the blog

I've wanted to visit Scandinavia for so long! I applied to the Baltic-Nordic fringe circuit a few years back, and was thrilled when I got into several of them (they're curated), but didn’t have time or funds to make it work in time. As an American and a struggling artist at that, it's a really long way to go and quite an expense just for one weekend-long festival, but the Oslo Fringe kindly gave me a deferral so that I could return a year later.

I have strong feelings about how comedy shows are categorized at Edinburgh Fringe. There is an abundance of stand-up comedians, which is lovely, and many people are down to see those kinds of shows. But what gets my goat is that all other comedy shows get lumped in the same genre at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. You won’t find any stand-up on this list (in my world, that would be an entirely different post). Here we focus on theatre, clown, and improv.

Q&A with Philadelphia Fringe Artist Donna Oblongata. Donna, you do more than perform; you direct and teach many clowns in Philadelphia. How does this impact your work? I love teaching and teach a really specific pedagogy, called Pochinko Clown, or Clown Through Mask, that comes from Canada. It's different from all the LeCoq and Gaulier stuff most people are familiar with. Teaching clowns is great because every time I'm giving them a lesson, I'm also giving myself one.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has long been known as a launching pad for bold and boundary-pushing theater. For Xhloe Rice and Natasha Rowland, a New York–based duo creating absurdist clown physical theater, the journey to Fringe began with little more than a duffel bag of props and a desire to share their work with a wider audience. What they discovered in Edinburgh not only transformed their careers but also reshaped their understanding of what success at Fringe really mean

Tips for Clowning: A Clown's first goal is to be loved.