By Eric George Tauber
SAN DIEGO — The 2017 San Diego International Fringe Festival has completed its fifth year. Ours isn’t the largest or most famous, but ours is the only bi-national fringe with venues in Tijuana participating. With 500 shows to choose from, no one can see everything. But I can give a few highlights.
“Incandescent” by Lighthouse Circus Theatre
Seven dancers burst into a kaleidoscopic swirl of movement, then down-shifted to a mesmerizing, ethereal slowness. I especially loved the physical virtuosity of hip-hop marionette, Brella Lopez. With a blend of modern dance and circus acrobatics, Incandescent reminds us that humanity is capable of greater strength and graceful agility than most of us dare imagine.
Lighthouse’s goal is to shine rays of hope into the dark shadows of depression. They were one of the acts to play in TJ where their audience included a group of children orphaned by HIV. Their lives are tragic, but for a moment, they got to be children again with eyes filled with wonder.
“We the People” by Poolhouse Project
“What is your most American moment?”
This was a question put to over 100 people from various walks of life. And from those responses, they chose six told in deeply personal, first-person narratives. The group has plans to expand the show into a full production. When they do, I’d like to hear a greater diversity of opinions. We live in such a politically polarized era that many people simply do not talk to each other. But if we can use art to voice the fears of both sides, we can also open our ears to listen.
Harriet Tubman by Berry and Co.
Harriet Tubman was called “the Moses of her people” for helping about 70 slaves escape to freedom. But rather than tell a purely historical tale, Berry & Co. have re-imagined her as a girl in modern day Harlem. How would she have done in school? Would she have been suspended for “disruption” or put in special-ed? A spirited storyteller, Berry portrays a variety of teachers and Tubman herself. With soulful R&B, humorous caricature and slam poetry, we get schooled about the racial bias that plagues our school systems to this day.
I hope this production is going to schools. As a one-woman show, it travels light with an empowering and impassioned voice that needs to be heard.
Mark Toland –Mind Reader
Mark Toland takes the stage with a hyper, nerdy enthusiasm that’s quite charming and fun to watch. A great lover of mystery, he swears the audience to secrecy about what he did. So I’ll only say that there’s a lot of audience participation, too many in the small space for them to have been shills. Mark doesn’t claim to have any “supernatural” abilities, but what he does is pretty uncanny.
The Beautiful Machine: A Musical (Act I) by Pop Theater
Because of the time constraints of the Fringe, we could only see Act I of this scathing commentary on dehumanization by the industrial machine. I recognized some of the actors from the MFA Musical Theatre program at SDSU. They had –by far- the strongest voices and stage presence.
Welcome to a post-apocalyptic society one hundred years after WWIII. It was very 80s with Cold War fears, sci-fi moralizing and electronica dance music (think Axel F with some Queen and Pink Floyd). One guy even danced the robot. The music often overpowered the vocals and some lines were lost for want of microphones. But working out those bugs is what these festivals are for.
The 2017 Fringe presented a bevy of acts from around the nation and the world. Get on the mailing list at www.sdfringe.org to get a heads up on the sixth festival in 2018. And if you’re not sure why this is really worthwhile, here are some numbers:
| 2013, our 1st Fringe | 2016, our 4th Fringe | |
| Productions | 52 | 90 |
| Total Attendance | 38,000 | 66,500 |
| Economic Impact | $1,018,070 | $2,121,060 |
*Source: Americans for the Arts
And it’s growing with more acts coming in from around the country and the world. And more young people are getting involved as volunteers and putting their creative energies to work with original productions in the Emerging Fringe competition. And who can put a price on that?
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Tauber is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts. He may be contacted via eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com