Conference Reflections: Liz Nichols

Why does Liz look like
Jaguar? Keep reading!

Liz Nichols got lost in the 398 (Folklore & Mythology) section of the public library at age ten, and hasn't found her way out yet! Liz is a professional storyteller, educator & Certified Laughter Leader, and was a presenter at the 2012 National Storytelling Conference, sharing her work as a TimeSlips™ facilitator, a creative storytelling method for people with dementia or memory loss. You can learn more about Liz's storytelling at her website, www.liznichols.net.

 I have been to 4 NSN Conferences over the past 15 years and enjoyed each in its own way. Of course it’s great to reconnect with folks and feel continuity, but for me discovering something or someone new and different is always the highlight.

At this year’s Conference one thing that was new to me was the programming of swaps and fringe performances concurrent with the workshop sessions. The idea of missing a workshop to attend a swap or fringe was tough for me, but I did it several times, and on Saturday afternoon I hit the jackpot. I’d already picked up “gig postcards” for various Fringes (just that self-promotional practice felt like the wider theater arts world permeating the storyteller atmosphere), and I couldn’t resist the sight of Christopher Agostino in the hotel hallway outside his session space, prepping the biggest, most colorful, most artsy box of face paints I’ve ever seen. When I heard the NYC accent from my hometown, that clinched it.

The show was called “Before Cave Walls... The Story on Our Skin”. Here’s what Christopher’s website (http://www.agostinoarts.com ) says about what he does:

Agostino & Co. Performing Arts presents exciting, innovative performances and entertainment for family audiences. We employ storytelling, movement, clowning, masks and costumes, sound and text, and "Transformation! Facepainting" to create original theatre which is both thought-provoking and entertaining for schools, theatres and events. Our "Transformation! Artists" are regularly seen at events and parties throughout the New York area turning thousands of people each year into fantastic works of art.

About 25–30 of us sat mesmerized as he started with a lecture/demo on the human history of self-transformation through mask and body art, calling up volunteer after volunteer to be painted as he talked. Then he wove several stories in, some traditional and some in a folktale mode that he and his kids had created – and he used us as his canvas to show characters like jaguar, snake and lizard, and settings like tropical island and African savannah.

While the performance itself was terrific, even more fun was the way those of us who volunteered became an instant family of sorts. Some of us decided to go to dinner together at a nearby restaurant, where we got lots of stares and some great conversations. Even Charlotte Blake Alston got up on stage for her Oracle Award presentation duties in her face paint, and at the reception that followed it was surreal to chat and sip wine, slipping in and out of the awareness that people seeing me were actually seeing Jaguar instead.

The larger importance of all this for me boiled down to a couple of insights:

1)   That it took an “oddball” experience for me to make a very special connection with a group of people who didn’t know each other at all before the conference.  It transcended the usual categories we fall into.

2)   The value of truly opening up our storytelling world to allies and friends with different backgrounds and identities – those for whom “storyteller” is a secondary aspect of their art and work.

Christopher told us that he had not been sure he would be welcome—he wouldn’t have come except that his Fringe application had been picked out of the hat. I’m glad to say he got a great response. It was an example of what Bill Harley talked about in his very thought-provoking closing address—that for the broader world, storytelling may be better recognized and valued as a “seed art” than stand-alone. And that rather than always complaining about that, we should see it as a positive, as a bridge.

Interview with a Rock and Roll Storyteller

Following up on my earlier review of "Dizzy Miss Lizzy's Roadside Revue presents Finn McCool," I'm sharing an interview with one of the company's founders, Debra Buonaccorsi. First, here's a description of how D.M.L.R.R. describes itself:

Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue is theatre and vaudeville. It’s rock and roll, bluegrass and Americana. It’s the spirit of Woody Guthrie and the dustbowl wrapped up in a gyspy punk. The spirit of the vagabond and the rebel. They are the voice of human kind’s savage soul. It’s pure storytelling with bare hands and authentic voices. Storytelling cranked up good and loud through a Telecaster and a Marshall amp.

DMLRR was founded in Washington DC by veteran actor/musicians Debra Buonaccorsi and Steve McWilliams. Led by their common love for theatre, rock and roll, and the traditions of American music and storytelling, they sought to bridge the gap between a night at the theatre and a rock concert.

