Minnesota Fringe Festival

Minnesota Fringe Festival
Current Fringe logo
Location(s)	Minneapolis, Minnesota
Selector	Unjuried
Foundation	1994
Founded by	Bob McFadden
Date(s)	August 3–13, 2017 (varies by year, see here for all past dates)
Type of play(s)	Comedy, drama, dance, musical, something different
Website

The Minnesota Fringe Festival is a performing arts festival held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, every summer, usually during the first two weeks in August. The eleven-day event, which features performing artists of many genres and disciplines, is one of many Fringe Festivals in North America. Minnesota Fringe is the largest nonjuried festival in the United States and the third-largest Fringe festival in North America. In 2013, Minnesota Fringe ran August 1–11 and featured 176 shows with a total of 895 performances in multiple venues around the city and distributed 50,007 tickets over the eleven-day event. In 2007, attendance and box office revenue were adversely affected by the collapse of the I-35W bridge the day before the festival opened.

Fringe shows are 60 minutes or less and appear in an official venue supplied by the festival for five performances stretched out over the festival's eleven days. Venues vary widely, with capacities ranging from 55 to over 400, and available configurations include black-box, proscenium, thrust or arena stages. Past venues include Minneapolis Theatre Garage, HUGE Improv Theater, Mixed Blood Theatre mainstage, Theatre de la Jeune Lune's side stage and the four stages at the University of Minnesota's Rarig Center. Normally, eleven shows will share a venue.

Performing companies that participate in the Fringe split a share of the ticket revenues with the festival and pay an application fee. Currently, the artists' share is 65 percent of the box office revenue.

The 2017 festival, which runs August 3-13, marks the 24th annual festival, the first under the leadership of executive director Dawn Bentley, who assumed this position on April 3, 2017, after former executive director Jeff D. Larson stepped down in October 2016.

Minnesota Fringe Festival is a founding member of United States Association of Fringe Festivals (USAFF).

The Minnesota Fringe Festival was created as part of a trend of fringe festival establishments in the United States. The country's first fringe was the Seattle Fringe Festival, founded in 1991, followed by the Orlando International Fringe Theater Festival and the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 1992 and 1993, respectively. Founded by Bob McFadden and operating with a budget of around $35,000, the Minnesota Fringe Festival first ran from June 23–July 2, 1994, in several theaters around the West Bank neighborhood of Minneapolis. In spite of the festival's name, the Minnesota Fringe did not serve as the fringe festival to any larger, more mainstream theater event. The first annual Fringe was described by Mark Pizzato as "quickly organized and underpublicized", with low attendance reported at its 53 shows, each of which cost six dollars or less and ran under 90 minutes. It drew 4,600 theatergoers and featured shows from companies hailing from three continents (North America, Asia, and Europe).