Welcome to the blog! Welcome to the inFRINGEment festival!

The Buffalo InFRINGEment Festival is a low-budget, DIY, quick-and-dirty extravaganza. It's about having an idea, and then doing it--maybe not perfectly, maybe not permanently, but getting it out there into the cosmos. Ideas belong to no one and everyone. We owe the festival's very existence to Kurt Schneiderman (who has spent most of the last 6 months or more seeking out people to help organize and carry out this thing), but he got the idea from folks in Montreal, and they were playing off the existing "Fringe Festival" idea, and that started in response to another festival, and so on, and so on.

The idea for this blog came to me when I was watching one of the 6 Infringement shows I've seen in the last 3 days and trying to think of ways to help spread the word about some of the great stuff I was watching. (I later found out that other foks had the same idea for a blog--no surprise!) All of us who have been involved in organizing the festival realize how overwhelming this thing is: there are over 125 individual performances in 11 days, so how the hell is anyone supposed to decide which ones they're going to see? And where can you tell other people what you think about what you see?

So this is a place where you can share words (and images) of shows you've seen, ask questions about the ones you haven't, or maybe plug one you're involved in. I'll start the ball rolling, but hopefully other voices (and photographers) will join in soon. Probably the whole thing will disappear shortly after the festival ends.

There's one pain-in-the-ass aspect of using Blogger, which is that (as far as I can tell) you have to be invited to become a member of the blog in order to post on it. (You can add comments to any existing post without being a member of anything just by clicking on the word "comments" at the bottom of the post, but you can't start a new post unless you get the invite.) So all you have to do is send an e-mail to ronehmke@hotmail.com, and I'll send you the invite. Then post away!