Fringe Festival – Day 7
Let me tell you what drives me nuts about modern dance.
It isn’t the dancing. I love the dancing. It isn’t even the fact most of it is movement for the sake of movement and being a writer, I’m always looking for the story.
No, what really drives me nuts about modern dance is the music. I understand why most dance troupes select boring, repetitious music that may or may not be Philip Glass. I get it. I’m supposed to be watching the dancers.
Personally, though, I prefer a soundtrack that sounds like more than a keyboardist who only knows three chords. I like the interaction of sight and sound.
Most modern dance leaves me wanting more. And it isn’t the dancing. It is the fact my eyes are excited and my ears are bored.
Here’s some notes on the shows I saw Wednesday! They were all quite good!
Fringe Festival – Day 6
As I wrote earlier, I always take a day off of the Fringe Festival. I didn’t see any shows on Tuesday night.
Let me write instead about the crucible of criticism that is the Fringe Festival. Because there is nothing like it. Artists love to hate it. Or hate to love it. Amongst a group of people who thrive on validation, however, the Fringe can be an emotional roller coaster.
Or maybe that’s just me.
I always tell people don’t write five-star shows. Because I don’t. It isn’t false modesty to say that I didn’t set out to create a brilliant piece of theater with the title “The Sound of Footloose: The Not Musical.”
I wrote a show that mashes up Footloose and The Sound of Music but nobody sings. It’s right there in the title, my friends. There are no lofty themes or deeply personal reflections.
What I set out to do is write something that will make people laugh. To me, something that is funny and a bit of a trifle is worth four stars. That’s all I’m writing. I don’t have any fantasies that I will eventually churn out the next Death of a Salesman.
So a four star review is fine. It’s expected. Heck, it’s a success.
The problem, however, is the math.
Whether you are producing great theater or something that is notable primarily for its Nazi jokes, Fringe producers need reviews to drive attendance. The more reviews the better.
Because all those reviews are averaged, a couple of two or one star reviews can really mess with your overall rating. And the more reviews you get, the more likely you are going to get a two or one star review. Unless you are Transatlantic Love Affair. Lucky, talented bastards.
Fringe Festival – Day 5
I know it’s coming. It’s as inevitable as the postcards.
Someone out there is going to post a one or two star review of my show.
I think you could write a horror show all about the process of getting audience reviews. Audience reviews are necessary to having a successful run and they can be super helpful. They are also a source of constant pain.
It may come as a surprise to many people that most Fringe artists have fragile egos. Even though we know that there is no way we can write a show that will please everyone, we are devastated when we get that one bad review because deep down, that is the review we thought was right all along.
As reviews for my show roll in, they are pretty positive. And that’s great.
But someone out there hates what we did. And at some point, they will sit down in front of a keyboard to let us know.
I don’t resent those reviews. But I dread them. Because I’m pretty sure they’re right.
And speaking of reviews, here are my reviews of shows I saw on Monday!
Fringe Festival – Day 4
Part of my Fringe tradition is to take a night off.
When I first began Fringing, I did it hard. If I didn’t have a show, I was at someone else’s show. I wouldn’t even take breaks before my performance because I had an artist’s pass and I was going to use it.
After a full day of shows, I would go to Fringe central and stay there until 1:00 AM or later.
By the end of the festival, I’d be a little burned out.
Somewhere along the way, I realized I could take a one night break about midway through the festival and it really helped restore my enthusiasm for the whole experience.
Tonight, I’ll be staying home. By making that choice, I know I’ll be missing my chance to see something fantastic. I’ll be missing out on the opportunity to socialize with some amazing people I see only once a year.
That’s the price I pay for my fringe tradition. I hope everyone else has a great night at the Fringe.
And now on to my reviews from Sunday!
Fringe Festival – Day 3
I cannot presume every artist has the same Fringe experience as me. Yet it would seem that one of the most common topics for discussion at Fringe central is whatever show everyone is going to do next year.
