So I’ve been working on this for a while:
Like many of the things I work on, it started as a joke; well, a kind of mean comment, leaving a Fringe show last year and saying to my partner “I’d rather have sat in goddamn silence for an hour.” Then, months later, being kinda high when the call for Fringe submissions came out and throwing my hat in the ring.
I assume Kingston Fringe gets enough submissions that fate does play a hand in how things get selected. For those who don’t know, it’s entirely random. Nothing is vetted. You don’t submit ideas or a precis. Just a name and contact info. Lo and behold, long enough later that I’d forgotten I applied, I got in.
That led to about four days of light soul-searching about whether or not I had any commitment to this bit. The more I sat with it, it turns out, the more it started to seem like kind of a neat idea.
That brings us to now; I’ve been working on this in the background for a while, and postering / trying to spread the word for a couple months. The shows start in under two weeks, so we’ll see how it goes.
Like I said, the more I sit with it, the more there is here that I find compelling. At first, it’s just the minimalist/experimental end of it that I got pulled toward. What’s a performance if nobody’s performing? That kind of thing.
But in the context of the world being a bit of a shitshow right now, this as a response started to get more important as well. In a couple of ways that I’ll unpack soon.
Also — to dig into — the personal challenge of it.
I like to overthink everything, and it turns out this is fertile ground for really going supidly deep on something that is ultimately, probably, a bit shallow. A snarky comment, a thing I did because I thought it was funny when I was a bit high, and here we are.
Here we go.