I don’t know about you, but 2026 feels like the year for bringing ideas to life and what better way to start than with a Fringe Festival, a platform for artists to bring their projects to a stage.
As I’ve been watching event submissions come through Eventotron (the Fringe Fest platform that we’re using for scheduling and ticketing), my excitement for this festival has just about quadrupled. It’s the first year that we’re bringing back the Ithaca Fringe Fest (shout out to George Sapio, Peggy Carey, AJ Sage and all the other people that were part of the original Ithaca Fringe Fest form 2014-2018!) and the sapling that we started with already feels like it is shaping up to be a wolf tree. Thanks for allowing me to make a nature metaphor, there will surely be more of those…We started with this idea of a few venues on the Waterfront Trail in Ithaca…Bike Walk Tompkins, GreenStar, Uncle Marty’s, The Ithaca Farmer’s Market, but interest in the festival has already exceeded our expectations. Thanks ITH fam for being so open to new and unusual art! Now we’re working with 15 venues and people keep reaching out to offer up their space for performances! But let’s get back to those performances AKA events…The original Ithaca Fringe Fest was about 4 days with 6 events that cycled through the various venues on the Commons. We put out an open call for artists to submit their show ideas and in a little more than a month we’ve had 27 producers apply to showcase their event at Old Greeny Fringe Fest. Wow, right? I figured we’d hear from some of the local producers that put on comedy, improv and drag shows locally and we have! But we’ve also heard from touring fringe fest acts from as far away at LA.
So, allow me to share a little story and maybe a few more metaphors…
The first Fringe Fest that I attended was the NZ Fringe in Wellington NZ, back in 2014. At the time I honestly didn’t know that Fringe was a world-wide event. I was so enamored with the art scene in Wellington that I assumed Fringe was unique to the New Zealand capital. Plus there’s a bar in Wellington called Fringe Bar where I performed in my first ever burlesque show and my partner performed in his first ever open-mic comedy show (Raw Meat Monday). So to me, Fringe was just part of Wellington…little did I know that it has a 50+ year history dating back to Edinburugh Scotland! The show that has stuck with me for all these years was called Transhumance, a clown show about self-identification and gender. Held in the Bats Theatre, the set design was minimal, a street light and a suitcase. The show was incredible, emotional and eye-opening. It changed that way I wanted to experience art. There was a moment when Ania, the performer, peeled an orange and offered it to audience members. I was seated in the front row and as Ania extended a slice to me the space between audience and actor melted away. I have so many more thoughts about the importance of food for community building and connection that I won’t touch on now, but this moment was utterly perfect. So we flash forward to 2026…I’m in NYC at a cabaret show at Sleepwalk, a venue in Brooklyn and there’s a duo of drag performers dressed up in dark eye makeup and emo attire, doing a mashup of 90s boy band songs. Turns out they also run a drag and burlesque workshop…turns out Ania had just taken that workshop, and my sister had seen their performance. Small world!
I reached out to Ania the next day, after maybe 10 years out of touch. We caught up. Talked about Fringe…Ania gave me some great advice from the lens of a touring artist applying to festivals and a few days later I saw an event submission for Transhumance to be a part of the OGFF.
I have to admit that I’ve probably cried reading a quarter of the event submissions that have come through our Old Greeny Fringe Fest portal and this is one of the ones that got me going again. I’m so delighted to be able to bring shows that I love to this place that I live, this little town on the South end of Cayuga Lake with it’s legendary lake monster and thriving queer arts scene. I’m so delighted that the community here is so willing to make space for new artists and try something crazy and different (massive shout out to Queen Tissential and Skarlet Killz for hosting the Anything Goes Thursday event in January at Lot 10 with almost 30 new performers). We’ve got a few months to go and this branchy sapling of an idea is obviously thriving on the nectar that is Ithaca’s community, support and hunger for art.
The event application closed on January 31st and we had more than 35 events to sift through! Acceptance emails have gone out and we’ve already got 6 confirmed events for the festival, with many more to come in between now and February 15th! I can’t wait to reveal the 2026 Old Greeny Fringe Festival line up later this month, so stay tuned!
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