The Fringe Festival arrives again, this year with more corporate sponsors than ever, and I’m feeling the same sense of anticipation and obligation. So many options, so much creativity, so many challenging theatrical experiences to seek out. As always, it’s the seeking that intimidates. Must I really drag my sporadically employed butt out of the house in all this heat and humidity to sit in some barely ventilated venue fanning myself with the program like a fat woman at a gospel meeting on the out chance that I will see something that’ll change my life? The answer’s yes, of course. But the question’s “why?” Why, just because something calls itself the Fringe should I believe it’s any more fresh and original than all the dazzling assertions of individuality I can find on the Internet? A whole world of original thought can be mine—from skate-chick rants to entire web rings devoted to a single poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. All I have to do is get out my credit card and pay Qwest (A WorldCom Subsidiary) $52.95 a month. Certainly, those pop-up adverts for car insurance and software security that litter my screen with all the graphic subtlety of fast-food wrappers are suspiciously slow to click off, but it’s a small price to pay for the world at my fingertips. Besides, there’s no real Fringe anymore, no alternative, just a bunch of various phenomena waiting to be absorbed and distributed at a reasonable price.
I use cynicism to disguise my laziness. The truth is that the Fringe is worth leaving the house for. In the first place, it’s live theater, and live theater, almost by definition, resists repackaging. Once it’s on video, DVD, CD-ROM, or cable TV, it’s no longer live. More important, however, is the question of whether there is still a fringe at all, and if so, will I find it at the Fringe Festival?
Of course the first Fringe Festival wasn’t called that. It happened in Scotland 56 years ago and might just as easily have been called “Eight Disgruntled Theatre Groups Get Turned Away From The Edinburgh Theatre Festival and Decide To Put on Their Own Damn Show.” By the next year the practice of staging dramas in unofficial venues began to attract attention and the term Fringe was coined by (who else?) a cultural critic. It’s no surprise that half a century later the phenomenon has grown up and solidified into a world-wide theatrical happening, taking place in cities all over the western hemisphere. Coca-Cola and Target banners flutter gaily in the press releases, and on all these flags, it’s the artists and performers who are the fringe.
Lest you think I’m one of those bitter, unsuccessful artistes who cry sell-out at any event not staged behind a grain silo at 2 a.m. in February, let me assure you I am an entirely different type of bitter, unsuccessful artiste. I think creativity should sell. I happen to think it should be fetching a much better price. If we artists are not going to get paid in dollars and sense, then we should be collecting the wages of fear. Being alternative, avant-garde, or simply on the Fringe, should carry with it the license to disturb and even enrage, not just the “mainstream” but your very own peer group. Alternative art of any kind ought to be scary, like rejection or death, especially when it’s funny. It should be something no one would dare turn into a beer commercial.
But speaking more broadly, what is Fringe anymore? I’m not sure, but I know it looks something like a guy I’ll call Capricorn the Poet. In 1982, when slamming was just something poets did with shots of whiskey, the open mike scene in the East Village was already churning it’s rusty gears into action. This was years before MTV showed up, before the phrase “spoken word” was coined, and before the poets themselves got suspiciously good-looking. Like verbal karaoke, everybody, lousy or excellent, got famous for exactly three and a half minutes before the proprietor’s egg-timer started buzzing and you were out of there. Naturally this democratic forum attracted a lot of furloughed mental patients of whom Capricorn the Poet was the most notable. For one thing he actually wrote metered verse. With his furious black-socketed eyes, a mop of dreaded-out unruly hair, and a precise Eastern European accent, he seemed to come from another century when poets thought they had the right to demand respect. He bellowed out his poems, giving each line the biblical weight he knew it deserved, his English antiquated and ornate, as if learned solely from books. His words themselves are unprintable in a non-fanzine context, consisting of violent, graphic smut that would make William Burroughs squeamish. His oratorical brio made it impossible to tune out. Feminists would leave the room in confusion, since you couldn’t really take a lunatic to task for commodifying women’s bodies. Even the young guys would get uncomfortable, all their bohemian posturing diminished before this literal onslaught. Capricorn, oblivious to audience response, would simply continue his philippic diatribe against aristocratic women who dared to tell their Lord and Master, Capricorn, that they were too good to have sex with donkeys for the purpose of increasing his onanistic delight, and I’m really giving you the lite version here. Finally some people wanted to 86 Capricorn from the open mike, but there were no grounds—he would always dismount the stage in a fit of verbal abuse when his time was called. “Sycophant, may you choke on a hemorrhoid!” was one of his tamer exclamations—but he would dismount. Capricorn stayed.
There are still open mikes in the East Village, though now everyone takes the subway, since the rents are too high for anyone who can even pronounce the word poetry. Miraculously, Capricorn is still there, arrogant, pompous, obscene, and insane as ever. Twenty years of what had to be hard times have not affected his confidence in the least, even though Russell Simmons is never going to put him on HBO.
It’s incredibly foolish to romanticize mental illness, which is no more an alternative to homogeny than pancreatic cancer. But when I think Fringe, when I think Alternative, I think of Capricorn’s enviable inability, or refusal, to understand his position. I am the choice, he seems to shout. It is you who are the Alternative! I am the flag, it’s you who are my fringe!
The Minnesota Fringe Festival takes place August 2-11 at various locations. See www.fringefestival.org.
Emily Carter is a Minneapolis author. Her collection of short stories, Glory Goes and Gets Some, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award in 2000.
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