Circadelix will perform at the Santa Cruz Fringe Festival.
‘I’m feeling kind of magical,” says Dixie Shulman, founder of the Santa Cruz Fringe Festival. She’s just saved the day. It’s Sunday afternoon, and earlier she got a call from the team working on the festival’s performance of No Exit, a modern dance piece inspired by the chilling Jean-Paul Sarte play and its prize quote, “hell is other people.” It’s the day of the group’s technical rehearsal, and the projector they were planning on using to display graphic scenes on the walls and floor of Motion Pacific Dance Studio’s performance space is busted. Maybe in this case hell is a blank wall.
But not to fear. This crisis, like many others, is swiftly neutralized by Shulman. It’s a long and confusing story about how she scrounged up another projector in 20 minutes, but the point is that she did. She arrives at the theater wearing a black tank top and hot bubblegum pink jeans, which accent the brightly dyed red tips of her auburn hair. She is accessorized with a fully functioning digital projector. “Not going to lie—I feel a little like Superwoman,” she says.
The Santa Cruz Fringe Festival, which runs July 13–22 at five different venues throughout downtown (Motion at the Mill, The 418 Project, Louden Nelson, Center Stage and the Tannery) is a festival of offbeat performance. Across the globe, there are about 50 Fringe festivals that occur throughout the year. The biggest and most famous one is in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the United States, Fringe festivals have taken hold in big, artsy places like New York, San Francisco and Hollywood as well as small-but-eclectic cities like Minneapolis and Indianapolis. This year, Santa Cruz joins the ranks for its first annual festival.
What makes a Fringe Festival different from a more traditional performance festival?
“Typically ‘Fringe’ refers to avant-garde, edgy, out-of-the-box, multiple genres, anything-goes performances,” explains Shulman, who also notes that Fringe festivals generally feature a mix of local and out-of-town performers.
Think of it as entertainment hors d’oeuvres: Most shows run 45-60 minutes, making them practically bite-size. Like any good caterer knows, it’s important to give people more than one chance to sample each delicacy—it’s bad form to make just one pass through a party with the tray of shrimp cocktail. Each Fringe show will have three to five performances throughout the course of the festival. And finally, variety is key: of the 42 shows in the festival (selected by lottery and director’s choice from 80 submissions), there will be a mix of dance, comedy, drama, magic and burlesque. Some family-friendly stuff and even circus-style acrobatics will make appearances as well.
“The idea is that people wander around downtown like on Saturday, see four or five shows, get some lunch at some point, stop for ice cream or a drink, make a day of it,” says Shulman. “Fringe has a really frenetic pace: boom boom boom boom.”
Santa Cruz, which Shulman notes has a higher volume of artists per capita than most cities, is ripe and ready for this festival to take hold and last into the future. “Having lived here, I know there’s a lot of artists that live here. They’re hungry for it.”
She figures it’s going to take. “People are going to think ‘summer in Santa Cruz’ and they’re going to think Cabrillo Music Festival and they’re going to think Shakespeare Festival and they’re going to think Fringe Festival. That’s the vision.”
Check in with Santa Cruz Weekly online and on Twitter @santacruzweekly for ongoing coverage throughout the festival. We’ll steer you towards the standout performances, be truthful about the forgettable ones, and share scenes of the festival’s atmosphere in all its avant-garde glory.
FRINGE FESTIVAL
Friday, July 13–Sunday, July 22
Various venues (see www.scrfringe.com for venues and schedule)
Tickets $10; $44 for five shows; $75 for 10 shows; $99 festival pass.
