A Short History of Fringe Festivals….It all started in 1947 in Edinburgh, Scotland, as an alternative festival that played concurrently with the Edinburgh International Festival. Though not invited to participate, groups of actors, musicians, and the like performed at various venues on the fringe of the EIF. In 1948, Robert Kemp, a local journalist, gave it the name Fringe: “Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise than before…”
And so the Fringe as we know it was born. Fringe performing arts festivals can now be found all over the world, with dozens thriving in the United States today.
In honor of Mendocino County’s Almost Fringe Festival, Partners artists are pushing their artistic edges further than usual.
Domestic art meets fine art when artists from Partners set up their ironing boards and do their ironing. Visitors are invited to bring their ironing or just come to sit and visit and talk about their ironing experiences and how to iron a shirt and whether ironing is a meditation or a chore. Is one person’s fringe is another person’s labor? Is the mundane or less visible “fringe”? Come and talk while ironing takes place!
The ironing takes place April 13th, 14th and 15th from 1 to 4 pm.
The gallery features works using solarized computer images, tea bags, decorated brooms, mysterious scenarios, Marcel Duchamp, paper balls, dangling fringes and velvet sea anemone tentacles.
