Iowa Fringe Festival

In my Friday Construction Photo #13 posting, I mentioned that a red and yellow tent in the upper background was up for the Iowa Fringe Festival. I'd not heard of the Fringe Festival before a few weeks ago but it sounded like it could be interesting. I visited their website and found their mission statement:

The mission of the iowa Fringe Festival is to provide a cooperative enterprise for artists to take creative risks in an inspiring and exciting environment for audiences. The Festival, through collaborative support from all local theatre groups, will bring national/international attention to the Greater Des Moines area, promoting this as an exciting entertainment and cultural destination, while building performing arts audiences in this market and throughout Iowa. The Festival will attract local, regional, national and international artists to Des Moines for these presentations in both traditional and non-traditional venues, while developing a more vibrant and nurturing landscape for Iowa’s performing arts and providing a wide range of entertainment at a price that a broader audience can afford.

I also learned that there were going to be over a dozen venues working over the four days of the festival and nearly fifty troupes would be participating. This was going to be big!

Looking at the summaries of some of the acts, it was apparent that they were targetting an audience that I'm not a part of but others looked like they could be quite entertaining. Linda and I have been to a couple of the shows and are planning to get to one more. While not all shows are for everyone, I appreciate that there is an opportunity for the artists to step up and express themselves and deal with the responses. It's certainly not for the timid.