Everybody has a story, and First Person Arts Festival is back with a line up of personal stories that will make you laugh, cry, and reflect as well as workshops to empower you to tell your own. Jamie J. Brunson stopped by our podcast, Happy Hour on the Fringe, to give us a preview of this year’s Festival and an inside look into what the Festival seeks to represent.  FringeArts is excited to be partnering with First Person Arts to bring several shows to our own stage including:

Felonious Monk

Wed, Nov 7 to Fri, Nov 9

You may have seen Felonious Munk as the “resident blegghead” on Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show, but now Felonious Munk has updated his smash-hit Second City performance and is bringing it to the First Person Arts stage. This is a hilarious yet harrowing first-person story of how one black man went from six years in a state prison to a six-figure job in corporate America. Felonious then transitions to a new life as an activist and satirist in his one-man show debuting at the First Person Arts Festival.

Pa’lante

Sun, Nov 11 to Mon, Nov 12

Gabriela Sanchez, Founder and Executive Producer of Power Street Theatre Company, joined the First Person Arts creative team this year, but you might remember Sanchez and her work from Power Street Theatre’s past productions, Shelter in Place and Morir Sonyando, which appeared in the 2015 and 2014 Fringe Festivals respectively.

Gabriela is masterful at creating devised theater that is passionate and pushes for social change. Her Festival directorial debut Pa’lante is no different. This devised work asks a diverse representation of the Latinx community to share their stories of living the Latinx experience in these United States of America. Influenced by the five senses, cultural roots, and resilience, each storyteller explores traditions and legacies.

For this run of Pa’lante, we are proud to partner with Puentes de Salud, a health clinic serving the Latinx immigrant communities of Philadelphia by bringing Puentes de Salud’s El Viaje de los Niños, a visual project which tells the stories of Mexican immigrant children who have crossed the border to come to Philadelphia, to FringeArts. We invite you to explore “El Viaje de los Niños, developed by Puentes Director of Art and Culture Nora Litz, before and/or after the performances of Pa’lante.

Legendary

Wed, Nov 14 to Fri, Nov 16

Voguing did not begin with Madonna by any means. Largely Black and Latino LGBT youth created the dance style during the 1980s Ballroom Scene in New York City. Kemar Jewel and the Xcel Dance Crew pay homage to the style and era with their hit show Legendary, which premiered in the 2017 First Person Arts Festival. The one-night-only performance was so fabulous, Legendary is back for a three-night run at this year’s festival.

Stay after Thursday, Nov 15’s performance for a talkback with Kemar Jewel and the Xcel Dance Crew. On Friday, Nov 16, we have a very special evening in store. A *legendary* Vogue Showcase Ball will follow the performance. The night continues with our November Get Pegged Cabaret featuring Justin Sayre’s Storytime Pajama Party.

GrandSlam: Swept Away

Sat, Nov 17

The First Person Arts Festival closes out with the GrandSlam. The culmination of First Person Art’s monthly StorySlam series, the GrandSlam brings togeter all the StorySlam winners from the past year to go head to head and see who will take home the title of “Best Storyteller in Philadelphia.”

Sometimes amusing, sometimes heartbreaking but always relevant and moving, First Person Arts Festival is a chance to sit back and listen – something so many of us do too little of today.

To hear more about what the festival has in store, check out our interview with executive director of First Person Arts, Jamie Brunson on Happy Hour on the Fringe here.

Get your tickets at FringeArts.com and see the full line-up visit firstpersonarts.org. Follow FringeArts on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We’d love to hear what First Person Arts shows you’re seeing.

FringeArts believes in the inherent value of diverse communities, and the importance of learning, being open, and listening. From our ticket-buying process to arriving at our building, the performances themselves to our post-show experiences, we are working hard to continuously improve our accessibility. We’re excited to share our new Accessibility Guide, where you can find a description of what to expect when you come to any performances at FringeArts, including relaxed performances which are adapted to reduce anxiety and for audience members with sensory needs. We hope this new initiative creates an even greater sense of inclusiveness at FringeArts. You can find the guide under the Accessibility tab on our website, or directly here.

In addition to these efforts, we also provide Audio Descriptions, Open Captioning, and ASL Interpretation for any performance with one month notice. We always have Hearing Assistance Headsets available at the box office upon request.

FringeAccess Members, for those holding a Pennsylvania Access Card, can receive up to four $2 to any performance at FringeArts per year. Tickets may be purchased through the FringeAccess Membership login, by calling 215.413.1318, or at the box office before a show.