Pictured: Debra Buonaccorsi (foreground) and Steve McWilliams (R) in "Dizzy Miss Lizzy's Roadside Revue presents Finn McCool" at the Capital Fringe Festival, July 22, 2010. Photo copyright 2010 by Paul Gillis Photography; used by permission.

How did you first hear about Fionn mac Cumhaill? And what was the inspiration to bring his origin story to life with a rock and roll show?

It was an idea that Steve and I had been tossing around for a while- we'd never nailed it down to one particular Irish legend. I was into all things Irish in high school- literature, music, culture, Bono etc… and my sister, upon returning from a trip to Ireland, brought me a book called Gods and Fighting Men, which was a book of Irish Mythology compiled by Lady Gregory (a good friend of William Butler Yeats). The stories were odd and funny, as mythology usually is, but they stuck with me. When my good friend Laura Keena, the actress who played the Druidess Bodhmal in the show, brought Finn McCool up as a possible subject for a DMLRR show, I was instantly inspired. Laura’s parents have this amazing wood carving that they brought back from their honeymoon in Ireland, of the Finn McCool legend. It has the faces of Finn and Finneces carved out, there’s a salmon in there somewhere. So, the Laura and I set off to googling Finn McCool, and called Steve. Being of Irish descent and having spent time in Ireland, Steve was familiar with Finn and loved the idea.

Rock and roll is an essential part of the DMLRR aesthetic. There is something so “everyman” about rock music. It’s unpretentious, unadorned, high energy, it’s visceral and cuts to the chase. That’s why we feel it suits us and our storytelling. The extra added bonus of Irish legend and rock music is that there was so much inspiration in Irish music and Irish rock music. The Irish have been telling great stories through music for centuries- so we thought it was a perfect marriage.

Did you consciously view this show as storytelling, as opposed to a rock opera, or a musical, or a live concept album?

We hate to think of ourselves as musical theatre. We do have the concept album in mind when we’re writing. We’d like all of our music to be able to stand alone as a concept album, without a script, in the tradition of The Who’s Tommy or Pink Floyd’s The Wall. We do think of ourselves as storytellers. It gives us license to have fun and play and interact with the audience; it frees us from the confines of “theatre.”

Were you worried about the audiences knowledge of this story (or lack thereof)?

Maybe we should have been more worried. There was a mention in a review about “barely decipherable Irish names.” That’s never stopped people from understanding Chekhov, and those are barely decipherable Russian names. Most of the negative comments about the show have been about the confusing story and names. I thought it was pretty simple stuff. We’re thinking in the re-write that we would add a story song to get all of the necessary exposition and background out. We’re also thinking of using multi-media “cave painting” -esque drawings to assist in that area.

What does the rock and roll revue format give you artistically that traditional musical theatre doesn't?

Both Steve and I have spent a lot of time in the musical theatre world and we both have grown dissatisfied with its limitations and conventions and we question the cultural relevance of musical theatre as an art form. We started out trying to tap into the traditions of vaudeville and burlesque—“low” forms of entertainment and we’re both rock and rollers—also considered a “low” form—in fact, I recently heard rock and rock described as a “derivative” form of music. Which I had to laugh at: what isn’t derivative? We’re all walking derivatives. Anyway, as I said earlier, the rock and roll revue format gives us freedom to have fun and be loose. There’s so much energy and immediacy in a rock show. Someone once said after seeing one of our shows, that we weren’t acting like we were having fun: we WERE having fun. Steve and I call Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue our playground. We simply invite others to come and play with us on our playground. You can play with us, or if you don’t like our games, you can take your ball and go home.

If you live in or near the Washington DC area, you can see the show again in 2011: DMLRR has recently completed a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to self-produce "Finn McCool" in March at the Woolly Mammoth.

Shout Out: Dizzy Miss Lizzy's Roadside Revue - Finn McCool

As an out-of-towner at the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington DC this past July, I had minimal information to go on in selecting which of the 137 productions to see. I did what research I could, visiting performer's websites, paying attention to local reviews... but with limited time and money, I mainly chose based on content: what was the show about? When I discovered, on the Fringe web site, that there would be a "post-apocalyptic, raucous, rock and roll, retelling of the Irish legend: Finn Mc Cool" by a group called Dizzy Miss Lizzy's Roadside Revue, I made time in my schedule.