Having managed to pull together one show, it is time to come up with the craziest of ideas for our follow up. For at least ten minutes last year, I was seriously contemplating “Shark Week: The Musical.”
You get five shows over ten days. Then you’re done and this little slice of theatre Brigadoon evaporates into the mists for another twelve months.
But while we all nurse our beers at the Red Stag, the theatre community of the Twin Cities turns into a gigantic brainstorming session. Ideas are flung about in a (sometimes) drunken frenzy and every single one of them could turn into something spectacular.
Most of them (like “Shark Week: The Musical”) are rejected (or forgotten) and fade into the mists of a sleep deprived hangover, but I can never help but wonder what shows at this year’s fringe were given birth at last year’s Fringe. And what shows will never end up on a stage.
The following reviews are from a long Saturday of Fringing.
Fringe Festival – Day 2
I’ve talked to a lot of artists about reviewing for Fringe shows and most of us don’t write reviews for the Fringe Festival site. It’s kind of counter-intuitive. We all really need reviews to get audiences interested in our shows. But most of the time we don’t review the shows of other artists.
In general, I’ll do a review on the Fringe site if I see a show I really enjoy and it doesn’t have many reviews or I feel like the rating is too low. That, in my mind, is a show that needs support from as many sources as possible.
If the show has a lot of reviews and is doing well, it doesn’t need my help if I liked it. If I didn’t like it, I have too much respect for the work of the people involved to torpedo the show’s rating by posting a negative review. A one or two star review can really screw a producer’s rating.
If I were an audience member with no skin in the game, I wouldn’t have an issue posting a negative review on the show page. As a producer, writer, and sometime performer, I want to help other producers. A bad review on the Fringe site can really hurt them.
So I’ll write a bad review here on my own page and perhaps they will find it helpful. Or perhaps they won’t read it.
Probably the second thing.
Fringe Festival – Day 1
Fringe 2015 has begun! Strangely, I’m only artistically enmeshed in one show this year and I don’t appear on stage for the first time since 2009. As I’ve worked to position myself more as a writer than a performer, this was bound to happen. I still very much love to perform. If anyone ever came to me and asked if I’d be in their fringe show, I’d be inclined to say yes.
You know, as long as I didn’t have to rehearse or anything.
As is my habit, I will write reviews of the shows I see during the festival. My opinions are my own so feel free to think I’m a raving idiot. If you didn’t think that already.
I don’t give star ratings and I don’t write reviews on the Fringe web site unless I think a show needs a boost. As an artist, I don’t want to be responsible for torpedoing a show’s rating just because I didn’t care for it.
I won’t actually review this show because I’m the writer. I did watch the opening and will simply offer my kudos to the cast and crew who found a way to realize my bizarre mash-up of an idea. Did it work for me?
Yeah. They found the humor in the script I wrote and while I don’t expect I will ever win an Ivey for my writing, I’m satisfied that I didn’t write a complete pile of crap. What will the audience think? Given we had the 5:30 Thursday slot, my sample size is still pretty small. Hopefully later shows will help all of us have a better idea how we did.
What I Learned – Just Dance
I’m writing a blog series about what I learned in 2014. The year had highs and lows – as any year does – but I learned a lot.
I’ve never been a very good dancer. I’m stiff and not very flexible and I’m generally more interested in singing along to a song than dancing to the song so I end up doing this sing-y danc-y thing with a lot of unnecessary clapping.
If I wasn’t keenly aware of my skills as a dancer already, there are plenty of people who are present to remind me. Hell, The Dregs have made a running bit out of my dancing skills. I usually try to dance even worse than I already dance just to help punctuate the joke.
Lots of people are bad dancers and I’m good at a great many other things so my self-esteem doesn’t take too hard a hit when people tease me about my inability to cut an impressive rug.
2014, though, was the year where I agreed to dance in front of everyone. And not as a joke.
During the after part of the Minnesota Fringe Festival in 2013, Windy Bowlsby and I were watching a bunch of our friends on the dance floor. They were actors, comedians, writers and even dancers.
