BWW Blog: The Westmont Fringe Festival Celebrates the Creative Process

The Westmont Fringe Festival is more than an event that features new, student-produced theatre--it's a weekend-long affair that debuts an assortment of artistic creations in a variety of forms, including theatre, dance, film, and fine art. Perhaps most importantly, the Fringe Festival is a celebration of the collaborative and creative processes that turn concepts and ideas into viable storytelling performance pieces. The Fringe Festival has been a Westmont tradition for a decade, but only in the last few years has it become a cross-campus collaborative effort with MFA playwriting students from UCSD and UT-Austin. The Fringe Festival offers an assortment of new productions, all written, directed, and performed by students.

With over 20 separate performances at this year's Fringe, it's difficult to see everything, at least in just one day; however, the plethora of short pieces vary in theme and style, so there's certainly something for everyone. I attended the festival on Thursday evening and saw several performances, each with a specific and unique thematic emphasis. The Bechdel Tent was an interactive, instructive theatre piece that used ideas associated with The Bechdel Test, a Litmus that gauges the relative importance of female characters in fictitious renderings, to de- and reconstruct a short scene to demonstrate that female characters are capable of discussing topics other than the men in their lives. The piece had no use for a fourth wall, and served as both conversation and performance. Time in Your Life, produced in the black box theater, was an intense, documentary-style series of monologues in which five actors described moments when they experienced pure and concentrated expressions of a particular emotion. Other pieces were performed without a stage, either in front of or behind the theatre: Kind of Girl used elements of magical realism to tackle the post-graduation confusion of the typical American college student; Man Burns was an absurdist Burning Man story played out in a patch of dirt against the Montecito skyline.

And this is just a sampling of what the event has to offer. The Westmont Fringe, which runs through Sunday, April 19th, has a true festival atmosphere, with performances happening constantly and simultaneously. Not only does The Fringe offer a weekend's worth of fresh, new work, it also puts the acts of theatrical creation and collaboration on display. Some pieces feel like workshops; some feel more fully realized--but each piece shows that it's not just the work of a single writer or director or performer that gives a production its voice; it's the unique combination of these elements that builds the character of a performance. The Westmont Fringe Festival offers the exciting sense of theatre fresh off the press, the ink still wet. These scenes show that art is a living, evolving entity; a feeling too-often absent from some overproduced works with little to offer that is new or provocative. The Westmont Fringe Festival is view of artistic production that allows the audience to see more of the creative journey than just the final destination. Fast, raw, and fun, the Westmont Fringe Festival is a medley of work that celebrates the collective creative process.

The Westmont Fringe Festival

April 16-19
Friday @ 7:00 pm
Saturday @ 3:00 pm
Sunday @ 7:00 pm
@ Westmont College

www.westmont.edu

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