When eight theatre groups turned up uninvited at the new Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and performed anyway, on the edges of the official programme, they accidentally invented a festival philosophy that would eventually circle the globe. Nearly eight decades later, that philosophy has a home in upstate New York, where each September downtown Rochester transforms into one of the largest and most successful fringe festivals in the nation. When the ESL Rochester Fringe Festival returns for its 15th edition this September, running twelve days from September 15th through the 26th, it will do what Rochester's Fringe has done every year since 2012: throw open the doors of dozens of venues and let the world walk in.
The festival that lands in Rochester each fall owes its existence to an unlikely homecoming. Erica Fee, a Rochester native who had been building a producing career in London, fell in love with the Edinburgh Fringe the way many performers do: by being in it, when she performed there in 2001. Around 2009, she made the risky decision to leave London and her production company behind to return to her hometown. "I felt that I was in the right place at the right time and I knew it," said Fee, now the festival's founding producer and CEO. Planning for the first Rochester Fringe began around 2008, and the festival debuted in 2012 under Fee's leadership.
The first Rochester Fringe Festival debuted in 2012 as a five-day event attracting roughly 30,000 people. By 2019 that number had climbed past 100,000, and the festival had become what its organizers call the largest multidisciplinary performing arts festival in New York State and one of the three biggest fringe festivals in the country.
The idea itself — that an arts festival could be built from open applications rather than a curated, exclusive programme — is the strange inheritance of that 1947 act of defiance in Scotland. Where most performing arts festivals present a hand-picked lineup, a fringe puts its trust in volume, variety, and the democracy of the application form. Rochester's version developed its own twist on the formula, a dual-structure approach its organizers call "the Rochester Model," which has become something of an export around the world. The festival's staff curate a small handful of splashy, headliner special events to draw crowds in, while the vast majority of shows are curated by the participating venues themselves from the thousands of applications artists submit. Combined with a signature free outdoor spectacle by international artists each year, the model has been adopted and studied by other fringe festivals internationally.
This year's 15th anniversary edition unfolds the way a Fringe should: simultaneously everywhere. More than 715 performances will radiate out across dozens of downtown venues, offering something for all ages and abilities. The physical and spiritual center of the festival remains One Fringe Place, across from the Eastman Theatre, where the renowned Spiegeltent hosts nightly shows while food trucks and a bar fill the adjacent Dawn's Spiegelgarden. A 15th anniversary carries a particular weight this year, because organizers are in the middle of a campaign to actually buy the Spiegeltent outright, so that it can be rented out beyond Rochester and generate new revenue invested straight back into the festival. To help fund the purchase, festivalgoers can buy a branded floorboard that will be displayed each time the tent is built. "Each is made of French oak and will support the feet of artists and shows of years to come," said honorary co-chair Jennifer Leonard. "When we own our Spiegeltent, we'll be able to rent it beyond Rochester."
The roster of headliners has grown as famous as the festival itself. Patton Oswalt has played the Fringe. So have John Mulaney, who sold out Kodak Hall, Eddie Izzard, Mike Birbiglia, Tig Notaro, and Colin Jost. Last year Chelsea Handler topped the bill. This year the comedy headliner is Pete Davidson. But the festival has never been merely about famous names. Its real magic lives in the margins — in small, inventive productions and unlikely collaborations that hold the promise a Fringe makes: that somewhere in the swirl of hundreds of choices, there is something you have never seen before and maybe never imagined.
The grand spectacle tradition continues as well. Over the years, festivalgoers have watched the aerialists of BANDALOOP dance up the side of a 24-story downtown high-rise, and seen French company Plasticiens Volants fill Parcel 5 with enormous inflatable creatures in a U.S. premiere tour. In 2023, Cirque Inextremiste staged a U.S. premiere featuring a full-sized hot air balloon. Last year eVenti Verticali performed their airborne "SPHERE" over Parcel 5, and organizers promise more jaw-dropping surprises to come.
The festival has weathered difficult years with stubborn creativity. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, organizers pivoted to "Fringe at Home," a fully virtual festival of more than 170 online productions from Rochester and around the world. Fee has called that pivot "extremely difficult," but it kept the festival alive and even widened its audience, and a slice of virtual programming survived as one "small silver lining of the pandemic." The festival bounced back in 2022 with shows in 34 venues and hasn't slowed since. The event also works deliberately at accessibility, partnering with the Mary Cariola Center and local venues so that the majority of its stages are ADA-accessible, with sign-language interpretation, captioning, and physical accommodations coordinated across the festival.
There is, tucked into the 15-year story, a reminder of why the Fringe matters to a city. Before Rochester's Fringe debuted, the city had no arts festival of its kind — a surprising gap for a place with a wealth of venues and artists. Today the official tally stands at roughly 1.1 million visitors and more than 6,500 performances. The festival has helped inject new audiences into local venues year-round and has become, in the words of the New York Times, "one of the country's more prominent multidisciplinary events." And it does it all on a radical premise borrowed from Scotland: that anyone, from anywhere, can apply to be part of it, and that the best way to find brilliant art is to make room for all of it. "It does take a city to raise a Fringe," Fee said at this year's lineup unveiling at the Dryden Theatre. She is right — and this September, for the 15th time, the city will rise to the occasion.