San Fran Fringe Festival Picks Productions For Sept Festival

Forget your touring Broadway shows. When's the last time the Bay Area has seen a play from Andorra??!! Well, the 18th Annual San Francisco Fringe Festival will have an Andorrese (Andorranite?) show in September. Directly from that tiny principality in the Pyrenees, between France and Spain, heretofore known only for its wealth of triangular postage stamps.

The San Francisco Fringe breaks new ground with...Andorranean theatre!

The 2009 San Francisco Fringe Festival has picked the productions for its 18th annual season, according to festival Artistic Director Christina Augello. The 12-day San Francisco Fringe Festival is an open, non-juried, uncensored international theatre festival that draws theatre companies and individual performers from the Bay Area, around the U.S., and across the world. This year's festival season runs September 9 through 20.

30 productions were chosen in a January 31 lottery at the EXIT Theatre in downtown San Francisco. The lottery is the Fringe's traditional method for choosing the shows for the Festival's three "standard venue" performance spaces, Augello explains.

"A true Fringe Festival is open to absolutely everyone to do absolutely anything, and so a lottery is the perfect curation. It delivers lots of surprises and lots of exciting new talent each year," Augello says.

In addition to San Francisco Bay Area theatre companies, the 2009 Festival will include companies from New York, Los Angeles, and Boston, as well as from Brooklyn, NY, Aspen, CO, Missoula, MT, and Charlottesville, VA. International performing groups will travel from Toronto, Brazil, Slovenia....and Andorra.

Theatre companies and individual artists chosen for the 2009 San Francisco Fringe Festival include the following:The 12-day festival, which ultimately may feature more than 40 different shows, takes place in three of the EXIT Theatre performance spaces in the Downtown San Francisco Theatre District - the EXIT Theatre & EXIT Stage Left (156 Eddy Street) and EXIT on Taylor (277 Taylor Street). These three theatres constitute the "Standard Venues" for the festival.

In addition, and soon to be determined, are the shows designed for a specific site or a "Non-Traditional Fringe Venue" (NTFV). Companies have until April 30, 2009 to apply to stage their work at a non-traditional venue of their own choosing.

Over the years, the San Francisco Fringe has hosted shows presented in local parks, at the Planetarium, and on a bench on Market Street. For the last year's Fringe Festival, one company took theatre-goers on a sight-seeing bus, performing on the bus and stopping at local landmarks to make snarky comments. (Adult beverages were served.)

"We're always open to fostering new and innovative ways of presenting theatre, so in addition to providing the standard EXIT Theatre spaces, we're encouraging performance companies to come up with non-traditional or site-specific places in which to perform," Augello says.

"These Non-Traditional Fringe Venues present an opportunity for shows that don't fit the standard Fringe format," she explains. "As always, I'm looking forward to what this open-ended category will bring us this year," she adds.

Fringe favorite OPM, the LA-based comedy troupe returns once more. Also retuning is InfluxDance from Charlottesville, VA - very popular, and not just with dance audiences.

Most are newcomers, like the Aspen Comedy Works, bringing "Jesus in Montana: Adventures of a Doomsday Cult."

Coming from Bakersfield, it's "Spider Baby: The Musical."

And the Andorrista show? It's entitled "The Tao of Everest" and is performed by a person named Ian Woodall. Sounds suspiciously British. Possibly an expat who collects triangular postage stamps.

Applications and Deadlines for Non-Traditional Venues

The deadline to apply for performing at a Non-Traditional Fringe Venue is midnight, April 30, 2008 PST. Applications are available at the Fringe web site at www.sffringe.org. ALL APPLICATIONS MUST BE SUBMITTED ONLINE. Non-Traditional participants will be announced shortly after the April 30 deadline.

The original Fringe Festival began in Edinburgh, Scotland, more than fifty years ago, and has since become an international phenomenon. Fringe Festivals currently bring cutting-edge theatre to more than twenty cities across the U.S. and Canada, as well as in Europe and Asia. San Francisco's is the second oldest in the U.S. Traditionally, international performers appear at the San Francisco festival, many of them having appeared at other Fringes, such as Toronto, Edinburgh, and Prague.

EXIT Theatre celebrates its 26th anniversary this year. It produces the San Francisco Fringe Festival, the second oldest Fringe Festival in the United States and is a member of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals (CAFF). 2009 will mark the 18th annual San Francisco Fringe Festival.

Each year, EXIT Theatre presents over 500 performances of some 100 productions by more than 75 companies and is one of San Francisco's most successful and enduring centers of alternative performance. EXIT continues to commission, develop and produce new work and present independent artists. In addition to the San Francisco Fringe Festival, EXIT produces the annual DIVAfest, dedicated to developing new work by women writers. The EXIT Theatreplex includes EXIT Theatre, EXIT Stage Left, and EXIT Café at 156 Eddy Street, and EXIT on Taylor, around the corner at 277 Taylor Street, all in Downtown San Francisco. Visit the EXIT Theatre web site at www.theexit.org.

SF Fringe Festival - EXIT Theatre - 156 Eddy Street - San Francisco, CA 94102 415-931-1094 www.sffringe.org