月別アーカイブ: 2015年4月

First things first: If you decide you simply must see every show at the inaugural Fort Lauderdale Fringe Festival on Saturday, you’re dreaming of the impossible.

Twenty shows are scheduled between noon and 10 p.m., all but one with two performances each during the festival, so even though that translates to 39 performances spread out over 10 hours, you’d be hard-pressed to see everything. The math just doesn’t work.

Not that fringe fest fanatics wouldn’t try.

Fringe-savvy artists and audiences alike just love the fringe theater experience. The Orlando International Fringe Festival, at 24 the oldest such festival in the United States and the largest one in the Southeast, will present over 700 performances of 130 shows May 13-25 at venues that ring the city’s Loch Haven Park. But until Broward College decided to back a Fort Lauderdale festival this year, the concept hadn’t come to South Florida.

Thomas Meyer, dean of the college’s Downtown Center on Las Olas Boulevard where the festival will be held, credits Broward College President J. David Armstrong with providing the impetus for the festival.

“President Armstrong had the vision. He thought it would be great to do a fringe festival in Fort Lauderdale. Supporting the arts and the community fits with our mission,” Meyer says.

Meyer is serving as the festival’s managing producer, but the college reached into the theater community for an artistic director. Vanessa Elise, who graduated from Miami’s New World School of the Arts in 2013, got the gig and will also appear in Sonia Cordoves’ play Reality Sucks at the festival.

Elise, who acknowledges that she’ll be “going a little cray cray” as the festival ticks down to its start, just finished a run in New Theatre’s Women Playing Hamlet and last fall performed her one-person show Noise: An Interruption at the United Solo Festival in New York. Taking her show to Manhattan taught her a lot, as did going to New World, where “they prepare you for anything,” she says. Advice from the Orlando Fringe and its producer, Michael Marinaccio, has also been invaluable.

“Looking down the road, we want this to be something amazing for South Florida,” Elise says. “We’re learning and growing. We have different types of audiences and artists here … We have rich Hispanic, African-American and Haitian communities here.”

Part of what makes a fringe festival different is explained in the way the Fort Lauderdale describes its shows: uncensored, unjuried performance art. The content can be plays, musicals, scripted pieces, improvised shows — whatever the artist decides.

The artist pays a fee to perform, then gets all or a percentage of ticket sales, depending on the fee paid up front. More than 30 performers or groups applied to be part of the inaugural Fort Lauderdale festival, and 20 were accepted on a first-come, first-booked basis. Eleven of the shows will have an adult content advisory label on their tickets.

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“As an institution of higher education, we embrace diversity and free speech,” Meyer says.

Casey Dressler, who took her solo show The Wedding Warrior to the biggest-in-the-world Edinburgh Festival Fringe last summer, is performing it again at the Fort Lauderdale Fringe and will take it to the United Solo Festival in the fall. Born of her experiences as a Key Largo wedding planner, the comedy is about the craziness of putting together someone else’s wedding while searching for love. Like Elise, Dressler is all about being a self-empowered artist.

“This is an opportunity for artists to have their voices heard,” says Dressler, who recently appeared in Alliance Theatre’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. “I don’t always get the part because I don’t always fit the costume. This lets me do whatever the hell I want. I wrote and produced it.”

Performing in a fringe fest can be a spur to creation, too. Miamian Francesca Toledo applied with just a title, Senseless, then collaborated with Michelle Antelo, Melissa Ann Hubicsak and Randy Garcia to devise an aimed-at-adults piece about love.

“We had to decide what it was that we wanted to tell — about how we fall in love, what love is, how it changes us, what we become when we accept love, how it shapes us,” Toledo says. “And that losing someone is like a little death, like a process of grief … Then we had to make it more simple, tell a story so that people could come on that journey with us.”

Jerry Seeger brings deep experience as both an actor and a teacher to his fringe fest piece Demerits, Detentions and Dismissals. The director of drama at Fort Lauderdale’s St. Thomas Aquinas High School, Seeger has put together a piece built around the poems of New York slam poet (and former teacher) Taylor Mali. Seeger’s wife and partner in Underdog Productions, Carbonell Award winner Elena Maria Garcia, is directing the show.

“I performed at the ninth Orlando Fringe Festival, and it was one of the best experiences of my life,” says Seeger, who did the Eric Bogosian solo show Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll there in 2000. “What we produce [as Underdog] is on the edge. Now you have a theater festival that offers so much stuff that’s just out there. Theater isn’t just helicopters taking off and falling chandeliers. As good as theaters like GableStage are, theater isn’t just one size fits all. Now we can all rally around this festival.”

Though the first Fort Lauderdale festival has yet to happen, organizers are already looking ahead to the next one, hoping to add more stages to showcase more artists. Orlando’s Marinaccio, who started as a performer in 1997 and took over as producer several years ago, has tips on what’s important in making a fringe festival successful.

“You need to make it a great experience for the audience and the artists. You want to build a core of artists and give them a supportive platform so you can get them back. Really, the audience curates the festival,” says Marinaccio, alluding to the importance of ticket sales as a draw to artists.

