IndyFringe is celebrating 20 years this month. Here's a guide to the festivities
Now the festival is the state's largest performing arts experience, said Paul Daily, executive director of IF Theatre.
The festival returns from Aug. 14 to 24, and it's celebrating its anniversary by paying homage to its roots. All of the show venues are within walking distance of each other in the Mass Ave area.
Buskers will perform for the first time since before the pandemic, extending the festivities. The street entertainment will include hand-pan music, breakdancing and performer Sarah Beth Nelson, who will create custom blessings and curses on handmade paper for patrons, Daily said.
"It creates that festival feel," he said. "Whenever you're in one of the venues, you feel like you're at a festival. And then you step out on the street, and if there's not reminders of that feel around you, it quickly disappears. So we want the whole avenue to feel like a festival the whole time."
The event will continue to highlight stories by artists who are Black, Indigenous and of color with the new Flanner Fringe Lab, a collaboration between Flanner House and IF Theatre. The former promotes quality of life on the northwest side by offering educational, economic and social resources to residents. The latter runs IndyFringe and provides separate year-round programming.
The lab, which was developed over the past year, began when Daily and Austin Dean Ashford, director of the Flanner House Arts Stage Academy, discussed how IndyFringe's opportunities could spread to more areas of Indianapolis.
"What would happen if we took (Fringe) to other parts and helped drive the economy of other communities in the city?" Daily said. "So in that conversation, it seemed like all the pieces fit together to do everything we wanted to do."
So far, 12 artists have gone through the lab and developed plays, he said. Six of the students and Ashford will appear in this year's IndyFringe. Their shows are marked in the program.
Fair food recommendations: We tried 12 wild Indiana State Fair dishes and ranked them from worst to best
This year's festival comprises 69 shows and 245 performances. Of the 515 artists 61% are from Indiana, 36% are national acts and 3% are international acts, according to IndyFringe's news release.
Here are a few highlights below. Additionally, "Fringe-a-palooza!", which celebrates the festival's 20th anniversary, will run from noon to 6 p.m. Aug. 17. Find the full schedule and showtimes at indyfringe.org/festival.
Shows will take place in the venues listed below. This year, the festival is returning to the Athenaeum's Basile Theatre and adding VisionLoft Events, where IndyFringe has built a custom stage. Find listings by venue at indyfringe.org.
Tickets are $22 for adults and $16 for children, students and ages 65 and up. Some shows have a pay-what-you-can option, which has a $10 minimum and will add $2 in fees. Six-ticket flex passes are $99, and those who buy one will be given an additional flex pass to give to someone who hasn't received one before. To buy tickets, visit indyfringe.org/festival/shows or call 317-210-4639.
This Indy newsletter has the best shows, art and eats
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
11 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Danielle Spencer, child star on ‘What's Happening!!,' dies at 60
The show focused on Roger 'Raj' Thomas (Ernest Thomas), Freddie 'Rerun' Stubbs (Fred Berry), and Dwayne Nelson (Haywood Nelson) as they grew up in Los Angeles. Ms. Spencer played Dee, Raj's younger sister, on the original show for 65 episodes, and then again on the reboot, 'What's Happening Now!!,' for 16 episodes. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'I had never seen any young Black girl in that type of spotlight, so I didn't have a reference point in the media as to how to deal with this opportunity,' Ms. Spencer told Jet Magazine in 2014. 'I was from the Bronx. What I did was use my own family as the reference on how to portray my character.' Advertisement She became best known for her line 'Ooh, I'm telling Mama,' which fans would regularly say to her for years after. Advertisement 'I chuckle because everyone thinks it's original, so I have to act like it's new every time,' she told Black America Web. Ms. Spencer did not originally get the part after auditioning, she said in an interview with a Richmond CBS affiliate television station in 2016. But a month after her audition, she got a call to head out to Los Angeles — a culture shock for someone who grew up in the Bronx. The character was written as someone who did not hold her tongue and could give as good as she received. Decades after the show went off the air, Ms. Spencer said that her portrayal wasn't inspired by her true personality — at least, not totally. 'I did not have an older brother,' Ms. Spencer told the CBS affiliate. 'However, I had a lot of pent up sassiness because I wanted to be like that. And I had an excuse, so why not?' Danielle Louise Spencer was born June 24, 1965, in the Bronx. Her father, James Spencer, was a civil servant in New York, while her mother, Cheryl (Smith) Spencer, was a schoolteacher. Her acting career began around age 8. 