Rochester Fringe Festival Reveals Full 2024 Lineup

The Rochester Fringe Festival held its annual “Big Reveal” Press Conference at CenterStage Hart Theatre at the Jewish Community Center, announcing the full lineup for the 2024 Fringe, which takes place September 10 – 21, as well as the return of the Spiegeltent and its adjacent Spiegelgarden, located at One Fringe Place (corner of Main and Gibbs Streets, across from Eastman Theatre).

Rochester's not-for-profit Fringe has become one of the largest, most successful, and most prominent fringe festivals in the nation, the largest multidisciplinary performing arts festival in New York State, and one of the region's most anticipated festivals each year. The 2024 Fringe will feature returning favorites, festival debuts and a major U.S. premiere. Tickets for all events go on sale TODAY at 12 NOON at rochesterfringe.com.

The festival lineup of 250 productions with more than 650 performances over 12 days includes returning favorites, Rochester Fringe debuts, and U.S. and world premieres.

Direct from the UK, the world-renowned Daedalum by Architects of Air. Designed by Alan Parkinson and hand-crafted in Nottingham, England, the giant luminarium comes to the Spiegelgarden at One Fringe Place for all 12 days of the festival Since 1992, more than three million visitors in over 40 countries across five continents have been welcomed into Architects of Air's monumental luminaria. Each new creation is a maze of winding paths and inspiring domes where the visitors may lose themselves in sensory bliss. Daedalum takes its name from Daedalus. In Greek mythology, he was the father of Icarus and the architect of the labyrinth of King Minos of Crete. Daedalum's core element is a maze of 19 egg-shaped domes whose spatial arrangement creates mysterious sightlines. Daedalum's Tree is an adventurous assembly of intersecting volumes rising above the visitor with inspiring complexity. The Main Dome features an innovative indirect illumination that varies the color inside according to the dome's position and the sun's direction. The 600-piece pattern of the Main Dome ceiling was inspired by Rome's Pantheon and the Gustave Doré drawing of angels circling heavenward in Dante's paradise.

By popular demand, the beloved Cirque du Fringe makes it long awaited return to Rochester Fringe with a brand new, world premiere production – Cirque du Fringe: Variete. Performing nightly throughout the festival in the Spiegeltent, Las Vegas legends and festival favorites Matt and Heidi Morgan present an evening of madcap, eye-popping theatrics. This year our audacious hosts become the hustling stage hands as they quite literally prop up a thrilling cast of unique and fiercely talented special guests. Fanciful puppetry, star-studded troupes including Argentinian dancers, basketball juggling direct from the Netherlands, aerialists, contortionists, live music and more – vaudeville meets 1960s-era TV meets International Circus in Varieté! With credits that include the runaway Vegas hit Absinthe, Cirque du Soleil, Teatro ZinZanni, France's Got Talent and beyond, this cheeky world-class troupe will stop at nothing to entertain Fringe audiences. 

Britain's favorite French comedian comes to Rochester with two U.S. premieres, including his award-winning interactive stand-up show, Marcel Lucont's Whine List, in which he serves up a unique Whine List from the audience's past woes and misdemeanors. A kind of group therapy experience, but one where everybody will probably leave more depressed.

Winner of Best Kids Show 2022 at the Leicester Comedy Festival and and named one of the Top 10 Kids Shows at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, Marcel Lucont: Les Enfants Terribles, A Gameshow for Awful Children – a wild family gameshow, in which kids vie to be crowned the most awful child of the day – also makes its U.S. debut at the 2024 Rochester Fringe Festival. Lucont channels his acerbic humor and quickfire wit into a series of tasks for the younger generation, which is every bit as entertaining for adults as it is for children. A big hit at Edinburgh Fringe 2023, it is currently on a highly successful tour of the UK, including London's Royal Albert Hall. Marcel Lucont has toured the world over the past 15 years, putting on shows at Melbourne Comedy Festival, New Zealand Comedy Festival, Cape Town Fringe and playing shows across Europe, Scandinavia, the USA and Asia. He has won the Fringe World Award for Best Comedy Show, the Amused Moose Award for Best Comedy Show at Edinburgh Fringe and was named one of the top 10 Edinburgh Fringe comedy shows by The Daily Telegraph. Rochester Fringe attendees of all ages can see the show on five nights of the Festival in the Spiegeltent.

