Category Archives: Touring

A Trade Show for the Performing Arts. Huh? Yup.

conference post

 

A few of years ago I started to attend the various regional arts presenter conferences to sell my wares: um, that would be selling me. After touring a bit of the fringe circuit and self-producing my one-man shows I wanted to take the next step in my professional development and network with the gatekeepers of the performing arts industry. What I was about to embark on was incredibly strange, fulfilling, exhausting and necessary.

Let’s get one thing straight. Trying to make money as a performing artist can suck the life out of you. I’ve talked about the trial and error of self-producing at length. I got very quickly that donning on every administrative hat plus trying to write, rehearse and memorize my work was completely unsustainable. Shit, it still is. I’m actually doing the same amount of work after attending these conference for the past three years but I learned a deeply value lesson: Face time is everything. Continue reading →

An Open Letter to Non-Theater (or Theatre if you’re all fancy) Goers

Remember when people used to write letters? All Griffin and Sabine and shit?

Remember when people used to write letters? All Griffin and Sabine and shit?

It’s not your fault really. There’s so much schlock that promotes itself as theater that it justifies your casting off any potential enjoyment of the form. Unfortunately I’m getting majorly screwed by that way of thinking in the process. Some have said that theater is a form with two feet in the grave just waiting for the rest of the body to fall in. It’s pretty accurate. With the major component of the audience being over the age of 50, white and upper middle class, it’s only a matter of time (say 30 years) before that audience is literally dead. Continue reading →

U.S. Fringes are Local Festivals, Plain and Simple.

local vs national

A Caveat: I know a lot of organizers of Fringe festivals personally through a variety of circumstances. These opinions are my own and are no reflection on the huge amount of respect I have for the dedication, perseverance and aptitude they demonstrate to bring alternative and small scale theater to their communities. 

Also, I’m up to anyone disputing this but I want the math to back it up, not just general numbers. How do out-of -towners payouts differ from local producers?

Last year  published a post called To Fringe or Not to Fringe in which I broke down what the circuit was like. I have only toured fringes in the U.S., and only if I’ve done extensive research on them so that I’m not walking away in the red (although I have anyway). In my previous post I spoke briefly about how some fringes can have a local focus where out-of-towners such as myself get lost in the shuffle. I realized something however… Continue reading →

Zero Stars. I Couldn’t Ask for More.

Me Want Stars

Wow. In the midst of my run at Minnesota Fringe I get an audience review with zero stars. Zero. Stars. What shocks me most is that this made me smile. What the fuck am I smiling about? This is bringing down my overall score. This is going to kill my audience. Actually… I couldn’t have asked for anything better to happen. Continue reading →