Elements of A Typical Fringe Theatre Production
The limitations and opportunities that the Fringe festival format presents lead to some common features.
Shows are not judged or Juried, but are accepted in the order received until all performance spaces are filled.
Shows are typically technically sparse; they are commonly presented in shared venues, often with shared technicians and limited technical time, so sets and other technical theatre elements are kept simple. Venues themselves are often adapted from other uses.
Casts tend to be smaller than mainstream theatre; since many of the performing groups are traveling, and venues (and thus potential income) tend to be fairly small, expenses must usually be kept to a minimum. One-person shows are therefore quite common at Fringe festivals.
Fringe festival productions often showcase new scripts, especially ones on more obscure, edgy or unusual material. The lack of artistic vetting combined with relatively easy entry make risk-taking more feasible.
While most mainstream theatre shows are two or three acts long, taking two to three hours with intermissions, fringe shows tend to be closer to one hour, single-act productions. The typically lowered ticket prices of a fringe theatre show permit audiences to attend multiple shows in a single evening.
Performers sometimes billet in the homes of local residents, further reducing their costs.
Read more about this topic: Fringe Theatre
Famous quotes containing the words elements of, elements, typical, fringe, theatre and/or production:
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and superseded by elements of lower quality.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.”
—Djuna Barnes (1892–1982)
“In the Japanese
tongue of the
mind’s eye one
two syllable word
tells of
the fringe of rain....”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise.... I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)