The Iowa Fringe; The Political Fringe

I won’t get back to The Fatalist until the upcoming Minneapolis Fringe Festival is over.
Here’s a brief report on our trip to the Iowa Fringe in Des Moines:

The reasons for the mess that was the festival became apparent over the weekend, and I certainly find them adequate. One person, John Busbee, seemed to do almost all the work, communicating with the performers, renting the spaces (including one that had to be arranged three days before the festival, when one of the venues was shut down), sitting at the ticket/check-in table when he wasn’t running last-minute errands for people, and also doing tech for our performances (this hadn’t been the plan), as well as constantly taking phone calls from performers and ticket buyers. He did all this with a slipped disc and a calm, gentle, good-humored demeanor. Really a lovely guy. Pretty amazing, especially since he’d only been asked to organize the festival a few months before.

Attendance was low, which I’d expected (we were doing a weird, 90-minute play in a thoroughly unknown city). I hadn’t expected a truly inadequate performance space: we’d asked for a quiet room that got pitch black with the lights out, and for stereo CD playback, and we got a “gallery” with all the air compressors for the building making a loud thrumming noise overhead, and that even with the black plastic we taped up on the entire wall of windows twenty minutes before the first performance (other ensembles were doing the same in other spaces), never got dark enough for some scenes to work. There was only one speaker (luckily, we’d brought along our own ad-hoc sound system), and we had to project a lot to make this rather quiet and delicate play heard.

I’m writing all this not to make the festival look bad—John Busbee is amazing, and this is only the second year they’ve tried to do this—but to warn anyone who might be considering going to one of these: if the needs of what you’re performing are highly particular, and it doesn’t seem pretty certain that everything is taken care of, write endless emails and make endless phone calls, until you’re sure you’re getting what you need.

One problem might be that, for much of what went on at the festival (and I expect this is often the case in Fringes), the performing situation isn’t nearly as sensitive. Lame comedy improv and hysterical trauma-drama about landmark interpersonal crises can basically be heard and seen over any kind of audiovisual noise. In a way, I don’t care that the standards for theater are so low, so TV-based, in this country; I just consider it to be a different art form… but it can lead to the assumption that all portable theater is energetic fluff that can survive a really adverse setup.

All in all, though, we had a good time. I enjoy performing the piece a great deal. Des Moines is one of those rather interesting cities that’s caught between decline, gentrification, and grassroots reconstruction, as far as I can tell. Plenty of beautiful, empty old warehouse and factory buildings (any of which might have made for better performance venues than the new glass-and-metal cultural spaces that were used, and which stood starkly next to the collapsing buildings). The best part of the trip was staying in the large attic room of the Des Moines Catholic Worker house. Everyone I’ve met from CW has been amazing, and these folks were no exception: extremely generous, compassionate, funny, and often potty-mouthed, undogmatic, unprejudiced, and committed to the ethic of voluntary poverty and social justice. Having lunch every day with the large number of people who came around to get a free meal and talk was great—some fabulous talkers and generally fascinating humans of all kinds are destitute in Des Moines.

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On another note, what’s up with the inability of most progressives to include queer issues among the causes they work on and discuss? Somebody named Ishaq sent a fascinating set of articles to the Buffalo poetics list on GLBTQI organizations in the Middle East and their responses to the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, and all the subscribers can do is have the same (thoroughly relevant and crucial) arguments about the status of Israel that socially concerned people always have, over and over and over. It’s so rare that anti-assimilationist, activist queers get any publicity (I’m always delighted at CA Conrad’s blogging in this regard), and when they do, too may lefties just go on having the same conversation they were having before. The rift between largely straight, white, middle-class peace activists and intellectuals (and people like myself, a pretty safe bisexual, white, shit-broke antiwar activist and intellectual from a just-below-the-very-middle-class background) and everybody else (people who have to deal, on a daily basis, with race- and sex-based prejudice) is a real problem, not just ideologically but for the sake of ending any of these forms of oppression, and it’s stupid to ignore it. Thanks, though, to Ishaq, for pointing to Palestinian queers who consider their struggle as GLBT people to be quite interwoven with the movement for a free Palestine in general.