On the Fringe

 

I've been involved with Fringe in some way or another since 2002.

Ever wonder what the heck a Fringe Festival is? Ever wonder why people participate in Fringe Festivals?  Ever wonder what the heck happens behind the scenes? This summer, I hope to answer some of these questions and more.

I briefly touched upon it in my last post, but I am creating a documentary of my upcoming summer tour. The current working title is On the Fringe and I am thrilled with how things are coming together.

From the end of May until mid-September, I'm going to have two people following me around with cameras as I go through the highs, the lows and the roadtrippyness of performing/producing a Fringe show on the Canadian circuit. There will be interviews with performers, audience members, staff, volunteers and critics... basically everyone who lives and breathes this crazy little world we've created for ourselves.

Since my team is based in Vancouver, they've started preliminary interviews with performers out there, along with David Jordan, Executive Director of the Vancouver Fringe and President of CAFF, which we will be using in the upcoming trailer to be released in March. My goal, at the end of this year, is to have a feature-length documentary which we will send to a variety of film festivals and release for world-wide distribution.

My days are currently filled with budgets and potential sponsorship pitches. Things I know we currently need:

• A car that can comfortably seat at least 4 people, all our luggage, film equipment & my show gear;
• Gas for a 4 month road trip across the country;
• Insurance;
• Accommodations along the way;
• Food for my documentary team who is currently volunteering 4 months of their lives to follow me around;
• Flights for 2 from Vancouver to Ottawa;
• Money to pay my team (because it is crazy that 2 people would give up their summer like that without compensation);
• Camera & other related equipment - It's actually cheaper to buy the equipment than rent it for 4 months;
• Emergency fund - Car breaks down? Equipment gets stolen? I want none of these things to happen, but I want to be prepared for them if they do.

Can you help?

If you have a company that would love to get some national & international exposure, please feel free to email me at info at nancykenny dot ca for a sponsorship package. Also, stay tuned for a crowdfunding campaign at some point in March when we will release the trailer.

Oh and if you're a performer/Fringe person who wants to be included in the doc, feel free to contact me closer to April-May, or just walk up and talk to me at some point during the summer. I'll be the girl on roller skates with a camera crew so I'll be pretty hard to miss.

Moving On...

While I expected some reaction to my last blog post navigating the murky waters of the U.S. Immigration system, I really could not expect how big that reaction would be. I hit record highs on this little blog of mine and the comment section both here and on Facebook provided some great additional insight from other performers and arts administrators. If you haven't already, go read the comments including the ones from Orlando Fringe Executive Director Mike Marinaccio by clicking that link above. Anyway, a lot of folks also expressed their sympathies at how much this situation sucks, and it does, but I am oddly at peace with it all. Dropping out of the festival felt like the right thing to do. A belief which was confirmed after receiving a few private messages from people telling me they had spent over $600 in immigration fees only to have to bail on the festival anyway, or how someone had done all the work and still gotten turned around at the border. It feels like I dodged a bullet.

So what happens now?

Well, Orlando was going to be the start of my tour. Not doing that festival gives me a little extra breathing room as I get ready for London.

Also, for those of you in Ottawa, I had originally set up a Save the Date for a One-Night Only presentation of Roller Derby Saved My Soul in Ottawa on May 3rd. Well, the venue I wanted, Arts Court, was not available that night. Not doing Orlando, means I can push the date back closer to the start of the London Fringe. So this is your new OFFICIAL save the date: May 30th. Arts Court is booked and pre-planning has begun on what will be an amazing night of food, friends, booze and derby.

And, in what amounts to the best news, my documentary team can now be there for the whole tour. Yes, you read right, I said "documentary team". Consider this your official announcement.

After winning the CAFF lottery, a friend and fellow fringer said that I should film the whole tour and turn it into a documentary. Not one to back away from something that would make the already difficult task of touring a one-woman show across the country EVEN HARDER, I said it was a brilliant idea.

And somehow, after making that decision, everything started falling into place. I've got two wonderful emerging artists in Vancouver who will be joining me and following me all summer as I go through the joys, the fears and the tears of producing my own work on the Fringe Circuit. The beauty of no longer doing Orlando also means that they can join me as of the 30th, since they will be graduating from the British Columbia Institute of Technology mid-May.

I'll be posting more about the documentary in the next few days, but all this to say, don't worry too much about me not being able to do Orlando. Things work out a certain way for a reason and I've never been one to sit on my hands for too long.

What do you do with $5000?

Final numbers have been counted and my online fundraising campaign for Roller Derby Saved My Soul brought in $5325 (minus fees). I am incredibly grateful, but now the real hard work begins. Applications are now available for the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals' (CAFF) lottery.

For those of you who don't know, Fringe Festivals in Canada (and in some parts of the U.S.) are members of CAFF, which holds all festivals to 4 basic principles, which you can read about here. They also have a yearly touring lottery that offers 5 national and 5 international companies the opportunity to know 8-10 months ahead of time if they will be participating festivals next year.

Basically, you pick no less than 5 festivals you would like to participate in, fill out the forms, hand in the fees for those festivals, and then cross your fingers hoping you get picked.

At the moment, I am considering bringing Roller Derby Saved My Soul to the festivals in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Halifax next year. This means I need to have $3848,62 available just in case my name gets drawn on October 17th.

If my name doesn't get drawn, I will have to apply to each festival individually in the hopes of being selected for their lottery.

And there you have the beginnings of what I am doing with $5000. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Ultimatums

I've never been a big fan of ultimatums. Not in relationships, in work or in life in general. They're just so... final. As you may know, I've been working on a one woman roller derby show that I would like to tour cross-country next year on the Canadian Fringe Festival Circuit. Applications to the majority of festivals is by lottery. To make touring a tad easier on the performer, an organization called the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals holds their own lottery every fall for the chance to participate in every festival of your choosing. You may or may not get in, but if you do, your entire touring schedule is now secured for the summer, months ahead of most local lottery deadlines.

The only hick? You need to have the cash for every single festival you want to apply to upfront. In my case, a potential 7 city tour, that comes up to almost $5000. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of money lying around (and if you do have that kind of money lying around, we should talk!). If I did, I wouldn't have been emptying out my cupboards of all canned goods since I've come back from China because my bills need paying and groceries seem to be a luxury at the moment.

So, I did the only thing a starving artist can do: I called my mom.

My mom was somewhat open to the idea. After all, I did get a grant from the City of Ottawa to write this piece. I talked to her about the lottery and how if I did not get in there would be no charges on her part. I would then apply individually to the various festivals and try my luck there. And of course she would be getting her money back by the end of the summer once my tour is done. However, my mom may have misunderstood my initial request. She seemed to think all I needed for the tour was $5000. After reviewing my budget plan, which brings expenses closer to the $20,000 mark, she did what all good moms would do. She kinda freaked.

And that's when the ultimatum reared it's ugly head. I've got until March to make this work. March is approximately when you can drop out of most festivals without incurring too much of a penalty.

I'm waiting to hear if I've received some grants that I've already applied for in December and there are new deadlines for other funding opportunities as well, but I'm scared. There is so much in this that involves chance and I've never really been that lucky before. This project means so much to me, but will it sell? Audiences across Canada are fickle. If I knew what they wanted, I'd be the greatest publicist on earth. But I don't know. All I can do is go about on blind faith (with a strong dash of hard work) and pray that it all pays off. My mother does not doubt that a Fringe tour would be a wonderful, soul-fulfilling experience. She just does not want me to go into a 5-digit debt load to accomplish that.

I guess there's no use in worrying about this right now. With my lotto luck, I may not get into a single festival next summer.