“For the audience, you need to keep ticket prices low (tickets in Fort Lauderdale are $5 or $10 per show). If you see five shows at $10 apiece, you can have an entire Saturday full of theater. For artists, you don’t control any of the creative content. There’s no filter. And that can really be magical for both the artists and the audience.”

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Earth Day was Wednesday, but it’s never too late to think about being a little more earth friendly. More specifically for this column, we can focus on taking a greener approach to style.

I recently attended the fourth annual Nashville Fashion Week and a big topic was the fashion industry’s responsibility to create more sustainable and eco-friendly products.

It may be hard to imagine, but our clothes and how they are made have a huge effect on the environment.

According to www.fibre2fashion.com, the clothes we wear and the textiles they are made from can cause a great deal of damage.

The following are examples of the impact the fashion industry has on the environment.

The pesticides that farmers use to protect textiles as they grow can harm wild life, contaminate other products and get into the food we eat.

-The chemicals that are used to bleach and color textiles can damage the environment and people’s health.

-Old clothes that we throw away take up precious space in landfill sites, which is filling up rapidly.

-Most of the textile machineries cause noise, sound and air pollution.

-Over-usage of natural resources like plants, water, etc. depletes or disturbs ecological balance.

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-The working conditions in the textile and clothing industry are of sub-standard.

-Exploitation of animals often goes hand-in-hand with intensive farming practices that damage the environment as a whole.

Sounds pretty bleak, right? However, there is hope, and the fashion world is embracing it.

The eco-friendly industry has grown tremendously over the past few years. Fashion designers such as Stella McCartney practice cruelty-free techniques and excludes the use of animals in her designs.

Eco-friendly brands have become more popular with the increasing awareness of sweatshops, animal cruelty and resource scarcity. According to style site thefashionglobe.com, our neighboring state Alabama is home to a lifestyle company Alabama Chanin, which produces everything from ready-to-wear to wedding dresses to quilts and placemats. They make clothes with organic and recycled material and utilize the slow movement, which promotes the wellbeing of society, individuals and the natural movement. More importantly, their clothes are made locally in the town of Florence, Alabama.

Florence is also home to designer Billy Reid, who is also eco-friendly and totally worth checking out.

There are also vegan shoes such as “Kailia,” an eco-friendly shoe brand created by designer Nancy Dong based in Bologna, Italy. The company collaborates closely with European family-owned factories for the creation of beautiful, handmade shoes. The factories use water-based glues and polyurethane soles rather than more toxic vinyl and PVC. Her shoes are also made with organic linen and cotton, a quality that other eco-friendly brands share.

Eco-friendly and organic beauty lines come from makeup artists such as Kate O’Brien, who was reluctant to let her daughter wear make-up due to the harsh chemicals, so she created Alima pure, a 100 percent pure mineral pigment makeup line.

Brands like Kailia and O’Brien are making a name for themselves by offering handcrafted and homemade items keeping Mother Nature in mind.

While all of these companies should be applauded for the eco-conscious efforts, I must warn you, the price for such items will leave you a bit weak in the knees and in the pocketbook. With the time, attention and earth-friendly care each of these items gets, there is a cost.

However, you also have the knowledge and comfort that you are doing something good for the earth by buying such items.

I would also like to think that if buying items like this becomes the norm, then price will become less of an issue.

So I hope I’ve given you some food for thought and a list of designers to Google in your free time. While I love a good bargain as much as the next fashionista, I also love Mother Earth, too. Here’s to a greener fashion industry.

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Lacey-Lee channelled Priscilla Presley for her bridal look. Her dress was an original vintage number which she had reworked to the exact style she wanted. The groom, Cam, is of Orcadian heritage so he wanted to wear traditional Scottish attire. Not an obvious paring you might think, but it really works!

The theme of combining both their passions continued into the rest of the wedding. “Cam and I always knew we weren’t going to have a normal wedding”, Lacey-Lee said. “We both have quirky interests and we wanted it to be a collaboration of lots of different elements. We are both touring musicians so music was also always going to play a huge part. I decided to DJ which allowed me to really set the tone exactly how we wanted it to feel. It also made the evening really special.”

“Our catering was also unique. We didn’t want the typical buffet or sit down mean so when everyone entered the reception we had the room centred around a huge food display with beautiful canapés and a dessert bar. Then later, we served gourmet tacos!”

The day was held at Whonnock Lake Centre in Maple Ridge, just outside of Vancouver. “I would call our wedding theme ‘Mystical Mod’”, Lacey-Lee continued. “The moody, enchanted forest backdrop with traditional Scottish styling representing the mystical elements, and the vintage brass décor and sixties styling represented the Mod.”

“A lot of my DIY was buying the brass items for the décor from thrift stores. I also created all the signage and laid out the reception furniture. I loved how everything came together in the end. It’s how I visualised it in my head. From the mood, décor, food, music… It was perfect.”

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