Monday, September 16, 2024
Excitement has begun to build for the Green Bay Fringe Festival, with the start of the event just around the corner.
“What the Green Bay Fringe Festival is is a fringe festival,” said Matt Worzala, vice president of the Green Bay Fringe Board. “It sounds repetitive, but it’s built on the tradition of other fringe festivals. The most famous one that kind of started it all is the one in Edinburgh, over in Scotland, but there are quite a few here in the states as well. There’s one in Tampa. There’s one in Indianapolis. There are several in Canada and there’s some out on the west coast as well. We’re in that tradition where we will be a weekend of shows of different types and typically hosted in non-theater venues or non-traditional performance venues. We hope that people will come and see and get to experience plays and creators that are not from the local area and that those creators and performers will get to experience the greater Green Bay area as well.”
Worzala said that in order to get a fringe festival to Green Bay, he and other organizers had plenty of support from the community.
“One person to give a huge shout out to is Alex Galt,” he said. “He was actually with UntitledTown, which was a big writing and book festival that took place years ago. It’s morphed into something else now, but he was one of the creators of that and when Mike (Eserkaln) and I were first meeting to figure out how to make a fringe festival happen and what limitations or what roadblocks there are, we reached out to Alex and he met with us and gave us a lot of insights on how creating a festival works.”
Community interest and support for the festival, Worzala said, has been nothing short of enthusiastic.
“The best thing has just been how enthusiastic everyone is about not only being a part of the board, but also in contributing to the festival,” he said. “Whether that’s offering up their space to have shows put on, financial donations, donations of time or sharing our listings across different social media… Mike and I, when we were first talking about this, were like, ‘There’s no reason we can’t do this, right?’ And we couldn’t think of a real reason why we couldn’t and every roadblock that we had dreamed up has been climbed over or driven around very easily.”
While there are a handful of local acts in the mix, Worzala said there has been significant interest from performers based further away and even out of the state.
“We were actually surprised that the first couple of responses that we got actually were not from even the greater Northeastern Wisconsin area,” he said. “We were very impressed by the reach and the enthusiasm and energy a lot of these groups have to travel to other places to put on their shows. It’s not really a 50/50 mix, but about one third of [the performers] are local now and then about two thirds are from not in the greater Green Bay area, which is very exciting.”
Because of the format of the festival, Worzala said he is excited for those out-of-town acts and performers to have the opportunity to explore Green Bay and for all of the performers to connect with each other when they might not have otherwise crossed paths.
“Everyone will get to do three shows and we have about 25 groups performing,” he said. “They're all going to do three performances throughout those four days and then we’ll kind of have a closing party/ ‘Hey, we did it’ celebration for any of the acts that want to stick around before we send them out on their way, back onto the road again.. [Performers] come into this town kind of a tourist. What I hope is to be able to show some of the people around Green Bay, if they have the time for that. But one of the really neat things about fringe festival is that you have your performances and then you’re able to see all of these other performances… You get to take your show that’s only 30-55 minutes and take it to a different place. You’re trying to meet people and trying to get them to come to your show — doing a little bit of hustling to self-promote and get people to come out and see you — but then, in that time you’re not performing, you’re out meeting people in the area, touring around the city, going to other shows and seeing what other performers are doing. So it’s a really great opportunity as a performer to just experience all of this art and all of this culture that you would not normally be exposed to.”
That exposure to different elements of art and culture, though, is what Worzala said makes fringe festivals special and ensures that there will be something for everyone to enjoy.
“One of the really great things about a fringe festival is that, because it kind of started as the idea of being on the fringe of this theater festival, it’s kind of unique acts,” he said. “We really wanted to get a good cross-section of different performance styles and it was important to us that we be able to provide shows that different ages or different sensibilities would feel comfortable going to see and I think we’ve really successfully accomplished that. Obviously time will tell, but I think the groups that we’re going to make available in this fringe festival will appeal to a broad variety of people and I really think that people, if they take some chances on these shows, are going to come away really enjoying it.”
With the festival scheduled for July 18-21, Worzala said he hopes that Northeast Wisconsin’s thriving theater community will show up to support the performers involved so that the Green Bay Fringe Festival can continue to occur for years to come.
“I’m most excited to see if we can make a fringe festival work here in Green Bay and Northeastern Wisconsin,” he said. “In general, we’ve got a really growing theater community and an audience for theater. You can see that in all the different play groups that are in Green Bay and De Pere and in Northeast Wisconsin… There’s that really kind of growing scene and that appetite for it, so as a producer and as a board member, I’m really excited to see if the community will respond to it. There’s a real interest from performers. There’s a real interest from venues. And I really just hope that the community reciprocates that energy.”
To learn more about the Green Bay Fringe Festival, check out gbfringe.com.
