness Rock and Roll Circus
- *The Slipknot: A Benefit for the Orlando Fringe
- Totem Figures
- TV iMature
- *Wet
- **VarieTEASE: No. 24 Doll Factory
- When Pigs Fly
* Indicates shows I have not seen, but I have a ticket for.
** Shows I saw after writing this blog post.
All of these shows (that I have seen) are awesome. Go see them all. If I could only tell you three, I would include The Cody Rivers Show, On Second Thought and Boom (not in that order). I would say Power to Pleasing, but it’s sold out. I continue to tell folks that if they haven’t seen any dance, they MUST go – we always have great dance at this festival, and I’m seeing all of the 5 dance shows this year. Lastly, (not leastly) if you’ve never seen TJ Dawe, Barry Smith, Jimmy Hogg, Greg Landucci, Gemma Wilcox or any of the other out-of-town monologists (like Paul Hutcheson from On Second Thought, mentioned earlier), they are all worth your time and money. This is also not counting Patron’s Pick day, where I plan to see some shows that have floated to the top, but I managed to miss. It should be a fun experience.
What was also a fun experience was getting a random contact from some folks from Rake Theatre down in Boynton Beach – they’re putting on Fluency this week at the Fringe. Apparently, they are wanting to start an all-Florida arts blog – a very ambitious project. I have about 3 such very ambitious projects in my head, in the works with locals, or I at least own the domain name for them.
The South Florida folks’ project is called, of all things, Florida Arts Blog, which is a Wordpress.com site right now, but for some reason the posts about Fringe have disappeared… ::shrug:: Something and someone to watch in the coming weeks and months. I am trying to sell them on Florida Creatives myself, blogging can come later. They’ve also got a link to Mark’s Orlando Arts Blog up there… I wonder if they’ve been emailing him too…?
Other things happening this weekend would be:
Orlando Silent Rave (see a video)
Saturday, May 24th, 5:24PM @ the Green Lawn of Fabulosity
Kite Flying 2.0 with Radio Rickshaw and Greg Barris
Sunday, May 25th 11AM – 5PM @ the Green Lawn on Drunkenness
Zombie March 3.7 with Rich Weirdos and Friends
Saturday, May 24th @ 3PM Park Ave and 5PM Lake Eola
If you know of more cool stuff, leave a comment and we’ll get it listed.
Orlando Fringe Begins! May 16, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Local, bloggingfringe, Events, floridacreatives, Fringe, Orlando, Reviews ; comments closedLast night was the first day of shows for the 2008 Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival, and I must say the Fringe has got a lot of great stuff going on! So many wonderful shows, both from Orlando regulars and some new folks as well – there’s even a show that takes place in the women’s bathroom! No matter what happens at this year’s festival, you’ll be sure to find daily updates at http://www.bloggingfringe.com
First thing you’ll notice is that the size of “The Green” has about tripled in size, with the Beer Tent remaining the center of attention. Because of the Fringe Membership drive and the special treatment for VIP members, beer/wine tickets are now $4 each, but I’ve seen some folks getting $1 off with their badges.
I saw Voci Dance’s “Perfectly Broken” at the Red (outdoor) Venue at the Orlando Shakes (the old beer tent location, and I think this is such a great use of this space! Even if the conflicts with the Orlando REP are resolved next year, I still would love to see this extra venue stick around or replace the old Red Venue, which was so tiny and hard to find.
Voci didn’t disappoint either, with an all-new show – lots of solos, more dance pieces that tell short stories over the course of two or three pieces, a live two-piece band and some really amazing dancing. I also liked the “Vocitini” table they had set up outside.
Some cool things to check out are Tod Caviness’ Poetry Vending Machine – $5 gets you a custom-written poem by one of the poets in residence. Also check out the Saturday night Poetry Smackdown events.
Another interesting addition is the Digi-Dada Theatre – Mark Biddle from The Office Art Gallery has written a series of short skits for Fringe Patrons to perform on camera in his mini-TV studio at the Shakes Fest, and he will be compiling the clips into a longer surreal piece to show off sometime soon.
Check out both Tod and Mark talking up their respective projects over at bloggingfringe.com/category/video/
I also went to the opening night of Gemma Wilcox’s “Shadows in Bloom”, which feels like a prequel to last year’s “The Honeymoon Period is Officially Over”. I’d like to ask Gemma and see what she has to say about this. Lots more characters, and lots more Gemma!
We are just getting started, but there is one more thing I’d like to mention – anyone and everyone has the ability to get their 15 minutes in this year, thanks to Blogging Fringe. I will be syndicating blogs – it’s simple and you get to keep all the publicity! Just send me a link to your blog or your blog’s feed – I’ll filter out posts that mention the Fringe Festival and re-post them to Blogging Fringe. When people check out the most recent posts on the site or do a search, they’ll see your posts, but when they click the links, they are directed to your blog, so you get to keep all the comments and maybe make some new friends in the process. Contact me through www.BloggingFringe.com or MySpace/Facebook to get listed as a Contributor.
