{"id":22907,"date":"2022-08-11T09:00:43","date_gmt":"2022-08-11T16:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=22907"},"modified":"2022-08-25T10:30:14","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T17:30:14","slug":"victoria-fringe-festival-returns-with-new-lineup-of-indie-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2022\/08\/11\/victoria-fringe-festival-returns-with-new-lineup-of-indie-shows\/","title":{"rendered":"Victoria Fringe Festival returns with new lineup of indie shows"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Fringe Festival has been a Vancouver Island tradition for over three decades. And it\u2019s returning this year: from August 24 to September 4, more than two dozen shows will be presented by various indie thespians.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ingrid Garner is one of this year\u2019s performers. In 1999, WWII survivor Eleanor Ramrath Garner, now 92, published Eleanor\u2019s Story: An American Girl in Hitler\u2019s Germany<\/i>, an autobiographical account of her experiences as a young girl living under Nazi occupation, and what it was like to grow and mature into her teen years amidst these struggles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For the past nine years, Ingrid\u2014her granddaughter\u2014has taken up the mantle in a solo production with the same name as her grandmother’s book. Garner says that her mother read her the book when she was 10, and hearing what her grandmother went through blew her away.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, it was stunning when I learned her story. I only ever knew my grandmother before then as such a magical person. She has this affinity with nature. She\u2019s like Snow White\u2014she has this beautiful magical garden out back that she tends to immaculately, and she trains blue jays to eat peanuts out of her hand,\u201d says Garner. \u201cSo it was very strange to me to read that as a nine year old she had gone through this harrowing, stunning, wild odyssey.\u201d<\/p>\n

Garner says that writing the book was very therapeutic for her grandmother, and it helped her build strength of character.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany war survivors never address it and they don\u2019t want to speak of it again. But, unfortunately, when you do that, the trauma just keeps wheeling you back,\u201d says Garner. \u201cShe suffered with what we know now is PTSD for many years. And one thing that really haunted her was the sound of people knocking underneath the rumble of collapsed buildings, but when she finished the book, the knocking stopped. In her 70s she found a new sort of peace, and life. She is very strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Garner says that a major takeaway from the show is that even in times of trial, humanity persists, with all its complexities.<\/p>\n

\u201cA really profound part of my grandmother\u2019s story is seeing the humanity during wartime. I think people will just expect a harrowing story, but it\u2019s very fascinating how people cope in a war. Even in the darkest of times, people find ways to joke, and to be themselves, and find identity,\u201d says Garner. \u201cYou know, just because my grandmother was going through a World War doesn\u2019t mean she wasn\u2019t going through all the stages of puberty. What\u2019s it like to get your period in a war? What\u2019s it like to like boys in a war? All these staples of life still go on. I think that fact is what makes this story more accessible, as it is told by a girl growing from age nine to 16.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Multiverse Mix Tape<\/em> is one of the many shows at this year’s Fringe (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another show on the Fringe roster this year is The Multiverse Mix Tape<\/i>, which follows the format of a science-fiction anthology. Writer, producer, and actor David Elendune says that the show was inspired by old television shows that he grew up with.<\/p>\n

\u201cI suppose if you were going to sum it up, this is like Twilight Zone<\/i> on stage,\u201d says Elendune. \u201cWe all grew up watching reruns of \u201850s and \u201860s stuff, The Twilight Zone<\/i> and Outer Limits<\/i>, and they usually comprised of three, maybe four stories in an hour, and usually there\u2019s a setup and a twist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elendune says that although he is performing in the production, his real passion is writing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an old joke, I think it\u2019s Dorothy Parker: \u2018I hate writing, I love having written,\u2019\u201d says Elendune. \u201cI love writing once I\u2019ve got a first draft and I know it works, and then polishing the dialogue, but I find first drafts painful, like most people do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elendune says that he lived within a time period where science fiction was booming, which was impactful for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cSci-fi was what I grew up with. I saw Star Wars<\/i> at the magical age of about six or seven,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s obviously hugely different to the technology now; a lot of the time you grew up reading the stories, there was novelizations of films, or comic-book versions of films, that was how I experienced a lot of the stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elendune says that science fiction is a way to explore existentially uncomfortable situations and problems, with the intent to draw people in unconscious of the allegory at play.<\/p>\n

\u201cSci-fi, to be honest, is no different from Aesop\u2019s Fables<\/i>, or parables in the Bible, it\u2019s a way of telling you something about today\u2019s society that if you wrote it in today\u2019s society, it would be too on the nose, but if you put it in a different society, then people will swallow it a bit more,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Marya Folinsbee is also performing in this year\u2019s Fringe. She\u2019s a writer and performer who started her own company, Material Theatre, in the Kootenays. In her second year with the Fringe, Folinsbee is performing Domestic Disputes<\/i>, about Evelyn, who is \u201cA perfect housewife, stewing in her own repressed juices,\u201d according to the Material Theatre website. The show combines mundanity with the surreal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe show was kind of inspired by, I don\u2019t know, the sort of bizarre relentless boredom and overwhelm of early parenting, and housework,\u201d says Folinsbee. \u201cMy character talks about this fight with entropy. Oh, you have to do the laundry, and then you do the laundry again, and again, and this kind of meaningless relationship with housework. Then all of a sudden this woman is in this wild dream world. She\u2019s full of sexual desire, but has no place to put it, so she ends up putting it into her housework.\u201d<\/p>\n

Folinsbee says that Evelyn is a way for her to explore parts of herself that she\u2019s not quite familiar or comfortable with, and she feels that she has grown with the character.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am not the most vulnerable, and this character is really vulnerable. She is not me, but she is not-not me, too, so just being comfortable with showing this very weird side of my own brain was kind of a challenge,\u201d says Folinsbee. \u201cEvelyn has taught me a lot; we have totally grown together. I discovered new things and found new meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fringe Festival
\nVarious times, Wednesday, August 24 to Sunday, September 4
\nVarious prices and venues
\nintrepidtheatre.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Fringe Festival has been a Vancouver Island tradition for over three decades. And it\u2019s returning this year: from August 24 to September 4, more than two dozen shows will be presented by various indie thespians.\u00a0 Ingrid Garner is one of this year\u2019s performers. In 1999, WWII survivor Eleanor Ramrath Garner, now 92, published Eleanor\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22956,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,271],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-august-10-22"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22907"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22932,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22907\/revisions\/22932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}