Seattle theaters have just taken two baby steps toward starting another fringe festival: The inaugural Solo Performance Festival will open on March 9 at Theatre Off Jackson, with work by the likes of Charles Leggett, Mark Boeker, Jonah Von Spreecken, and organizer Keira McDonald (it's not nearly as fun to read about as it will be to watch) and Theater Schmeater has announced its Open Stage festival (12 acts, one week, timed to dovetail with the summer fringe-festival circuit). Another fringe festival would be okay—festivals give locals a low-stakes forum to present new work and attract out-of-town fringe artists—but not terribly exciting.
Why not aspire to something more ambitious than just another fringe festival? Portland has the curated TBA festival (last year: Laurie Anderson, Mariana Abramovic, Kiki & Herb, lots more), Vancouver has PuSh (smaller than TBA but still exciting): Why, of the three major cities in the Pacific corridor, don't we have a significant contemporary art festival?
Partly it's Seattle sluggishness (can you already hear people bitching about parking?) and partly it's anxiety. The fear is that there aren't enough audience members and donors to go around, that a festival would step on toes (of, say, On the Boards) and wind up cannibalizing existing arts groups. (Norman Armour, the executive director of PuSh, argues that that only happens when a festival is poorly planned and shoved down a city's throat.)
Why do it: (1) To raise the bar. Much of our art is far less forward-thinking than we think it is and we won't start pushing ourselves to be more rigorous and adventurous unless we see what is going on elsewhere. (2) To show off our best artists to visiting presenters and artistic directors who can bring them to New York, Tokyo, wherever. (3) For fun. Imagine the city given over to intellectual and artistic electricity, a carnival atmosphere. Symposia and lectures in the morning, gallery shows in the afternoon, evening performances: from Dumb Type to Mike Daisey, the Kronos Quartet to the Blow, afterparties, rubbing up against people and ideas from Berlin, Rio, Kyoto, New York. Then getting up in the morning and heading back into the fray.
How to do it: Loosen government purse strings by convincing the city that a festival would be good for cultural tourism, that it would be good for that "world-class city" gong they keep beating. (The 2006 PuSh festival cost $800,000 Canadian—$690,000 American—including in-kind donations. That's .02 percent of the estimated cost to rebuild the viaduct.)
Talk with folks who already import performance to Seattle: the Moore and Paramount, On the Boards, the UW World Series, the International Children's Festival, Velocity, One Reel. Talk with producing theaters about showing off locals. But why stop at performance? The most intense creative energy in Seattle seems to be bubbling in the art world. Harness the connections and imaginations at Western Bridge, the Henry, Crawl Space, and the rest. Imagine Art Basel Northwest, with performance.
Yeah, it would screw up parking. And it would be so totally worth it.