The invisible festival

Even though the 2005 fest ended a week ago, several people have expressed interest in keeping the blog going year-round. Fine by me, since I still had some thoughts to share regarding the last few days of events. Maybe you do, too. If so, post 'em here!

Walking around Allentown between performances on that glorious second weekend of the festival, I had plenty of time to reflect on what was so unique about this 11-day extravaganza. As we all know, WNY has no shortage of summer festivals, celebrating everything from gay pride to Italian heritage to corn on the cob. But unlike all the other festivities, inFRINGEment was sort of invisible, in the sense that you had to look around to find it. No white tents, no fried dough stands, no massive crowds.

That thought occured to me as I was trying (unsuccessfully) to find Arzu Ozkal's "Self de/fence" during one of the times it was scheduled to take place. This wasn't the kind of piece where you could report to a given venue at a given hour; it was more the sort of thing you just kind of stumbled upon. I stumbled upon plenty of other things instead, like



this bit of Hiroshima Day sidewalk art. Not officially part of the festival, but it fit in beautifully, particularly when I watched a group of people standing by one of the several stencils in the neighborhood debating what it was and what it meant.

The weekend before, by chance, I happened to be performing a wedding in Days Park (long story). A couple of days later, a friend told me she'd seen it on the Buffalo Rising blog. Turns out the person who wrote the entry had stumbled upon the wedding by chance: "At first we thought it was some sort of production... like a play, or a poetry reading." So, in a sense, that ceremony became part of the festival, too.

And if you were anywhere around Allen Street during the run of



Car Stories, you heard the constant cries of "I WILL NOT ATTRACT ATTENTION TO MYSELF" every half hour or so. (Not sure I have the line right, even though I heard it enough times to memorize it before I saw the show myself and got to yell it with my fellow audience members.) The first time I caught the screaming off in the distance, there was a debate about whether or not it was "part of" the festival, too. "Probably just some fratboy assholes," someone insisted.

Throw in various people blowing bubbles, quoting Shakespeare, conducting tours of the afterlife or doing tequila shots in an alley, offering aura readings, and the usual sights and sounds of Allentown, and you have a remarkable convergence of the planned and the unplanned. In a way, I kind of love the fact that large numbers of people out and about had no idea the festival was going on, while another group of devoted inFRINGErs was busily comparing notes about what to see next. It was all part of the mix.