Last but not least, come join the Florida Creatives on Monday for a visit to the beer tent and some socializing – we’ll be there from 6PM until 7:30, then we’ll head to the Shakes for Barry Smith’s show, American Squatter.
Hope to see you all out at Loch Haven Park this week! Happy Fringe!
May is a Kickass Month for Arts Events in Orlando May 15, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Local, Arts, bloggingfringe, Drupal, Events, Film, floridacreatives, Fringe, Likemind.orl, Music, Orlando, OrlandoScene ; comments closedWhy is May such a great month for holding events? Sure, for our Northern friends, it means the end of bad weather, the opening of roller coaster parks, and a change in the scenery as the trees and flowers start to show their summer colors, but here in Florida, it’s more like the start of the summer’s hot, humid, rainy monotony, the arrival of the tourists, time-share owners, kids on summer vacation, religious zealots protesting Gay Days, and of course, bad drivers in rental cars.
The main reason I look forward to May every year is the arrival of the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival (Thursday the 15th through Monday the 26th). Every year, theatre companies, dancers, comedians, clowns, musicians, improv actors, writer/directors, solo acts and large ensembles, exuberant teenagers and road-hardened veterans alike grace Loch Haven Park with their creativity and energy, and Orlando gives every ounce of it (and more) back to them as many of the national and international acts begin their Canadian Fringe circuit, which brings them to a new city every two weeks. Show prices range from free (as in free software) to $10, and all shows require the one-time purchase of a $6 festival button – 100% of your ticket money goes to the artist. This is one of the only unjuried, uncensored events I know of in Orlando outside of a few open-mic nights, and even some of those are passing judgment on the performers (the other best example here is BarCamp).
18 months ago, I started gathering a group of my friends together every third Monday of the month for an event called Florida Creatives Happy Hour (Monday the 19th, 6PM @ Loch Haven Park). Now, those original 8 friends are hardly in the same room, but the group has grown to something resembling a small political party representing the creative professionals and hobbyists here in Central Florida (with a group getting started in Jacksonville as I write this). This month’s Florida Creatives falls during the Fringe Festival, so at 6PM on the 19th we will be descending upon their “Green Lawn of Fabulousness” to have a beer and some soul food and socialize. At 7:45, we will be attending American Squatter, starring Barry Smith, the creator of last year’s sell-out hit Jesus in Montana. Tickets are $10 plus your $6 Fringe button.
Despite the fact that Fringe starts on the same day every year, another festival seems to think they are better than the Fringe, by starting on the exact same day. Yes, the Florida Music Festival runs Thursday the 15th through Sunday the 18th this year, at pretty much every available venue downtown. In past years, you’ve been able to buy a one-time pass that gets you in to all the shows for the whole weekend, as well as nightly passes – buying a ticket to just one show will hardly do such an event justice. The festival also has a short film as well as an art contest, check these out too if you can find the time in between all of the other events happening at the exact same time.
What other events? How about that bizarre craft bazaar held semi-bi-anually at Stardust Video & Coffee, Grandma Party? (Saturday the 17th, 10AM to Sunset) For some reason they opted out of celebrating Earth Day in favor of overlapping with FMF and Fringe this year – the reason why is left as homework for the reader. Actually, if you find out, please try to explain this one to me too. At G-ma Party, you’ll not only find loads of handmade goods, like the cereal-and-eggs inspired work of the Breakfast Bunch, but trendy t-shirts, buckets of buttons, live music by some of Orlando’s best local bands (at least those who are friends with the festival organizers), a bal-looney community pool, and of course rummage piles and raffles.
Not as culturally significant, but still worth a mention, the second ever Florida Drupal User Group meeting will be held at the offices of MindComet in Maitland this Saturday (May 17th, 1PM). Check out the event and any follow-up at groups.drupal.org/florida.
Still more to come in this round-up of events, because I couldn’t write such a blog post without mentioning the Corazon Art and Music Festival being held at the Orlando Brewing Company (Sunday the 18th, starts 1PM, All Day). As I’m writing this I don’t have access to any listings, but I know tickets are $5, and I can give a serious recommendation, as this event is being thrown by Robert and Jonathan from Gamble Records, the folks who brought us the ELLA Music Festival in October. I expect you will see lots of singer-songwriter type acts, and you can trust Robert Johnson’s rolodex to bring you some great music (and art?).
There must be more happening during the next two weeks, but isn’t that enough? Of course, we can’t forget about this Friday (May 16th, 8AM-11AM) and the Likemind Orlando coffee meetup at the Lake Eola Panera Bread. This month there will be free coffee and hopefully a few free copies of a book called Murketing – I don’t have a lot of details about it, but I know the publishers of the book are sponsoring the coffee and snacks all over the US, so they get serious props.
If I’m missing anything here, please leave a shout-out, and I’ll try to include it in the next bulletin. Until next time, have a great May!
