Michael Vought was in high demand at the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival. Over the course of five minutes, five different people — festival workers and community members alike — approached Vought with a series of tiny fires to put out, running the gamut from “the actor’s not here yet” to “we’re running out of temporary tattoos at the other venue.” But Vought, head of Westminster’s theatre department and Fringe board member and advisor, took this as good news: It meant the festival was busy.
The festival took place at Sugarmont Plaza, outside an old Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-owned building, now property of the Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency. A giant “F” was painted on the two-story windows and the inside was decorated like a hipster’s kinda-creepy, kinda-cool dream basement. The actual basement was a functioning art gallery with paintings, prints and jewelry from a dozen local artists. This was the “Fringe Factory,” the festival’s home base from August 6-9. Its most distinguishing feature that week? A line out the door extending well into Sugarmont Plaza.
The inaugural Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival has been a labor of love five years in the making. Performers, most of whom were Westminster students or graduates, said it was hard to get through the theater program without talking about starting a Fringe. “This year we had the right students, the ones who had the energy to make this happen,” Vought said.
Many of the core student volunteers on the festival board took classes during the academic year focusing on how to create a nonprofit — Great Salt Lake Fringe is now a registered 501c(3) — as well as classes in business and festival organization from Fringe advisor and Westminster Business School professor Michael Sutton, though they received no credit during the festival itself.
“They are just doing this because they are cool,” Vought said of Fringe’s 50-plus student volunteers who often wore multiple hats during the festival’s four days — manning the ticket booth, making and breaking sets, and performing on stage.
The vibe of the festival encompassed all of the good things about a liberal arts college — the small, friendly community, the willingness to experiment, the relaxed confidence — and put them into practice. Musicians rotated through Sugarmont Plaza all weekend.
Sunday night was the last night of shows, and festival workers said the crowds grew as the weekend progressed. Speaking of both the festival and her show “Behold, Zebulon,” actor Jen Waterhouse said, “I feel like it was just upward momentum the whole time.”
The festival produced over 25 shows, most running at least one performance every day. Taking cues from other Fringe festivals, such as those in San Diego and Edinburgh, Great Salt Lake Fringe made its work as accessible as possible, simulcasting many of the stage performances on Periscope. One hundred percent of the ticket sales went to artists, while the $5 festival admission fee took care of all administrative costs and got patrons discounts at local Sugarhouse businesses in between shows.
The shows were funny, intimate and, yes, fringe-y. Though at its heart it was a theater festival, Great Salt Lake Fringe found room for other performing arts including, but not limited to, acrobatic yoga, magic and fire dancing.
“Behold, Zebulon” featured a crack cast of five actresses, all in different stages in their college careers; some had just graduated, and some were finishing their freshman year. “Zebulon,” directed by Michael Vought and originally written by Angus MacLachlan,tells the story of small Southern town, Zebulon, through vignettes of its goofy townsfolk. The nuanced characters that Waterhouse, Natalia Noble, Natalie Mcaneney, Alison Lente and Sierra DuCharme-Hansen brought to the stage saw Sunday’s audience filing out of the theater atwitter with talk of favorite lines, the actresses’ chemistry and that part with the water bottle.
“Next year” was a phrase often on the lips of festival-goers and artists alike. With so much neighborhood and artistic support in its first year, and a smooth first year under its belt, it would be hard to imagine next summer without another Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival.
Looking ahead, Vought said, “My favorite part has been how many artists have come up to me and said ‘I’ve already got ideas for what I want to create next year,’ and that’s what makes me jazzed, is how we are engendering creativity.”
@TheChrony