Make Cincinnati Weird!

One of the original founding board members of the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, Jeff Syroney, on why he won’t ever live in a city without a Fringe Festival:

I’ve made the decision that I won’t live in a city that doesn’t have its own Fringe Festival. A Fringe city makes a statement about itself. It says it’s open to the unknown. It says maybe we don’t have avant-garde, uncensored, rock-it-out-to-all-hours-of-the-night events happening every week, but we think there’s a place for that and so we’re going to make it happen – even if it’s only for twelve days at a time to start. A city open to risk, to taking a chance on something it’s never tried before is a city that honors and respects its creative capital. It indicates an understanding that a city’s uniqueness is tied to providing opportunity for its creatives to experiment and collaborate with other creatives from other parts of the world. More than just an arts festival, Fringes are essentially very cool conventions on what tomorrow’s art will be. Like many things worthy of understanding and funding, it will take some time before all civic stakeholders see the twelve-day event that way, but Festival organizers say they’re not plannning on leaving anytime soon.

Take any drive to any city and on your way in you can pretty much guarantee what kind of shopping you’re going to run into, what kind of music will be playing (or not playing) on the radio and what kind of food you’re going to eat based on the pretty pictures on the menus. But a Fringe city tells you something different. It tells you that amid this homogeny lies a group of creatives who are willing to offer something much more exciting than the safety of the familiar. They’re willing to offer a gamble. And that gamble is what a Fringe Festival is all about - there is always something for anyone to love or hate, you just have to find it.