Fuel for the Fire 08/12/2012 10:55am

I saw a show on Friday afternoon that makes a pretty good analogy for the Fringe Festival. InDance Money Grind at TRP, an energetic, playful riff on the dance marathon phenomenon of the early 20th Century, the actors never stop moving. They shuffle wearily on their feet, fighting to stay upright, in hour 572 of a dance marathon. They're alerted to the arrival of authorities bent on shutting the contest down, so they jump en masse into an elevator, then a moving van, then a ferry, then another moving fan, continuing their desperate, determined, exhausted dancing all the while. And if that's not a good metaphor for the Fringe, I don't know what is. Except that our frantic fleeing from place to place is motivated not by oppressive authority but by a ruthless schedule of shows. If this were indeed an endurance competition, I would have been disqualified yesterday, when I took a whole day off of seeing shows. My fella had procured us tickets to the Polica concert at The Cabooze a couple weeks ago, and I was ready to experience a whole different kind of live performance after seeing 15 Fringe shows in the past week. When you're training for an actual endurance event, like a marathon, there are some pretty good rules of thumb when it comes to increasing your mileage. They say you really shouldn't increase by more than 10% a week, meaning that if you run 20 miles one week, you should only increase your total distance by 2 miles the following week. Now think about what we do in the Fringe. Even the most ardent theater-goers among us probably don't see more than an average of 2 shows per week for the majority of the year. Then we suddenly jump to seeing 10, 15, 20 shows in a single week. It's bound to take its toll. If we did it with running, our joints would holler, our muscles cramp and seize, and our feet would blister. I think there's a similar effect that happens the week of the Fringe, but the hollering, cramping, seizing, and blistering are all internal. All that social interaction rubbing up against your psyche is starting to chafe, and all that art you're consuming starts blurring together into one long impression of people standing in front of you doing stuff. Which is not to say it isn't awesome. I mean, people do marathons because it's freaking hard, and it's an accomplishment, and you uncover parts of yourself you didn't know existed--courage, determination, flashes of insight and clarity, the feeling of being raw and open, spent and laid bare. Screw staying safe and comfortable all the damn time. So I'm throwing myself back into the race today so I can have the pleasure of crossing the finish line, even if I did take a few walking breaks along the way. I've got three shows lined up for the day, and then I plan to put my feet up, let my chafing heal and the cramping muscles relax, and call it a Fringe well done. Home stretch, people. Let's do this thing.