The Philadelphia Fringe Festival is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.
The celebration of the performing arts that features experimental, alternative, and uncensored work by new or independent artists features more than 350 acts this year, running Sept. 8 to 27 at sites around the region.
“The Fringe Festival celebrates Philadelphia as a city that is pulsing with the creativity of the working, breathing artists who live here,” said FringeArts CEO and Producing Director Nell Bang-Jensen. “Our programming puts Philadelphia’s innovative artists on the same stage as creators from other cities and countries, creating opportunities for cross-disciplinary, cross-genre, and cross-cultural exchange.”
This year’s Philadelphia Fringe Festival programming includes the Philadelphia premiere of Kramer/Fauci by acclaimed director Daniel Fish (Broadway’s “Oklahoma!”).
A special partnership with Philly’s iconic Franklin Institute will bring Theater Mitu’s Utopian Hotline to the Fels Planetarium, while several world premieres by seminal Philadelphia-based FringeArts favorites Nichole Canuso Dance Company, Ninth Planet and The Bearded Ladies Cabaret are part of the festival roster.
A complete schedule and tickets are available at https://phillyfringe.org.
“This year, you can find us at nearly 100 venues, from traditional theaters and large cultural institutions to neighborhood bars and city sidewalks,” Bang-Jensen said. “We are excited to continue to grow our presence across the city, amplifying the incredible artistry already happening in every neighborhood. Audiences can look forward to hundreds of experiential performances that will inspire them to see their neighbors, their neighborhoods, and the city in new ways. Philly is scrappy, gritty, and downright magical because we are all lucky enough to be in the midst of this wild creative expression, and it is never more abundant than during the Philly Fringe.”
The Festival Hub program will feature the return of popular hubs Cannonball, Circus Campus Presents, Dumb Hub, and Studio 34. New this year are The Lemonade Stand, a home for fresh work and new artists, focused on supporting those who are emerging in the arts scene, and Performance Garage, a dedicated hub for dance and theater at the historic venue, which started out as a horse stable in 1865.
These hubs provide a comprehensive extension of the Fringe Festival into Philadelphia’s vibrant neighborhoods and provide regular programming throughout the festival, generating artist and audience communities. Each hub features more than a dozen experiences in centralized locations.
The Bearded Ladies Cabaret is transforming a former industrial space into an otherworldly airport terminal in “Priority Hoarding: A Retrospectacle.” (Courtesy of The Bearded Ladies Cabaret)
A new, immersive installation from the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, “Priority Hoarding: A Retrospectacle,” is transforming a former industrial space at 444 North Third St. into an otherworldly airport terminal. “Priority Hoarding” is a large-scale, interactive experience that blends performance, installation art and participatory ritual.
Framed as a journey on a fictional “receding airline,” the project offers a playful yet poignant retrospective of the caberet’s 16-year history: What they’ve made, what they’ve carried, and what they’re ready to release.
“We’ve accumulated a lot of baggage over 16 years of producing queer art, and this project is about looking forward through looking back,” said Rose Jarboe (she/her), founding artistic director of Bearded Ladies Cabaret. “It’s about honoring the past while making space for whatever comes next, and doing it with joy, absurdity, and a lot of puns.”
Part exhibition, part performance, and part emotional reckoning, the experience unfolds as a “flight of fancy” in which small groups of audience members move through a series of imaginative environments.
From a retro “hairport lounge” space filled with curated suitcases containing memories of past performances to a whimsical terminal complete with karaoke, ritual checkpoints, and a final departure into a cardboard kitchen modeled on the real kitchen where the Bearded Ladies began in 2010, each stage invites participants to engage with memory, legacy and transformation.