'I realized early on in my acting classes that it was fun memorizing lines, putting on makeup and pretending to be different characters,' she told Jet Magazine. 'Acting really is therapeutic because you're able to relate to your characters and figure out what makes them tick while also infusing your own personality.' After 'What's Happening Now!!' went off the air in 1988, Ms. Spencer studied veterinary medicine at Tuskegee University in Alabama, graduating with a doctorate in 1993. (She obtained an undergraduate degree in marine biology from UCLA.) Advertisement From her telling, her love of animals started as a young girl. 'Ever since I was 5 years old, I can recall bringing my first pet home to my mom,' she told an interviewer in 2012. 'She's like, 'What is this?' I'm saying, 'You have to keep the pet. I mean, you can't throw it out.' And I'm screaming and crying. And she let me.' Her veterinary career lasted several decades. While her acting career mostly stopped with the role of Dee Thomas, she did appear as a veterinarian in the 1997 film 'As Good as It Gets.' During the production of the second season of 'What's Happening!!,' Ms. Spencer and her stepfather, Tim Pelt, were involved in a car crash that ultimately killed Pelt. Ms. Spencer was in a coma for three weeks, with a broken pelvis and limbs. But she healed and returned in time for the show's final season. She later credited Pelt and her mother, Cheryl Pelt, with being huge influences on her acting career, including helping select auditions to attend. In addition to her mother, she is survived by her brother, Jeremy Pelt. Nearly 20 years after the crash, Ms. Spencer developed health problems related to it. In 2004, she began experiencing symptoms of spinal stenosis that left her close to paralysis, and that doctors attributed to the crash. In addition, she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014 and underwent a double mastectomy. She said she leaned on her family to get through it. 'They didn't want me to think of suicide even though I had considered it,' Ms. Spencer recalled in a 2016 interview on the Oprah Winfrey Network. She required emergency brain surgery in 2018. Advertisement In 2016, she was inducted into the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. 'I still can't believe it,' she told Black America Web when she found out about the honor. 'That's something people can look at for years to come, long after I'm gone.' This article originally appeared in
Indianapolis Star
11 hours ago
- Indianapolis Star
IndyStar reporter competes in Indiana State Fair cow milking contest
IndyStar reporter competes in Indiana State Fair cow milking contest IndyStar public safety reporter Jade Jackson tried her hand at milking a cow during the 2025 Indiana State Fair.
Los Angeles Times
13 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
L.A. jazz legend Bobby Bradford lost his Altadena home to wildfire. At 91, music is ‘all I have left'
Fifty years ago, L.A. free-jazz titan Bobby Bradford moved into a rambling, verdant house in Altadena. The cornet and trumpet virtuoso, who performed in Ornette Coleman's band and taught jazz history at Pomona College and Pasadena City College for decades, chose the neighborhood partly because it was bustling with artists. He finally had enough bedrooms for his young family to thrive in a bucolic corner of the city with deep Black roots. In January, Bradford's house burned down in the Eaton fire, alongside thousands of others in his cherished Altadena. At 91, he never imagined starting his life over again in tiny rented apartments, with decades of memories in cinders. Despite it all, he's still playing music. (He said that while he did not receive grants from major organizations such as MusiCares or Sweet Relief, a GoFundMe and others efforts by fellow musicians helped him replace his cherished horn.) At the Hammer Museum on Thursday, he'll revisit 'Stealin' Home,' a 2019 suite of original compositions inspired by his lifelong hero — the baseball legend and Dodgers' color-line-breaker Jackie Robinson, a man who knew about persevering through sudden, unrelenting adversity. 'That's all I have left,' Bradford said, pulling his horn out of its case to practice for the afternoon. 'I'm [91] years old. I don't have years to wait around to rebuild.' For now, Bradford lives a small back house on a quiet Pasadena residential street. It's his and his wife's fifth temporary residence since the Eaton fire, and they've done their best to make it a home. Bradford hung up vintage posters from old European jazz festivals and corralled enough equipment together to peaceably write music in the garage. Still, he misses his home in Altadena — both the physical neighborhood where he'd run into friends at the post office and the dream of Altadena, where working artists and multigenerational families could live next to nature at the edge of Los Angeles. 'We knew who all the musicians were. Even if we didn't spent much time all together, it did feel like one big community,' Bradford said. 