More detailed accessibility information can be found on our Know Before You Go sheet, or by contacting Patron Services at patronservies@fringearts.com or 215.413.1318.

Many thanks to Roger Ideishi, Occupational Therapy Program Director and professor at Temple University, and his graduate student team (Remy Binder, Vivian Hin, Christina Neroni, and Johanna Reed) for their help putting together the Accessibility Guide!

Within the last twenty years, technology has changed every facet of our lives, and art has not been immune to the technological revolution. The computer and internet have given rise to an entirely new medium with which artists, whether they self-identify as one or not, can experiment and play.

In Philadelphia, the digital art community may still be a bit “underground”—some people may say non-existent multimedia artist and founder of CRUXspace Andrew Zahn notes, but they would be mistaken. The community of people using technology creatively is growing, and three very different institutions are at the center of that growth: CRUXspace, FringeArts, and Philly Game Mechanics.

Many galleries, like Philly’s Vox Populi, show digital and multimedia art, but few are dedicated solely to the medium. Bitforms in Manhattan comes to mind, but a comparable space does not exist in Philadelphia. Enter Andrew Cameron Zahn. Zahn, who started experimenting with online art and design applications like Photoshop and Quark as a kid, sought to fill that void with his new media art gallery CRUXspace in 2014. Growing out of art exhibitions for “hackers” that he organized as a student at the University of the Arts, CRUXspace found its first home at 7th and Master in Ludlow. Andrew and lead curator Kim Brickley have collaborated with the likes of Mural Arts, University of the Arts and FringeArts and have presented artists such as G. H. Hovagimyan and Molly Soda. Earlier this year CRUXspace moved out of its original location and found a new home at the WeWork in Northern Liberties, but its purpose, to provide a space for creators experimenting with technology in art and design has moved with it. In its new space, CRUXspace will be presenting a new exhibition featuring the digital media artists Swoon, who makes use of stop-motion animation, installation, and video techniques and Eric Westray, who employs cutting-edge 3D modeling techniques to bring to life impossible humans and environments. The Swoon/Westray exhibition opens October 26.

Past CRUXspace collaborator FringeArts seeks to provide digital artists with a platform of their own as well but in a very different way. FringeArts has maintained a mission “to present world-class, contemporary performing arts that challenge convention and inspire new ways of thinking” for decades. In 2015, the organization’s Fringe Festival was already 19 years old, but the team recognized that much of the art that aligned so perfectly with their mission was being created digitally but not presented nor seen. With about 15 digital art pieces, FringeArts launched its first Digital Fringe, a platform that allows audience members to experience the work of digital and multimedia artists for free, as part of the annual festival.  Three years later, Digital Fringe has grown to 26 pieces with an additional two digital works, R&J and SPIES!, featured in the traditional Fringe Festival. Digital Fringe artists provide a URL or another method (app, text message, etc.) to access their technologic creation on the FringeArts website and in the Festival Guide. This year, you were able to cook with drag queens, outsmart the undead, and escape-the-room (chatroom that is). 

Whereas Fringe and CRUXspace work with people who think of themselves as artists, that is not necessarily the case for FringeArts’ Digital Fringe partner, Philly Game Mechanics. Philly Game Mechanics is a charitable organization focused on supporting game development and indie game enthusiasts in Philadelphia, PA. PGM members take game development classes, create relationships and share their work with other gamers, creators, and makers through different talks and their indie arcade cabinet, the Philly-Tron (currently being housed at the Franklin Institute.) Through partnerships and relationships with other organizations such as The Franklin Institute and Drexel Game Program, Jake O’Brien from PGM points out, members further develop their skills and expand their perspectives. Recognizing the benefits of such partnerships herself, Jenny Kessler, a FringeArts intern brought her supervisor, Jarrod Markman, and PGM together to partner. Jake posed the question “What is digital art?” to the PGM community, and eventually, several Digital Fringe pieces were developed by members. On September 12, many of those pieces were shown at Philly Game Mechanic’s Digital Art Showcase at Harrisburg University’s Philadelphia Campus.

Although we may not be ready to distinguish digital art as its own distinct branch of art yet, CRUXspace, FringeArts and Philly Game Mechanics are filling the void and bringing the digital creative community to the surface. Once other institutions begin bridging the disconnect between themselves and the hackers, gamers, and artists utilizing technology in creative ways, these three groups will likely be cornerstones to the digital art community in Philadelphia. In a lot of ways, they already are.