Meet N Greets for the Chicago Theatre Community Scheduled

I’m pleased to announce that we are hosting two Chicago Fringe Festival Meet N Greets in the coming weeks.

These events are designed to be a casual dialogue between the producers of the Chicago Fringe Festival, Inc and the local theatre community, in particular those interested in getting involved as administrators. It is also designed to be a forum where both serious concerns and innovative ideas can be shared. We plan on having more of these events in the future.

Please feel free to attend one or both; detailed notes from the meetings will be posted to our blog at www.chicagofringe.blogspot.com in the week following the Greets.

Details follow below. We hope to see you there!

Friday, September 18
7-9 pm
Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. Angel Island735 W. Sheridan Road(1 block South of Irving Park at Broadway)Chicago, IL 60613

or

Monday, September 28
7-9 pm
St. Andrews Church
Social Hall
Hermitage and Addison, Southeast Corner

Email Love Fest

It's such a pleasure to see my inbox nowadays - it's flooding with a combination of "join mailing list", "so and so is following you on twitter" and "so and so wants to be your friend on Facebook." Further, I'm getting more and more emails from enthused artists that want to either volunteer on the production side, or bring a show to Fringe. It's CRAZY! The Time Out article sent this whole operation into overdrive.

Please stayed tuned! As always we are endeavoring to move faster and keep you more informed.

Did you see that the website is updated? www.chicagofringe.org

Time Out Chicago Article!

Check it out!

http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/theater/78035/chicago-fringe-festival-planned-for-2010

More Reasons Why

The further along the road we get, the more it seems right. Last week, we got interviewed by the editor of the Theatre section of Time Out Chicago. Exciting as the publicity will be when it comes out (I'll keep you posted), perhaps the conversation itself was more elating. Kris was planning on writing an article about how Chicago doesn't have a Fringe, and the pros of cons of why we would need one. He brought up an interesting point - the argument could be made that we need a Fringe so that small scale artists from around the country and the world have an opportunity to come here and show their work. In turn, we have the opportunity to view their work. Of course, we believe this argument to be true. People are starting to hear about it, and often the most excited artists are the ones from out of state. They want to come to Chicago! And who can blame them right? Most of us moved here from wherever we were in response to the tremendous siren call of what we perceived as an vibrantly alive theatre scene. I could write love letters to our theatre scene - it's bigger, more exhilarating, more complex than I even imagined when I was moving here with a capital M five years ago.

Twitter/Facebook

As I was on Twitter and Facebook today, surveying all as Oxymandias in Watchmen, I am seeing topics about Fringe brewing...people asking why, why don't we have one? To which I just say, we're working on it! :) I have commented and direct tweeted as applicable. By the way, if you haven't yet, check out The New Colony's blog. They are currently publishing a wish for Chicago theater each day, and it's fascinating: http://www.thenewcolony.org/wordpress/

August Already

A bit of an update on the last post - we ended up having to re-file the incorporation, so our official official incorporation date is 7/24/2009. Since then things have been coming along nicely. We have invited some new folks to attend our upcoming board meeting; pretty thrilled about that. It's really something how folks are starting to contact us. People all over the country are excited about this! Stay tuned here for news of upcoming events. I hope to start blogging much more frequently. I think I've been taking the blog too seriously and probably need to let loose and view each post as less precious and just blog more often.

Fringe is in high season right now! It's great to hear little snippets from the fringes as they roll out across the country.

Last weekend I participated and attended the Abbie Hoffman Festival here in Chicago. As usual, it was fun and wonderfully bizarre.

Happy Birthday ChiFringe!

We have officially filed the paperwork to become a real life business. May 19, 2009 will always reflect the date of incorporation.

We had a productive board meeting Saturday morning - got everything all pretty and signed, and started some lucrative discussions on fundraising, the website, and the selection process. I find that we are becoming more sure, more confident; really more arrow like. I suppose now with our filing of the incorporation, we've gone ahead and loosed that arrow from our bow.