Three highlights from the 2024 Victoria Fringe Festival
Photo courtesy of Intrepid Theatre.
The end of summer marks the start of the annual Victoria Fringe Festival, a theatre event that brings performers of all kinds together to produce a variety of wild and heartfelt shows. There’s magic, musical acts, one-person performances, improvisation, plays, experimental theatre… all you can imagine and more.
Of the 28 total shows of the Victoria Fringe 2024, the Martlet saw 14. Here are our stand-out productions.
Free Kittens is a dark, raw, and hilarious autobiographical one-woman show created, written, and performed by Megan Milton, a disabled comedian from Vancouver, and directed by Danielle Florence. Milton tackles a variety of topics, including abortion, growing up in poverty, trauma, and mother-daughter relationships. The daughter of a Catholic teenage mother, Milton brought a new, thought-provoking perspective to the conversation of reproductive rights and freedoms as someone who is passionately pro-choice but was almost an abortion herself.
Diving deep from the start, Milton began by telling her audience that her parents met at a gas station, she was conceived at a gas station, and they broke up at that same gas station. From accidentally learning her father was a drug dealer to realising she ruined her mother’s life, Milton walked the audience through her experiences growing up poor in a house full of unfixed cats in the bible belt of B.C.
Milton excellently incorporates a serious commentary on reproductive rights, childhood trauma, growing up in poverty, and the lasting effects of these experiences in adulthood into her comedic dialogue. At the end, she left time for a brief Q&A period, joking that it was to stop people from coming up to her at a bar and asking about her trauma after the show. Milton told the audience that she has been doing the show since the early 2000s, transforming it over nearly two decades. Free Kittens is a phenomenal one-person show that will definitely be remembered.
Multiple Organism by Chloe Ziner & Jessica Gabriel was a surrealist comedy using puppets, projections, and performers’ bodies to tell a story of how bodies are seen by others. Full of crass humour, the audience journeys down a toilet and back as our heroine gradually learns to love her body after a bad relationship with a perverted artist. The main draw of this show was the bizarre world created by deft shadow puppetry. The performers projected a mouth onto the naked body of another while their breasts were painted as eyes. The plot was pretty nonsensical, but the way performers interacted with projections and puppets was enough of a draw in itself. If you have a chance to see what Mind of Snail Puppet Co. has created, definitely check it out.
Tango, It Takes Two marks the return of the group PointeTango, Alexander Richardson and Erin Scott-Kafadar, from Argentina to Victoria. The draw of this show was simple: the physical capability of the two dancers, enhanced by pointe ballet shoes. Sometimes wearing one ballet shoe, sometimes both, the pair dance expertly to music and spoken poetry. There was great tension in seeing one dancer walk out with ballet shoes and wondering what on earth the choreography was going to be. Rife with lifts and tosses, Tango, It Takes Two showcased the performers’ mastery of dance.
Of the many one-person shows at Fringe (and there are many, many one-person shows), the performance that outshone all the others this year was Good Grief. It was a personal exploration of grieving the death of a father and rebuilding a relationship with a mother. Death can be at once deeply tragic and funny, and writer/performer James Gangl did a fantastic job juggling these two tones. Accompanied by sound effects and made dazzling by Gangl’s performance, the script shone. It was a resonant show, raw in its exploration of the need simply to be heard and understood after trauma.
If you have the chance to see a Fringe festival, be it in Victoria or elsewhere, you’re bound to discover something that resonates with you. If you’re around next summer, check it out! And keep an eye out for these acts’ next appearances. You don’t want to miss them.
