2nd Annual Fringe Festival Returns
-
Asia Tabb
The Harrisburg Fringe Festival is making its return on July 18-21. The festival provides a space and opportunity for artists to emerge and showcase their talents and craft. It provides live entertainment, visual and displays, kid-friendly shows and more.
The Fringe Fest is an arts festival that takes place across the City of Harrisburg connecting artists, venues, and audiences in a spirit celebration. Co-producers Chris Gibson and Brianna Dow stopped by The Spark to tell us the importance of the festival.
“Fringe is an international circuit of festivals. The largest one is the original one, which is in Edinburgh, Scotland, started in 1947. And the smallest one might be us, but in between our literally hundreds of festivals around the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, they’re all over the world and fringe, in a general sense is a sort of a, an encouraging place for artists. In our case, it’s uncensored, juried, and we return 100% of the ticket sales directly to the artists. So our goal is to sort of remove boundaries from artists and allow them to create the work that they want to create and, help to facilitate them in doing that, by providing them with, high quality facilities to perform in technicians, marketing, bringing a critical mass of audience to, the festival and then giving them all of the money that they earn, “said Gibson.
Paul Hood and Wallace McKelvey are among the many artists that will showcase their talents at the Fringe Festival. Their film “River City Stories” is set to premiere at the festival. The film is a heartfelt tribute to a city that’s constantly changing yet always the same. It presents a series of intertwined stories that reflect the diverse lives and experiences of its residents. This film has been in the works since the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
“I’ve been working on films. Paul has done a lot with theater, and we’ve been circling each other for years…Talking about… Hey, we need to collaborate sometime. Well, Covid gave us that chance. We had these long conversations over around my fire pit on his front porch. And eventually we got together a bunch of scripts, and fringe gave us this natural platform where we could reach a large number of people, to show our work, which is the first phase of what will be a feature film eventually early next year. I’ll hand it off to Paul. Yeah. We just. We took this opportunity to showcase the, you know, the stories that we had, come up with, “said McKelvey.
Listen to the podcast to learn more about the Fringe Festival, plus bonus content from the interview.