Now, as a storyteller, I'd certainly heard of Fionn mac Cumhaill (my Celtic storytelling colleagues would never forgive me if I didn't use the Gaelic spelling). Over the years, I had heard a tale here or there of this Irish warrior-king of the Fianna, but I'd never read or heard Finn's origin story (And, truth be told, hearing one too many versions of the tall tale where Finn meets Cuchulainn did not inspire me to seek it out). So now here, I hoped, in DC, I'd get to hear it... gathered in the darkness with strangers to hear a story.

Only we weren't gathered in the dark. We were in a portable tent (a good omen for storytelling) set up as a temporary venue constructed for the duration of the Fringe, with a massive soundsystem (so it could double as the party spot) and a roof to keep the summer thundershowers off the outdoor thrust stage (seating on three sides). Though not air-conditioned (and in DC in July, that fact made it into every review of each show that played there), the venue was conveniently located next to the Fringe bar.

The stacks of amps, full drum kit, microphones, and numerous electric guitars on the stage made me realize this was not going to be your average storytelling set. The programs and postcards for the show set up the frame that the legend of Finn McCool would be presented as a rock and roll revue with six bands on the bill (With just 8 performers in the show, the "bands" were created with costume changes and sometimes switching up instruments).

And so, in music and song, we were treated to Finn's origin story: how his father, leader of the Fianna warriors, was killed by Goll Mac Morna; how his mother gave him up to be raised in secret by the druidess Bodhmall and the warrior woman Liath Luachra; and how Finn obtains the Salmon of Wisdom during his service to the poet and teacher Finneces, which enables him to claim his place as leader of the Fianna and defeat Goll.

Plot points were kept to a minimum to let the music do the heavy lifting of the show: and it worked. The music ranged from ballads (both acoustic and power) to art rock to stadium rock to blues... the troupe used a wide musical palette to vary the emotions through the arc of the story, and the audience cheered every time they recognized a trope (e.g. guitar solos, power duets, drinking song choruses). I was also impressed by the quality of the performers (though the show had a thrown-together, held-together-with-duct-tape thrift-store aesthetic, everyone in it, from the costumer to the composer to the performers had bona fide professional theatre chops). The singers--most with musical theatre backgrounds and many recognized by local critics and peers with theater awards--really delivered, as the variety of songs explored a vast emotional range.


Pictured: Audience and Felicia Curry, Matthew Schleigh (as Finn), and Debra Buonaccorsi. Photo copyright 2010 by Paul Gillis Photography; used by permission

This show called to mind ancient traditions of epic storytelling, where the community gathered to listen to stories of heroes, and achieve an altered state of consciousness. At the Fringe, our consciousness was being altered not only by our willingngess to engage with the drama, but the soaring melodies and the volume of the music, but by the venue's heat, humidity, and proximity to the performers (no one was farther than 15 feet from the stage). The availability of alcohol helped, too.

Furthermore, the posturing and tropes of rock and roll passed for modern day versions of the ritual required for the sharing of such epics. So, while in an oral culture, everyone in the audience would know the story (e.g. the Ramayana) , this performance gave the audience a story in a style everyone knew, though many weren't familiar with the characters or plot.

The creators of the show made sure that before and after each song, characters explained who they were, what they wanted, and where they were going. The extra exposition here was necessary for an audience unfamiliar with this epic. Some reviewers complained that the exposition muddied the dramatic arc, but I found it was not only necessary to get the story out, but actually a clever way to continue to build the trance state you want in an epic storytelling session (My own theory: by giving the logical brain narrative, we're compelled to engage more--to find out what happens next-- which allows us to continue in the performance environment towards a trance state).

Me? I’m predisposed to enjoying epic narration (my list of most enjoyable theatrical experiences include narration heavy shows like lookingglass theatre’s Argonautika and Metamorphoses, and Mabou Mines’ Peter and Wendy… and to which, I’m adding this production), so my enthusiasm for this show might differ from the typical DC theatregoer, but all in all... I found it a thoroughly delightful way to engage with an ancient myth, and in terms of artistic craft, an inventive and masterfully crafted performance experience.

If you're not in the DC area (and won't get a chance to see future productions of Finn McCool), you can get a mere taste of it: Check out this Flickr slide show with Paul Gillis' photos (link) while you play music from the show via DMLRR's page on Myspace. (The versions there are clean, but nowhere near as thrilling as hearing them performed live by sweaty rock and rollers a stone's throw from you!)

