Our hearts are broken. 

On Monday, we learned that our community lost Dito van Reigersberg, co-founder of Pig Iron Theatre Company, beloved performer, brilliant risk-taker, and friend. 

For several years, the arc of the Fringe Festival was a familiar one: opening night, a week or two of 20-30 shows each day, a steady build which would peak precisely at the moment that Martha Graham Cracker—Dito’s Amazonian drag alter ego – strode onstage at the Late Night Cabaret. 

The effect of watching Martha perform those shows was a duo of feelings that don’t logically go together: total awe, and radical belonging. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. These are my people. 

Dito’s ability to hold both things at once – on the one hand: virtuosity, experimentalism, danger; on the other: welcoming, pleasure, humor, joy—made him an exemplar of the kind of outrageous, anarchic, beautifully-human approach to performance that has come to define how we do it in Philly.  

This in itself, of course, would have been enough.  But he was also an extraordinarily kind listener, a mentor to young performers, a wildly-enthusiastic champion for the art he loved, and a fantastic cultivator and convener of talented folks from across the globe and across disciplines. How is it possible that our brightest light was also the glue that held us together?

Dito performed in nearly every one of the 29 Philadelphia Fringe Festivals, starting with Pig Iron’s Cafeteria in the first festival in 1997. Year after year, we’d see him as an actor, a dance artist, a cabaret performer, host at the Rockys. Twenty-seven years later, Poor Judge, created nearly three years after Dito’s cancer diagnosis, was—to the best of our knowledge— the first Fringe piece in the Festival’s nearly-three-decade history to win Best Musical at the Barrymores. 

That seemingly-boundless energy and abundant care for others can’t just disappear, can it?  We don’t think so.  All of us at Fringe are, in one way or another, living in a world that Dito helped nurture into being. Our grief is mixed with extraordinary gratitude for all he’s given us, and with wonder at the life and art he made. Our hearts are with his family, his husband, Matthew, and the countless others who grieve his absence. 

It is unspeakably sad that Dito is gone.  It is a fucking miracle that we all got to share this planet with him.