Denver’s version of the Fringe Festival takes its inspiration from Edinburgh

In 2017, Denver Fringe Festival founder and executive director Ann Sabbah attended the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “The mothership,” she called it recently during a conversation ahead of next week’s Denver Fringe Festival (June 8-11).

Edinburgh’s massive gathering of performers of all stripes is the sort of event that lands on bucket lists. Robin Williams, Emma Thompson, Steve Coogan, Russell Brand, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Rachel Weisz are among the performers who got a start at the fest. Trevor Noah’s stock skyrocketed after he took his show “The Racist” to Edinburgh in 2012.

“It was just world-shifting for me,” Sabbah said of her first time there. “I just completely fell in love with the whole idea of it and the event itself. I think on a very gut level and very heart level, I responded to it and felt at that time that I really wanted to do this for Denver. I’m a fourth-generation Denverite and just wanted to do something great that has a lasting impact.”

Timing doesn’t always allow a life-changing event to immediately, well, change your life. In 2017, Sabbah’s brother, Jeff Carey, became ill. A local theater-maker, Carey worked with Creede Repertory Theatre and was, says Sabbah tenderly, “a prolific artist, a wonderful playwright and a wonderful human being.” Carey died in 2019. And, Sabbah said, “The time wasn’t quite right for me in 2019.”

Then, in 2020, she found herself returning to Edinburgh. Her daughter was at Denver School of the Arts, and the proving ground was taking a group of people from the theater department. This time, Sabbah was able to seize on her epiphany. Right then and there, she recalls, she “bought the URL denverfringe.org while on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.”

The last three years, Sabbah has become increasingly immersed in a festival tradition that has gone global. The five tenets of fringe festivals are roughly that the event have open access; be unjuried and uncensored; host all original work; and the majority of ticket sales goes back to the performers. Her participation in World Fringe, the global association that estimates there are 300 fringe fests worldwide, can only deepen and broaden what locals get to see but also are able to create.

Fringe benefits community

This year’s installment had twice the number of applications as last year. It also has several returning acts, among them: Soul Penny Circus, Denver Aerial Dance Collective, Deadroom Comedy, Two Cent Lion Theatre Co. and Believer’s Theatre. Two-thirds of this year’s creatives are Colorado-based. Hello, Fruita. Hey, Adams State Theatre Department. New Orleans, Los Angeles and New York City also have representatives.

In the arts, traditional gatekeepers continue to be scrutinized for whom they let in and whom they keep out, be it willful, myopic or out of a profound laziness. From its start, the fringe movement (which itself might well recoil at the notion of a movement) has worked to throw wide the gates, trusting the onrush. Which doesn’t mean fringe itself hasn’t had to work to make its ideas of the margins ever more representative of the marginalized. (In the last couple of years, Edinburgh has been rightly taken to task for its lack of Black and South Asian performers.)

“In the last three iterations of the Fringe Festival, we have had BIPOC and LGBTQIA artists. persons with disabilities, immigrant voices, persons on the autistic spectrum, new playwrights, established playwrights, novice performers, very seasoned performers, young performers, very elderly performers,” said Sabbah, asked about Denver’s own commitment to a diversity of stories and performers.

“It’s really exciting, just seeing it evolve into the tremendous, empowering, community-building event that I think it can be.”

Access is one of the ways the arts build community and the community bolsters the arts. So, ticket prices are reasonable, at $15 a show. All seats are general admission. The venues — many not traditional theaters or performance spaces — are generally more intimate. And there are pluses for the artists: The festival platform lowers many of the hurdles to getting work in front of audiences, offering venues, stage management or tech, front-of-house management, volunteers, ticketing and the promotion and publicity for the festival as a whole. And, 70 percent of net ticket sales generated from their show goes to the artists.

This year, offerings for kids and immersive performances have grown. “I really do believe people who get exposed to the arts at a young age become future art supporters,” said Sabbah, herself a beneficiary of Denver’s once-robust public school arts-education programming. As for the immersive offering, there are nine.

At last fall’s Denver Immersive gathering, Merhia Weise and Andrew Novick did a one-day pop-up, taste and sensory-testing experiment. They created a traditional ice cream shop, said Novick, only everything was black. “We wore black aprons and black visors like Baskin Robbins, there was black metal furniture. Everything was black, not spooky, not scary black. It’s just there was no color. We had six flavors of black ice cream.”

For their first Denver Fringe foray, “Taste the Rainbow — A Surrealist Ice Cream Shoppe,” the two will channel bored teenagers scooping up black ice cream for customers at the woman-owned shop Hope Tank in Whittier. The ice cream — but not its activated charcoal-tweaked color — comes from Scoops, another local woman-owned business.

Where to start?

Asked what a good tasting menu might look like for a fringe newbie, Sabbah didn’t name her favorites. Instead, she called up on her computer screen a recent order that had delighted her. “They’ve put together the most amazing evening for themselves,” she began. On that self-curated list was Denver Aerial Dance Collective at Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, an immersive theatrical piece called “AI Spy with my Chat GPT Eye” at the Immersive HQ in RiNo, and Deadroom Comedy’s “A Brush With Death” at the Lodge at Woods Boss.

But what Sabbah really advises festival-goers: “Trust your gut. You know, what looks fun to you, what speaks to you, or what’s drawing you in. Don’t stress about it.”

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