The Fringe Festival, an eccentric five-day celebration of visual, performing and cinematic arts, is back for its sixth year to Downtown Wilmington.
City of Wilmington arts programming manager Jeni Barton says the festival thrives on being unconventional and the public should plan on experiencing something new and exciting.
“That’s what the Fringe is all about is taking you a little past your comfort zone, taking you a little past what you would traditionally experience," Barton said. "Its about being on the fringe and being edgy and you can’t do that without a little bit of danger in there.”
Barton says the mix of nearly 200 local, regional and national artists will push the boundaries of what the average person may consider to be normal, and this year's theme, "Journey Beyond the Edge", will highlight those differences.
“What we’re really hoping to do is to bring unconventional art that isn’t traditionally presented in our community to town," said Barton, "to give people a new experience or, you know, to have them experience something they’ve never experienced before in the arts.”
This year’s festival will coincide with Halloween, and planners have organized a costume ball at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art that night featuring live music, flashlight gallery tours, roaming magicians and more.
Other festival highlights include improvisational comedy, one-man and one-woman monologues, independent films, illusionists, dance troupes and live music. Also returning is the 48-Hour Extreme Film-making competition, where nine teams are given two days, a genre, a prop and a single line of dialog around which they are instructed to create a short film.
Festival entry is $5 and each individual performance is an additional $5. One hundred percent of the proceeds from performance tickets go directly to the artists.
The annual celebration begins Wednesday and runs through November 3rd. It kicks off with a Preview Party at the Queen Theater on Wednesday with 5-minute samples of all Fringe performances.
This program is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.