St. Lou Fringe feeds your fancy.
The St. Lou Fringe Festival is a 5-day long immersion in cutting edge performing arts, connecting brave artists with bold audiences.
Imagine popping into several shows of your choice in downtown St. Louis, ranging from traditional to experimental theater, from Shakespeare to musical theater, but also including dance, movement, improv, music, voice, slam/spoken word, performance art, fashion, vaudeville, burlesque, mime, clowning, circus arts, - all concentrated within several city blocks.
Passionate artists from around St. Louis and the country will converge to create a fully immersive and explosive pressure cooker of artistic expression. On any given night, there are half-a-dozen shows on rotating schedules with street performers (or “buskers”) roaming the festival grounds, entertaining crowds with fire dancing, aerial arts, music, poetry, guerrilla theater, urban break-dancing, capoeira juggling, comedy, street improv,or anything else one’s heart desires. Patrons can vote for their favorite shows but will never be able to see everything the festival offers.
A minimal admission fee at Festival Headquarters will give a patron a Button Pass and a Schedule/Map to see as many as a hundred different performances by varied artists within a 3-4 block radius over the course of a long weekend. St. Lou Fringe Festival will blossom a humble St. Louis street into a creative hotspot destination within the city, and will open the eyes of St. Louisans to a wealth of undiscovered local talent, new work from national companies, new art forms, and the limitless world of creative possibility.
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How To Fringe
3 easy steps.
Step 1: Buy Button.
The Fringe button is your all-access pass to every show and event that the Festival has to offer, and more.
For a minimum donation of $4, you can purchase tickets to any Fringe show, get free entrance to the Fringe parties, and get discounts from local Fringe Friendly companies. The button system allows us to put on the festival and still return 100% of ticket sales to artists.
Buttons can be purchased at Fringe Central and at select Fringe Friendly locations prior to or at the festival, or online.
No Button? No Show Entry. No Exceptions. No Dice.
Step 2: Get Your Tix.
Peruse the 30 performance descriptions, check out what’s playing at each of our three Fringe Venues, and pick your poison. Artists price their own shows, so ticket prices vary but are never more than $12. Doors open 30 minutes before showtime. Tickets can be purchased at Fringe Central, at the venue, or online. One ticket per button. Because of the nature of ticket sale returns to artists, no package deals are available at this time. No refunds after the show begins.
Step 3: Rock the Fringe.
Vote for your favorite shows, bring friends to the ones you like and enemies to the ones you hate, and have a ball. That’s what it’s all about, after all.
Want even MORE Fringe?
100+ shows, 3 venues, and a couple city blocks just ain’t enough for ya? If you just can’t get enough of the juice, come hang out at Fringe Central, grab some grub in the Food Truck Lot, or check out the Fringe-de-Fringe street performances and sideshow venues throughout the district.
Why Fringe?
It’s just a good thing to do. Fringe by nature fosters independent artists, exposes audiences to new work, stimulates economic growth and supports the creative community. By making performing arts visible, available and affordable, the festival supports local arts year-round. St. Lou Fringe serves our community by connecting the brave and the bold: artists, audiences, businesses and civic organizations.
![What’s The Fringe?
“Very generally speaking, Fringes are…
Focused on the performing arts: Theater, dance, puppetry, spoken word and the like make up the Fringe core, but festivals often may include film and visual arts elements. Fringes don’t have a focus on a single discipline or genre, but are a performing-arts smörgåsbord
Uncensored: No one gets too fussy about swears or nudity but squeaky-clean content isn’t marginal or discouraged, either
Easy to participate in: Ticket prices are low for audiences and production fees are low for artists…[productions are] generally quite open to participation by the gamut of amateurs to professionals
Festivals: They last from just a few days to a few weeks and involve boatloads of people at multiple venues
Original: Fringes feature a huge array of original material—sometimes by design, but usually because that’s what Fringes naturally do well
Rapid-fire: Typically, tech is minimal and time is a factor at our festivals. Shows are often kept brief (Fringes most frequently have shows right around 60 minutes in length) and technical requirements kept simple (minor sets, streamlined cues, nothing elaborate)
It all started in 1947 in Edinburgh, Scotland, as an alternative festival that played concurrently with the Edinburgh International Festival. In 1948, Robert Kemp, a local journalist, gave it the name Fringe: “Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise than before…”
-United States Association of Fringe Festivals
The Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals states that Fringes “…provide all artists, emerging and established, with the opportunity to produce their play no matter the content, form or style and to make the event as affordable and accessible as possible for the members of the community.”](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvz0ai1mxq1r7ipnio1_400.jpg)
