The stage is yours

On Wednesday evening, in slightly grey weather, I headed for Théâtre Cercle Molière in St. Boniface to take in my first two performances of this year’s Winnipeg Fringe Festival.

The shows could not have been more different. The first, Afeni, was a biographical monologue about Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur, performed by Edmonton’s Onika Henry, who was making her Winnipeg debut. The second, Absolutely Not a Cult, was a wacky dark comedy by a trio out of New York.

It was just the opening night of the 12-day Fringe — so no reviews to guide audiences yet — but already both venues were bustling. Dozens of fans had come to see one of the two shows, based on nothing more than a brief description in the festival program and a hunch.

A spirit of curiosity. A public willingness to embrace the new, the untested, and even the totally unknown. An excitement to go out and discover, with no guarantees of what you’ll find. If you pick a Fringe show at random, it could bore you to death, or it could change your life. These are the qualities that make Fringe great, both on the stage and in the seats.

And for me, being surrounded by that spirit again felt like coming home.

That night marked my first time back at Fringe in four years. I’d been living in Ukraine over the previous three summers; while I was gone, people often asked if I missed Winnipeg. The truth is that I rarely did. There were exactly two occasions I longed to be at home. One is while Kyiv was actively being bombed; the second was during Fringe.

Of all the festivals on our summer calendar — and we are blessed with many — there are none quite like Fringe. For those still unfamiliar, the fringe theatre movement is built on a few core values. Of these, the most important is that there are no juries to decide what shows get in. Most are chosen by lottery; others sign up by securing their own venue.

Over the years, many things in Winnipeg have aspired or claimed to be “world class.” Fringe is one of the few that truly is. There are dozens of fringe festivals worldwide; with over 160 shows this year, ours is not only the second-largest in North America, running close with Edmonton for that title, but also one of the most significant Fringes in the world.

If you haven’t sat in the festival’s beer tent at Old Market Square, chatting with artists who came here from various corners of the world, you may not realize the extent to which Fringe puts us on the global cultural map. It never gets less surreal to hear actors from Los Angeles, New York or Australia raving about how excited they were to get to Winnipeg.

But it isn’t only the global visitors that make Winnipeg’s Fringe such a jewel. It’s also what sprouts from here at home. Because on Wednesday night at Cercle Molière, I was reminded of a curious thing that happens inside these venues — or at least, a thing that happens to me, and I’m certain I’m not alone.

Near every time I take in a Fringe show, there are at least a few moments where I start to imagine myself on stage. My brain starts to bubble with ideas of what sort of monologue I’d perform, what tales from my own misadventures I’d recount for an audience who’d plucked my name from the program book and decided to give it a shot.

It’s interesting, because performance is not my natural inclination. Other than a stint as Hermia in an embarrassing high school rendition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, theatre is not in my background. I’m not one to face the public too directly; if newspaper journalists enjoyed being seen, we would’ve gone into TV.

Yet when you’re in the audience at a Fringe show, the distance between the stage and seats feels very small. The performers, you realize, are not so different than ourselves; in many cases at Fringe, they’re quite literally our neighbours. Many are not professional actors, or trained, or with any significant experience in theatre at all.

They still have a story to tell, every bit as much as the professionals, which means so do all of us watching.

That Fringe generates that impulse to perform in many audience members is, perhaps, the most beautiful testament to its vision. Stripped to its core, theatre is one of our most ancient and even primal forms of entertainment: for as long as we’ve been able to speak, or act out scenes, we’ve stood in front of each other and told stories.

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Over time, that process became more professionalized and more curated. That’s all well and good; there’s a certainly a value in seeing art forms refined to their highest levels. But every July, Fringe calls on us to remember theatre can and should be accessible to everyone, in both its appreciation and its creation.

We are all the playwrights, actors and performers of our own lives. We all carry some piece of this art in our very bones.

So if you’ve never taken in the Fringe before, let this be your sign to try a few shows this week. I can’t guarantee you’ll like them. You might laugh, you might cry, you might be bored out of your mind, and debate running out the door. Whatever happens, you may find the act of discovery addictive.

And if you have a few moments to drift off into imagination, ask yourself this: if you woke up from a dream and found yourself on stage at Fringe this week, what story would you tell?

melissa.martin@winnipegfreepress.com

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Every piece of reporting Melissa produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.