On the heels of hugely successful, critically acclaimed runs in New York City, Los Angeles and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., renowned magician and “cruciverbalist” (crossword puzzle constructor) David Kwong brings his immersive, interactive experience of puzzles and cryptology to Rochester Fringe. Called a “masterful exercise in head-spinning illusion and fleet-footed problem-solving” by The Washington Post and “a spin class for the frontal lobe” by The New York Times, The Enigmatist will be presented on three nights during the festival.

Attendees of the 2023 Rochester Fringe Festival will recall Craig Walsh: MONUMENTS, an extraordinary site-responsive, outdoor video projection event honoring three Rochester locals, nominated by the community and deserving of recognition, but otherwise might never rise to public consciousness. With an overwhelming number of submissions and popular demand, Monuments brings the continuation and finale of the project to the 2024 Fringe with three new honorees. A finalist in CITY's "Best of Rochester Awards" for its first installment last year, Monuments can be viewed for free nightly from 8:00 – 10:00 p.m. in the parking lot of the Third Presbyterian Church on Meigs Street. Built for the great outdoors, Walsh projects large-scale, 3D video portraits of the honorees onto live trees in a public space after dark. The projections transform the trees into sculptural monuments in gentle perpetual motion, presenting a haunting synergy between the human form, nature, and the act of viewing. A standing display at the site will provide a short biography of each honoree and their profession, volunteer work, or other reasons they were selected for this installation. Through this installation, Walsh endeavors to answer the question: What does it mean to honor someone with a monument…and who should be honored in such a public way? Customized for each community that hosts this work, Craig Walsh, Monuments has mesmerized audiences around the world.

As always, there will be plenty of family-friendly activities including such favorites as the annual free Kids Day on Saturday, September 21, with activities such as pumpkin painting, the ever-popular chalk art and Disco Kids, among other fun events.

Street Beat, the popping, locking, breakdance competition that pulls in fresh talent from all over the regional hip-hop scene, returns on Saturday, September 21 at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Park. The contest is open to any crew of three people in any dance style, with preliminary trials that lead up to all-out dance battles. Prelims take place from 1 to 3:30 p.m., and finals begin at 4 p.m., with the winning crew announced around 5:30 p.m.

All of this and so much more will again make the Rochester Fringe the event of the year – including the previously announced comedy headliner Pete Davidson, performing on Friday, September 13 at 7:30 p.m., at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre.

The full 2024 Rochester Fringe Festival program can be found at rochesterfringe.com where tickets are also available for all events. Please follow Rochester Fringe Festival for additional information and announcements: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | #rocfringe24.

ABOUT ROCHESTER FRINGE FESTIVAL

The award-winning, 12-day Rochester Fringe Festival was named by the New York Times as “one of the country's more prominent multidisciplinary events” in September 2023. The Fringe has become the largest multidisciplinary performing arts festival in New York State and one of the most attended Fringe Festivals in the United States. More than 750,000 people have attended more than 5,000 performances and events at the Fringe since its inception in 2012. The non-profit organization's mission is to offer a platform for artists to share their creativity and develop their skills, while also providing unparalleled public access to the arts. It strives to be diverse and inclusive, and to stimulate downtown Rochester both culturally and economically. It showcases the work of regional, national, and International Artists, from emerging to superstar.

ABOUT FRINGE FESTIVALS

In 1947, eight theatre groups showed up - uninvited - to perform at the newly established Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland. Although not listed in the official program, the groups performed anyway, at venues they found for themselves. The following year, a Scottish journalist coined the term “festival fringe” to describe these non-curated shows that began turning up annually. The Edinburgh Fringe is now the world's largest arts festival and the third largest event after the Olympics and the World Cup. Today, there are more than 250 Fringe Festivals worldwide, with nearly 50 in the United States. The Rochester Fringe Festival was the first in Upstate New York.

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