Coming up soon: an interview with one of the show's creators, Debra Buonaccorsi

In Conversation with Ellouise Schoettler

I can't quite remember the timeline of how I met Ellouise Schoettler. I'm sure it was via email first (perhaps on STORYTELL). She introduced herself in person at the Bay Area Storytelling Festival. I ran into her again in Fresno, California, at the Rogue Festival. And then I found her blog, and her online videos. I've learned a lot from Ellouise: we worked together in a MasterMind group, and this year, we each had shows at the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington DC (where I finally got to hear her tell in person... and she had one of the most focused, robust social media strategies for promoting her show of any of the 130+ artists in the Festival). While I was there, she asked me to come be interviewed on her cable television show, "Stories in Focus," and I was delighted to talk with her on camera about my work as a storyteller and storytelling blogger.



Considering we didn't plan our conversation at all, I thought we managed to sound reasonably coherent. Ellouise wanted to keep the conversation lively, so all I knew going in was that I could tell a story (about 10-12 minutes long) and that I should think of a tip to share at the end of the show.

2010 Capital Fringe Festival Wrap Up: Lessons Learned

I returned recently from ten days in Washington DC telling stories at the 5th annual Capital Fringe Festival. I'll have more to say both about my run of shows and the other performances I encountered, but here's a quick summary of some of my experiences.

1. Solo performers support solo performers.
2. A hundred and thirty shows to choose from? Doesn't matter how good your postcard is. You need buzz, targeted marketing, and personal connections. And, in DC in the summer, an air-conditioned venue.
   
3. And a good title.
4. Be nice to the venue manager. Among other things, she's in charge of the air conditioning.
5. Whether there are 12 people in the audience or 50 people, you still have to deliver.
   
6. Media outlets don't have storytelling critics. So if they send a theatre critic to review your show, they may not understand what you're doing.
7. Don't forget your vocal warmup.
8. Or your pants.
9. It is possible to do a show without air conditioning (in Washington DC in the summer), but it's not pleasant.
   
10. It is possible to do a show without a vocal warmup, but it's not pleasant.
11. It is possible to do a show without pants.

Why Memoir? Part 1

I was explaining to a visiting storyteller one of the secrets to success in improvised storytelling is an accident of the American storytelling scene: the popularity of personal memoir.

My improv storytelling ensemble isn't trying to re-create Gilgamesh, or the Canterbury Tales, or an Anansi story. Storytellers Unplugged often relies on the dramatic power of layering multiple stories. A collage of solo monologues. Given a theme, an image, or a single word, and we can riff all night in various voices.

So when I say, I don't tell personal stories, what I mean is, I don't tell my own personal stories. I'm not interested in telling them. But when it comes to improvisation: I can make up personal memoirs all night long. So can my other ensemble colleagues.

It's just not that difficult.

And audiences respond to it.

Sean Buvala touches on this point in one of his Roadblocks to Success postings.

I don't quite agree with his comparison of storytellers who rely on personal memoir and stand-up comics, because the intent of each type of performer is different, as is the persona/mask they present to their audience... but there's a question that's been bothering me for some time.

Why?

Why are storytelling audiences so interested in personal memoir? (To the point where one Festival, with two decades of production under its belt, got audience survey comments back: "Why are your performers telling folktales and myths? I came to hear stories.")

I know that oral history can be compelling. I'm fascinated by the life stories collected by StoryCorps, some even make my cry. And I totally understand why the Library of Congress wants to save all these stories, as history. But what's going on in the storytelling revival-- that the traditional stories that fueled the movement in the beginning are being pushed aside for more stories about lived experience?

Why is the boom in the alternative storytelling movement (e.g. the Moth, Fringe Festival solo performers, --and soon to switch places with the "mainstream" storytelling movement which is driving itself if not to the fringe, then to folksy irrelevance) so focused on personal memoir?

Why, as Ben Haggarty of the UK put it --after having been banished to a small classroom at 9:00 AM on a Friday morning in order to present his 2 hour version of Gilgamesh, as the Jonesborough-style festival that had hired him had nothing longer than a 50 minute available during the weekend-- do American storytelling festivals reserve the spotlight on the mainstage for stories that in any other culture are told around the kitchen table?

