September 22, 2026
The Rochester Fringe Festival starts long before the first spotlight comes on. Erica Fee, the festival's CEO and producer, arrives at Rochester Living holding a 128 page guide and enough news to fill it. Her yearly visit has become a reminder that Rochester's most adventurous stretch of the calendar is close.
The fifteenth Fringe runs September 15 through 26. Its 715 performances spread across 45 venues, from familiar theaters to sites that ask an audience to look at the city differently. Fee calls it a spectacle. The guide makes a strong case for that word.
Fee remembers the first festival as an experiment with a short runway. The team planned for four years, knowing rain, attendance, and a long list of factors outside their control could change the plan at any moment. Thirty thousand people came that first year. The festival now draws about 100,000 people. Fifteen years later, Fee still talks about it as work that needs to earn its audience every fall.
The festival has grand rooms such as Eastman Theater and Blackfriars Theatre. It also has four parked cars, a camper van, an old growth forest, Mount Hope Cemetery, and a downtown park. The contrast is the point. Fringe gives performers room to make work for spaces that were never built as stages.
Dashboard Dramas shows how far that idea can go. Two audience members sit in the back seat of a parked car for a ten minute play, then move to the next car. Four locally written short plays make up the roughly 45 minute experience. Fee remembers people calling it strange when it first arrived. The concept is now familiar enough to sell out without much explanation.
That change matters to Fee. A Fringe festival should give artists room to test an idea in public and give people a chance to meet live performance outside the usual auditorium rules. Rochester audiences have shown they will show up for the risk. Fee says the city has always had that appetite, even when early skeptics called Rochester too conservative for this kind of work.
The effect reaches past a single ticket. Early in the festival's life, younger attendees sometimes needed help figuring out how to reach a downtown venue. Fee says that is no longer the case. People know the streets, gather downtown in groups, and move from one room or outdoor site to another as the night develops.
That movement supports the venues themselves. Fringe brings new audiences into theaters, dance spaces, bars, restaurants, and public areas that need people coming back through the rest of the year. Fee sees that as part of the mission. A theater is expensive and specialized to build. Keeping people curious about those spaces helps keep the local arts ecosystem healthy.
September 18 and 19 bring the festival's largest new outdoor idea. Parcel 5 and Gibbs Street will become what Fee calls a mini Montreal, inspired by the outdoor circus culture of Montreal. Eight companies are scheduled from 5 to 10 p.m., with performances set one after another so people can take in several shows during the evening.
The lineup includes aerial work, ladders, trapeze, juggling, contemporary circus, and a school bus with trampolines on top. Chicago company Aloft performs The Pieces, an aerial circus piece that uses stacked ladders for height. Quebec City's Flip Fabrique brings Summer Break, a high energy show built around that first day of summer vacation feeling. Food trucks and bars will be part of the free outdoor event.
Fee says the large free outdoor shows were built to give people a reason to come downtown for something they cannot see on an ordinary evening. Rochester Fringe is the only Fringe festival in the world that puts on this kind of free spectacle show. The approach worked from the beginning, when a founding board member urged Fee to bring in a company that rappelled down a building. She had thought it was outside the standard Fringe formula. He was right that Rochester did not need the standard formula.
The Spiegeltent has become one of the festival's recognizable homes. Fee says Fringe already owns the tent and is now about 85 percent of the way through a $1.575 million campaign to pay off the financing. Owning it removes the annual challenge of shipping a tent across the ocean and gives Rochester a mirror tent that can be rented to other arts groups.
The tent will hold Cirque du Fringe: Anchors Aweigh each night, led by Matt and Heidi Morgan. Fee describes the Las Vegas based performers as longtime stars of the festival's circus programming. Marcel Lucont's Wine List also arrives for three nights, September 18 through 20, inviting the audience to share their grapes and grievances.
Fringe keeps its programming restless by splitting the work. Fee and her team curate some shows, including major outdoor events and headliners. The venues program the rest. A single application on the festival website lets artists identify the spaces they want to play. Venue teams then decide who fits their own rooms and audiences.
That system brought thousands of applications this year. Fee estimates the festival will host 2,500 artists, producers, stage managers, and other people connected to the shows. Roughly 20 percent come from outside the region. The draw is both practical and creative. Artists get a platform. Audiences get the live feedback loop that helps a performance find its shape.
Fee still travels to Edinburgh to see work and watch the audience as closely as the stage. She looks for the quiet concentration that tells her people are locked in. She also looks for a show that makes her think Rochester should take a chance on it. Her choices for this year range from an aerial circus company to a French comic character called Marcel Lucont.
Most Fringe shows run about an hour, which leaves room to put more than one on a night. Fee loves seeing a guide with dog eared pages, circles around titles, and a personal plan made by date, age range, or pure curiosity. The app and website help, but the printed guide still carries that feeling of choosing what comes next.
Big names are part of the program. Pete Davidson plays Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre on Friday, September 25. The festival will also screen The King of Staten Island outdoors one night. Smaller rooms carry their own pull. The Garden Studio hosts Tea Party at the End of the World, an immersive Arctic Circle inspired piece for 30 people, and Just to Be Close to You, a show built around a worn out lounge singer character.
The 2026 guide is ready, and Fee's message is simple. Pick something that feels a little unfamiliar, get downtown, and see what happens. The festival is there for people who like something new, enjoy community, and want a night that does not feel like every other night in Rochester.
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