Philly Fringe Festival announces fall lineup

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The 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival has announced this year’s lineup. Having weathered a major pandemic slump and a significant change in leadership, the festival, now in its 28th year, is starting to look like its old self again.

The so-called curated Fringe, featuring headline productions selected by FringeArts, features familiar names from past Fringe seasons: Pig Iron Theatre, Elevator Repair Service, Nichole Canuso Dance, and Lightening Rod Special are all staging new work.

Interim programming director Mikaela Boone said groups like those are “close to the creative core” of the Philly Fringe.

“What makes FringeArts unique in the context of the Philadelphia arts scene is its commitment to experimental theater and devised work,” she said. “Well-researched, well-crafted, but also on the fringes, on the edges of innovation.”

Pig Iron and Lightning Rod are debuting world premieres, respectively: “Poor Judge,” conceived by Dito van Reigersberg as an Aimee Mann fever dream, and “NoseJob,” about a messy sexual awakening set in a Catholic university.

Nichole Canuso is reworking her site-specific dance concept, “The Garden,” for the historic Arch Street Meeting House in Old City. Elevator Repair Service will present its signature theatrical trope of staging an entire work of literature, this time wrestling James Joyce’s “Ulysses” to the boards.

Boone has taken over programming duties from Nick Stuccio, the founder of FringeArts, who stepped down after last year’s festival. She said Stuccio laid some groundwork for the festival before he departed.

“It’s a collaboration between me and Nick,” Boone said. “As you can see in this lineup, it’s really connected to the history of FringeArts and what has been some of the definitional artists associated with FringeArts.”

The festival has also returned to inviting national and international artists to Philadelphia, such as musician Holland Andrews, choreographer Reggie Wilson, composer Helga Davis, and choreographer Trajal Harell with the Zurich Dance Ensemble.

Last year the festival was notably lean on visiting artists. In response to the theater world’s pandemic-related austerity, Stuccio had focused exclusively on artists local to the Philadelphia region. This year, the scope of the festival is broad once again.

“In a leaner year, we doubled down on our Philadelphia artists,” Boone said. “It’s an important part of our job to lift them up onto a national stage. But in order to do that, it takes putting Philadelphia in conversation with cutting-edge artists from across the country and across the world.”

Fringe might feel more familiar this year as of late, but it has been going through a structural evolution.

The bulk of the festival is comprised of roughly 300 artists and groups presenting their work independently. The Fringe had about that many last year when artists roared back from the pandemic, but the number is well above anything the festival saw in its first 25 years.

“Three hundred is a lot,” Boone said. “It’s no longer the days where you can see all of them. Even if you’re the most ambitious theater goer of all time, you can’t.”

The high number of artists is due in part to resource-sharing models, or hubs. Cannonball is by far the largest, presenting 120 productions in five locations. This year, it added the Christ Church Neighborhood House to its roster of performance spaces.

Cannonball creates hotbeds of constant activity at its venues, and offers artists the ability to share the burden of ticketing, marketing and renting space and equipment.

Cannonball also offers direct support, this year distributing $41,000 to 14 selected artists via several funding tracks focusing on artists of color, artists of Southwest Asian and North African descent (SWANA), and artists developing circus and young audience work.

“The goal of Cannonball remains the same,” said mentoring producer Colby Calhoun. “To cultivate a space of warmth, sharing and belonging by and for artists who have often, by their own admission, been overlooked by many of the city’s other presenting organizations.”

The Laurel Hill Cemetery experimented last year with being a hub location for the festival. It will not be doing it again this year. Neither will the Crossroads Comedy Festival at Theater Exile. The Circus Campus in Mt. Airy will return with circus-oriented acts, and the Glen Foerd historic estate in the Northeast has newly thrown its hat in the ring as a hub.