I've been poking around, asking this question. I'll be posting some responses from other storytellers, from academics, from various
You have theories? Feel free to post in the comments.

"We Rock Stories. We Rock Them Hard."

How come Minneapolis/St. Paul has all the cool kids? This past weekend in the Twin Cities you could hear both the O.G. storytellers, and the new kids on the block:

http://www.rockstarstorytellers.com
http://www.myspace.com/rockstarstorytellers

The alt-weekly City Pages says:

Let's face it—storytelling may be the primordial art form, born at the dawn of language. However, modern performance telling, with its small but dedicated, heavily middle-aged audience, has just never managed the same level of cool as rock 'n' roll. But this year, a group of 10 younger local performance artists banded together to take back some of the cultural cachet storytelling deserves. Optimistically calling themselves Rockstar Storytellers, they come to the stage from a multiplicity of backgrounds, from mime to radio monologue to traditional theater to slam poetry to competitive speech. Laden with Fringe Festival credentials, the cast promises to not just twiddle your emotional dial, but to take a monkey wrench to your presuppositions about what storytelling should be.

Go monkey wrench!

Exclusive interview later this month.

Oh I Wish I Were An Oscar Mayer Weiner

"An Angry White Guy in Chicago" is the blog of Chicago producer/writer/director/performer Don Hall. It should be required reading for any small theatre producer in this country. That includes storytelling event producers, and storytellers who perform for adult audiences.

Recently, he posted a video from Weird America of a man obsessed with hot dogs. A guy who devotes all of his creative energy to hot dogs. Don writes:

With our esoteric devotion to what has become, like opera or ballet or jazz, the province of a small, SMALL portion of American society (more people have webbed toes than see live theater monthly in this country) and our deep belief that other people will care if we only could reach them, aren't we much the same as Hot Dog J. Frank - The Willy Wonka of Meat?

Watch the hot dog video, then read Don's post.

Then read it again with the following substitutions:
Replace "Fringe theater" with "storytelling."
Replace "live theater" with "storytelling."
Replace "theatre artist" with "storyteller."

Not Your Mama's Bedtime Story

A school in my neighborhood is hosting their first ever storytelling festival in October. One of the parents there who is helping to organize it, is a local journalist, and thought this an appropriate time to do a survey of the local storytelling scene. She interviewed me via email, and later came to see a performance.

For someone writing about storytelling from the outside, I thought Autumn Stephens does a very good job... and kudos to the The East Bay Monthly for letting her go in-depth (the article weighs in at over four thousand words). (Link)

I'm hoping the photo here, by Lori Eames, helps get across the serious themes that stories can deal with, rather than encourage audiences to say "Hey, dude, when are you going to bring out the skull?"

Reflections from the Fringe: Improv Storytelling

So I've completed my run of You Go First at the San Francisco Fringe Festival, a show which was essentially an experiment conducted on the hypothesis that if you drop two experienced actors with a long history of improvisation on a stage with no script, no games, and no suggestions from the audience, that something interesting would happen.

We would create scenes in the moment, and either play them until the lighting technician turned out the lights, or we both left the stage. What happened next is that one or two of us would come back out onstage and start a new scene.

Often I would enter to start a new scene having no idea of how to set the next scene. For one thing, if I entered first, I had no way of knowing if my partner was going to come out and join me for a two person dialogue, or if I should start a monologue.

A few observations about the kinds of stories we ended up creating:

1. Many of our stories involved characters who used the Web to conduct part of their daily lives (whether it was looking up an address for a store to checking email to blogging to reading Wikipedia). The immediate challenge was the question of how do make that theatrically interesting? Because a stage picture of someone sitting down at a computer is not that compelling.

We figured that out quickly-- you make the search for information have high stakes-- essential to the character, so that the narrative depends on how this character reacts to finding or not finding this information.

I found it interesting the way different audience members reacted to our references to the digital landscape. On one night, blank looks from a couple in the audience made it fairly clear that the term "Wikipedia" held no meaning for them. On another, a reference to "poking" got giggles from a few in-the-know Facebook members in the audience, but if you were in the audience that night and aren't on Facebook, that phrase didn't have any meaning to you (although we made sure it did to the characters we were playing). Later in the show my partner did a monologue about MySpace in which he described what one could do with MySpace, mainly because it fit with the theme of the show we were creating (the theme of identity, and how we present ourselves to the world) but happily it gave context to those in the audience who weren't familiar with it.

