You’ll want to make sure to plan for the family fun around the corner at the Rochester Fringe Festival.
An array of creative and wildly entertaining activities, from an enormous luminarium to international comedians, will be in downtown's East End from September 10th to 21st.
Family highlights of the 12-day festival include matinees of main events and a full day designated for kids on "Kids Day", Saturday, September 21st. The festival is committed to making theater and art accessible to everyone in the community, so many events are free or low-cost and every effort is made to be inclusive. It’s worth looking over all of the options at rochesterfringe.com (or a paper guide here) for the right mix of events for your family and to make your plan for the most enriching Fringe possible!
Starting on the festival’s opening day and continuing throughout, visitors can tour Daedalum for $7 apiece (free for 1 and younger). Daedalum, by Architects of Air, is a giant labyrinth of spectacular color and light that is being assembled in the Spiegelgarden, the Fringe’s central area at East Avenue and Gibbs Street.
One of many sculptures of light designed by Alan Parkinson over the past 30 years, Daedalum has traveled the globe, wowing audiences from the Guggenheim in Barcelona to the Sydney Opera House.
Daedalum’s colorful maze—described by some as like walking in a stained-glass window or a pool of light—features otherworldly phenomenon like a rainbow-colored tree and a cavernous dome.
Another family-friendly headliner event will be the matinee of the world premiere Cirque du Fringe: Varieté, a circus-variety show mashup by festival favorites Matt and Heidi Morgan of Las Vegas. The matinee is scheduled Sept. 14 and 21 with tickets starting at $23. This show in the dazzling
Spiegeltent—a magical venue from Belgium—will feature outlandish comedy and thrilling feats from an eye-popping international cast, including aerialists, roller skates and unicycles, plus a world-renowned basketball juggler!
The U.K.’s favorite French comedian, Marcel Lucont, will put on his hilarious competition, “Les Enfants Terribles. A Gameshow for Awful Children,” in the Spiegeltent on Sept. 21 ($23 and up). Lucont channels his acerbic humor and quick-fire wit into a family-friendly game show pitting children against adults and each other to try to find the most awful child. (Time Out named this one of the top kids’ shows at the Edinburgh Fringe.)
Many of the festival’s children’s activities are concentrated on Kids Day, Sept. 21, and a lot of the action on Kids Day is free. Things kick off with the popular dance event Disco Kids at 11 a.m., followed by pumpkin painting, chalk art, and rock painting with the Child Advocacy Center of Greater Rochester.
Fringe Street Beat, a breaking competition at MLK Jr. Park, will take place throughout the afternoon and is free to watch. Food and beverages are available at the Spiegelgarden as well as brick-and-mortar merchants in and around the festival.
Now in its 13th year, the Rochester Fringe is rooted in a tradition of daring creativity that was established decades ago in Edinburgh, Scotland, where uninvited performers crashed a festival by performing in unusual locations on the outskirts. Rochester’s festival, the first in upstate New York, has been noted by the New York Times as “one of the country’s more prominent multidisciplinary events” and by CITY Magazine as Rochester’s “Best Arts Event.”