'We knew players for the L.A. Phil, painters, dancers.' These days, there's a weariness in his eyes and gait, understandable after such a profound disruption in the twilight of his life. He's grateful that smaller local institutions have stepped up to provide places for him to practice his craft, even as insurance companies dragged him through a morass. 'The company said they won't insure me again because because I filed a claim on my house,' he said, bewildered. 'How is that my fault?' But he draws resilience from his recent music, which evokes the gigantic accomplishments and withering abuse Robinson faced as the first Black player in Major League Baseball. As a child in 1947, Bradford remembers listening to the moment Robinson took the field, and while he has always admired the feat, his understanding of Robinson has evolved with age. 'It was such a revelation to me as a kid, but later I was more interested in who the person was that would agree to be the sacrificial lamb,' Bradford said. 'How do you turn that into flesh-and-blood music? I began to think about him being called up, with a kind of call-and-response in the music.' The challenge Bradford gave himself — evoking Robinson's grace on the field and fears off it — caps a long career of adapting his art form to reflect and challenge the culture around him. With Coleman's band in the '50s and '60s, and on his own formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a style that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial song structures. He played on Coleman's 1972 LP 'Science Fiction,' alongside Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. 'Ornette played with so much raw feeling,' Bradford said. 'He showed me how the same note could be completely different if you played it in a different chord. I had to learn that to play his songs.' His longstanding collaboration with clarinetist John Carter set the template for post-bop in L.A., charged with possibility but lyrical and yearning. He's equally proud of his decades in academia, introducing young students to centuries of the Black American music that culminated in jazz, and the new ways of being that emerged from it. At both Pomona College and Pasadena City College (where Robinson attended and honed his athletic prowess), Bradford helped his students inhabit the double consciousness required of Black artists to survive, invent and advance their art forms in America — from slavery's field songs to Southern sacred music, to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and into the wilds of modernity. 'You always had that one kid who thinks he knows more about this than I do,' he said with a laugh. 'But then you make him understand that to get to this new Black identity, you have to understand what Louis Armstrong had to overcome, how he had to perform in certain ways in front of white people, so he could create this music.' He's been rehearsing with a mix of older and younger local musicians at Healing Force of the Universe, a beloved Pasadena record store and venue that reminds him of the makeshift jazz club he owned near Pasadena's Ice House in the '70s. Places like that are on edge in L.A. these days. Local clubs such as ETA and the Blue Whale (where Bradford recorded a live album in 2018) have closed or faced hard times postpandemic. Others, like the new Blue Note in Hollywood, have big aspirations. He's hopeful L.A. jazz — ever an improvisational art form — will survive and thrive even after the loss of a neighborhood like Altadena displaced so many artists. 'I remember someone coming into our club in the '70s and saying he hated the music we were playing. I asked him what he didn't like about it, and he said, 'Well, everything.' I told him, 'Maybe this isn't the place for you then,'' Bradford laughed. 'You can't live in Los Angeles without that spirit. There are always going to be new places to play.' He's worried about the country, though, as many once-settled questions about who belongs in America are called into doubt under the current president. January's wildfires proved to him, very intimately, that the most fixed points in one's life and community are vulnerable. Even Jackie Robinson, whose feats seemed an indisputable point of pride for all Americans, had his military career temporarily scrubbed from government websites in a recent purge against allegedly 'woke' history. 'I thought we had rowed ourselves across the River Jordan,' Bradford said, shaking his head. 'But now we're back on the other side again. We thought we had arrived.' Who knows how many years of performing Bradford has left. But as the sound of his melancholy horn arced through a sweltering Pasadena afternoon, one couldn't help but be grateful to still have him here playing, even after losing everything. 'You know, in his first game, in three times at bat, Jackie Robinson didn't get a hit,' he said. 'Folks said, 'Oh, it's so sad. We told you he couldn't play on a professional level.' But when you dig into it, you discover that he didn't get a hit at the game, but he laid down a sacrifice to score the winning run.'