And I said to her that it would be interesting to see a dance show where all the dancers were people who didn’t dance. I specifically talked about writers but the basic thought was that it would be fun to see a good choreographer (Windy) take people who weren’t known as dancers and get them to dance on stage in front of an audience. As a serious dance show.
The moment the suggestion passed my lips, I knew that if she liked the idea, she was going to ask me to be in the show.
My philosophy is to say “yes” to the performance ideas that scare me because I can’t grow if I keep doing the projects that are safe. So of course Windy asked me if I’d be in such and show and of course I said yes.
And such was the birth of “Jumpin’ Jack Kerouac.”
The show was the best kind of success. It didn’t succeed because we all suddenly became great dancers but because Windy found a way to bring out the best in all of us and she made the show about something other than “let’s all laugh at these awkward writers trying to dance.”
It became a celebration of potential and I had a lot of performers telling me how much that show touched them. It touched me too.
The classic phrase is we should learn to dance like no-one is watching. But someone is always watching. Even if we shut out everyone else, there is a little piece of ourselves that is keenly aware of our own body movements. And if you are me, you are aware of how dorky you probably look.
At the Fringe after party the last few years, I’ve watched a whole lot of awkward people dancing enough to know that they don’t care if anyone is watching. When dancing to “Firework,” most people aren’t concerned with dancing like a professional. They just want to dance.
Are people watching me and laughing at how awkward I am on the dance floor? Probably not because there is someone right next to me who is just as awkward. Being a bad dancer isn’t the exception. Most people are bad dancers.
And most people dance anyway because they just feel like dancing.
So what I learned in 2014 is to say “fuck it. I feel like dancing.”
Putting it Together – Where’s that Line?
I’ve been writing a bunch of things lately and fell far behind on my blog projects. If you were reading and missed my posts, I’m sorry. If you weren’t reading, I don’t know why I brought it up.
Today, I’m re-starting my Putting it Together blog. I’ve been using this blog series to share thoughts that arise from creative projects, like the Fringe Festival.
For the Minnesota Fringe this year, I wrote a show called “Top Gun: The Musical.” The show was very successful and my writing got an amazing assist from a talented cast, great choreography, and really good music co-written with Chad Dutton. Most of the feedback was positive and I felt like the audience really enjoyed what we put on stage.
When I was writing the show, I spent a lot of time watching the film and as I watched, I was taken with all of the homoerotic subtext. I mean, there are dozens of Youtube videos on the topic but I hadn’t watched any of them. Yet. To me, the romance between Maverick and Charlie was not at all interesting and there seemed to be more chemistry between Maverick and Iceman.
When I wrote the script, I wrote it with those thoughts in mind. I told the actors that as far as I was concerned, every pilot in the show was a closeted gay man.
The serious subtext was the idea that in the 80’s, you couldn’t be an openly gay man in the military. It was hard to be an openly gay man at all. It is remarkable how far we’ve come in such a short time.
Now the show wasn’t at all serious and the idea that these characters were in the closet was played for laughs. That made me nervous.
Because while I wanted to make fun of the fact these characters were in the 80’s closet, I didn’t want it to come off as making fun of the fact that they were gay. I wanted it to be very clear that it was OK they were gay.
Fringe Reviews – Days 10 & 11
I spent a lot of time at the Fringe this weekend and while reviewing shows makes no difference for anyone’s attendance at this point, I’m still going to write about what I saw.
I’ve developed a lot of friends at the Fringe over the years. At first, I would try very hard to see all of their shows because that’s what friends do. Over time, I’ve reached the point where watching every show by a friend could mean I’d never see anything by someone I don’t know.
So I reached the point where I realized that everyone I knew was in the same boat as me. Making a choice to miss a friend’s show isn’t personal. You are only going to see so many shows over the course of eleven days.
When you reach that conclusion, it takes a little bit of the pressure off.
So if you are a friend of mine and I missed your show this year, I’m sorry. If you missed mine, that is OK too. I’m sure we can all still be friends.
Grail Diary 