Molly Manning, Managing Editor
Richmond’s Fringe Festival brought performances of art, music and theater to venues across the city last weekend, fostering connections between Richmond locals, viewers and performers from all over the country.
Fringe Fest is a queer led event created in 2020, focused on a curated set of events and performers and framed around a profit-sharing model arts and creativity event that aims to “cross-pollinate” people in Richmond through performance and mutual aid, according to their website.
The festival ran from April 10-13 and kicked off with workshops at the Virginia Repertory Theater and a “Fring-aoke Sneaky Opening Party” at Fallout on Friday night.
With RuPaul as the backdrop on every screen in the room, Fringe lovers, artists and performers gathered to usher in the long weekend with karaoke classics like Amy Winehouse, Mariah Carey and even a little Weird Al.
For Paolo Garbanzo — a Richmond native, VCU alum, juggler, comedian and Dungeons and Dragons aficionado, karaoke means Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” or an attempt at a Tenacious D song.
Garbanzo is spending the first April in 12 years in his hometown, and had a new version of his show this weekend — Decide Your Endangerment, a fast-paced D&D storytelling that engages with the crowd to take them through a comedic telling of the game.
What is fringe?
“Fringe” comes from the idea of being on the fringe of another festival or arts event, according to World Fringe. While each festival differs in identity, politics and structure, Fringes all emphasize grassroots organizing and shared risk and reward — it is an investment by artists and organizers alike.
World Fringe day is July 11, for those who celebrate, or may want to now.
Creative alchemist, super-connector and Fringe Fest RVA founder and director Carmel Clavin said Fringe is a global, multimillion-dollar industry — a “powerhouse of connectivity and experimentation and money.”
“It is an in-between,” Clavin said. “It is a pocket dimension where the buoyancy and energy of a festival allows for things that could not live on their own to thrive — the shows that are super experimental and strange, the solo cabaret artists who have nowhere else to perform, the immersive experiences that are unknown to the market that they’re popping up in and also the connectivity that comes with people being in that dimension together.”
Clavin said they find Fringe to be their home, and it has a sense of playfulness more mainstream festivals cannot afford to have. They also emphasized the mutual benefit of profit sharing.
“Our flourishing is built to be mutual, and it is absolutely an experiment in how commerce, around art and especially around festivals works,” Clavin said. “Is it possible to share the responsibility and share the risk between the artists and a festival in a way that allows us all to succeed.”
Soleil Kohl, the artist behind “Dragonfish,” an on-stage multimedia collage, said their favorite part about Fringe is the network behind it and the fact that whether the performances are good or bad, you learn something about what you love.
Kohl has been involved in Fringe since 2019, when they first attended Edinburgh Fringe — one of the largest Fringe festivals dating back to 1947 — they travelled from Denver for Richmond’s Fringe Fest.
“I love going to places and meeting people and meeting artists and seeing what people are making, and feeling the finger on the pulse of what artists are creating right now, which oftentimes is hard to find when you’re in these bigger institutions,” Kohl said. “So it’s really cool to see, what are the artists on the fringes creating?”
The events
After Madame Onca taught the crowd how to host a killer show at the Virginia Rep “Be the MC You Want to See in the World” workshop and everyone sang their hearts out at karaoke on Friday, Saturday was jam-packed with events.
At Toy Lair, Jim Julien and his puppet, Krampy, blended storytelling, puppetry and music to tell the tale of the classic Christmas myth and the origins of the band The Cramps’ rock n roll history during “Krampus Gets Kramped.”
Julien said Fringe fests encompass a weirdness hard to come by in other festivals. He started the Asheville Fringe Fest, has attended over a dozen fests and now lives in Philadelphia, home of the Philadelphia Fringe.
Fallout hosted an art market for several hours in the afternoon, where attendees could swing by after Fringe Brunch on the way to whichever venue they headed to next. There was also the option to check out Gold Lion’s Community Chaos Mural Tabletop Role-Playing Games while fueling up for the night with a coffee — or a cocktail.
The prices of events were tiered — the community events were free to the public, and the main events, after parties and workshops were priced between $10-35 depending on length.
Following workshops on clowning and shadow puppets, the evening came to a close with the long-awaited Fringe Cabaret show — 10 different performers took on drag, burlesque, satire and, of course, music.
Sunday opened up with a “Wild Double Feature!” of Athanor Dance Collective’s Green Witch and Spooky Hollow Storyteller’s Hot Monster Summer, a free, all-ages, outdoor dance and storytelling event at Fonticello Food Garden.
Crescent Collective, a queer-owned venue and community space in Manchester, had an impressive lineup Sunday — after “Dragonfish” took the audience through a disarming exploration of grief interwoven with humor, Casey Urban captivated the crowd during “Favorite Lover.”
“This one-woman show has been described as a psychedelic, burlesque memoir,” Urban said. “It is a show I developed after a near-death experience I had with an abortion, it gave me a rebirth as an artist.
Urban is a Texan multidisciplinary writer, dancer and musician. It was her first time performing the show in Richmond, where she now lives.
Last on the docket for Crescent Collective was the “Furies Funtime Variety Show,” which Madame Onca opened with the question “are you ready to party with the gods?”
Onça and her sisters The Furies — also known as Krystal Younglove and Claire Dima — garnered laughs and cheers from the audience throughout their performances of dance, classic sideshow acts like walking on glass and music.
Monday meant the end of the long weekend, though the day was not wasted with “Teatime Workshops” at Virginia Rep on building immersive theatricals and “the History of Haunt.”
Festival co-director Dev L. Ish enlightened an intimate audience on the overlap between magic and haunting through an exploration of the history and inner workings of magic tricks used to scare, including revealing the strategy of one of their own tricks.
After the Virginia Rep workshops and performances at Firehouse Theatre finished up, the space transitioned into the Fringe Funeral.
A place for collective grief and resilience, the Fringe Funeral invited attendees to interact silently or out loud, sharing peace or collective rage and connecting with those who may be in similar situations. For a little under an hour, anyone had the opportunity to come together in loss, placing offerings or talismans on the Altar of Unnamed Saints and participate in a communal mourning.
One attendee, who requested to remain anonymous, traveled to Richmond from about an hour away — they said they were curious about the variety of artists and wanted to get to know the community.
They said they will be back next year, and enjoyed the workshops the most.
“I really enjoyed the building the immersive worlds, and this one was really great, and the clowning workshop was really fun — so a lot of more of the interactive and getting to build things in the workshops,” the attendee said.