Given that we were performing in San Francisco, a very "wired" city, we made a lot of presumptions about the extent that digital devices permeated our audiences' respective lives. No doubt we were guilty of overestimating the relevance of our own social networks.

But storytelling is filled with opportunities to introduce new words and new cultures. In fact, that's one of the benefits that storytellers hype when they try and drum up business in schools. Your students will learn new vocabulary, learn about cultures that are new to them....

Being aware of this, I once asked a group of fourth and fifth graders, "Do you know what a jackal is?" A few did, and volunteered that information with the group, and then I started with "This is the story of the Brahmin, the Tiger, and the Jackal."

"What's a Brahmin?" three of them cried in unison. My own children are similarly inclined to interrupt me at every opportunity to learn a new word.

Actually, I had to remove the term "crone" from my adult version of Rapunzel, because adults in my audience (even the storytellers!) didn't know what that word meant (and truth be told, I introduced the word in the moral to the story, so there wasn't enough context to decipher that I was referring to the witch who had imprisoned Rapunzel).

2. One of the storytellers who came to see the show was fascinated with the moments in between the words. "You two were listening so well to each other you could almost see it," she told us.

In the absence of a script or game, listening is the most valuable tool an improviser has onstage.

But I think that it has been my experience storytelling that allowed me to be comfortable standing onstage, in front of an audience, and not saying anything. The improviser inside me knew a story would come out eventually. The storyteller in me trusted that the audience could wait.

I don't think a handful of seconds is an unreasonable amount of time to not say anything onstage. Would you be comfortable not saying anything for 5 seconds in front of your audience? for ten? fifteen?

3. In improv, we're trained to jump to the next most obvious scene. If we set up audience expectations that a story will go somewhere, we should go somewhere, rather than delay.

In one story, where my character was convinced that another was stealing/dissolving my identity in bits and pieces, we chose to draw this story out, adding depth and color and backstory. Seeing how my character was dealing with other people besides his antagonist. Yes, it was delaying the inevitable. But I don't regret adding the extra texture. I like to think it made the inevitable final scene more satisfying.

In the moment I was mostly focusing on what was happening right then and there, but I knew in the back of my mind that we already made the call of how the story could end (my character would disappear completely) and the question was back there: when would we do that scene, if at all?

Funny how in traditional storytelling, knowing the ending ahead of time (we know how Jack and the Beanstalk is going to end-- and stick around long enough, you start to internalize the Aarne-Thomson tale types, and think, oh, this is AT 1620, I know how this will turn out) doesn't take away from the experience.

In fact, and I can't remember who said this (Duncan Williamson???? I'll have to track it down)-- knowing the ending and knowing the plot points are an essential part of enjoying traditional tales.

At the Fringe

One of the many reasons this blog is off to a slow start is that I'm gearing up for a show at the 2007 San Francisco Fringe Festival.

My show, You Go First, is not a storytelling show. Instead, I'm diving back into my roots in improvisation for this one.

One of the challenges of performing at a Fringe Festival is that you are your own producer (unless you've convinced someone else to take that role). The Festival gives you a stage, a person to help with the box office, a person to help out during the 60 minutes you are actually in the physical theater, and includes a description of your show in a program. But everything else (like filling the seats, promoting the show, making the costumes, securing rights, hiring musicians) is your own responsibility.

Having an improvised show (no set, no costumes, no props) simplifies things a bit. Cuts down on rehearsal time, too. (I'm relying on the performers decades-long experience in the craft, natural talent, and trust to pull this off onstage).

But there's a lot of details to attend to (in addition to a full time job, a family, the start of a new school year, etc.)... so I've been neglecting the blog. Been doing a "soft open." Once I'm up and running I'll announce the blog and let people know it's here.

As for Storytelling and Fringe Festivals... I have presented both a workshop and a poster session at the National Storytelling Conference on "Storytelling at the Fringe," as a way of explaining what a Fringe is, why storytellers would want to be there, and even help organize the National Storytelling Conference Fringe. I'll post more about that later.

If you're not familiar with Fringe Festivals, Slash Coleman has a new blog, "Fringe or Die," that is a nuts-and-bolts introduction of how to do it. He explains what Fringe Festivals are here.