PHX:fringe Starts March 2 -- It's Almost Time to Get Some Strange

By Julie Peterson Thu., Feb. 9 2012 at 2:15 PM

Categories: Performance Art, Theater

For 11 days in March, we'll get to revel in off-the-beaten-path (ideally) performances -- 23 different ones, in 88 time slots at five locations -- in the fifth annual Phoenix Fringe Festival.

Local alt-Christian glam-rock-opera dude Paisley Yankolovich is back on the schedule (we missed him last year!), and some new companies and new venues will also be spicing things up. The schedule's still evolving, so check the PHX:fringe site for updates before you make specific plans -- that is, if specific plans are your thing.

Here are a few potential highlights we hope to catch:

hair & fingernails from Orange Theatre Group (at Phoenix Center for the Arts, Third Street and Moreland)
Matthew Watkins, who was just amazing as an actor in festina lente's The Revenger's Tragedy, is presently the artistic director of Orange, a company that develops original work collaboratively over time, much as do the other ASU grads of festina lente and its precursor, Interrobang. Headquartered in Bragg's Pie Factory, the kids were using the working title Untitled Greek Something About the Agonizing Burden of Knowledge, Witchcraft, and Also Drowning for this work until they narrowed it down.

Jamie Peachey

Paisley Yankolovich

Paisley Yankolovich in The Liberal Soul, Warehouse 1005 at Art Awakenings, First Street just north of Roosevelt

Paisley's a fascinating and talented guy, and although he performs often, it's rarer to get to see one of his concepts fully realized from beginning to end. In e-mail, he describes this particular show as "a controversial set of mournful spirituals delivered bleakly a capella on a naked stage. Bondage, crucifixion, catharsis, redemption . . . Not your mama's Gospel."

Theater in My Basement's Twitch at Modified Arts

The crappy economy has made it even harder than usual for very small, weird companies to get themselves out in front of audiences, and a performance from FrogWoman author Chris Danowski's venerable Theater in My Basement is something for which I've been seriously pining. I don't really care that TiMB's artist blurb in PHX:fringe's promo materials says that Twitch "is almost a melancholy recreation of something that might have looked like theater at one time," or whether that's accurate. Don't care what it is -- just wanna be there.

Martin Schwartz

From left, Brandon Wiley, "Lippel von Berg," Margery Fairchild, Meg Hurtado, and Ryan Hayes in TUTOR: enter the exclave

TUTOR: enter the exclave from San Francisco's Dark Porch Theatre, at Space 55

This is, according to Dark Porch's website, a "genre-interrogative, nonlinear performance work" -- so, yay? We're mostly excited about it because Brandon Wiley from Nearly Naked Theatre's recent Shakespeare's R & J is in it.

The fifth venue will be FilmBar, and that makes all five PHX:fringe venues within a few blocks of each other this time around, which should be pretty sweet. We Jackalopes will do our best to share more news, as it breaks, and tip you off to the good and the not-so-good, once performances begin.

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