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San Diego’s Fringe Festival includes award-winning New Zealand act
The Only Bones Project challenges storytellers to strip things down to essentials
Ham for Cam: In the OB Theater’s Dressing Room, Fay Van Der Meulen, Daniel Nodder
Video:
GOLDEN DREAMS: SD’s Fringe Festival includes award-winning New Zealand act The Only Bones Project
When I hear Fringe Festival, I think of Scotland’s Edinburgh. Its Fringe Festival is as famous as its mainstream one, and it ain’t new. It started in 1947, when eight drama groups turned up uninvited and performed anyway. There was some precedent: a century before that, you had the French Salon’s Salon Des Réfusés, when all those who weren’t accepted into the main exhibition barged in and put on their own show (thanks, it turns out, to backing from a sympathetic Napoleon III). The event produced the likes of Cezanne, Pissarro, Whistler, and Manet.
Now, fringe is more mainstream. There are 250 Fringe Festivals around the globe, 50 in the United States. San Diego’s Fringe Festival has become a wildly popular artists’ “entry-level” (read: uncensored) exposure to the world of live and often experimental theater.
It was my true love Diane who called and said, “Manson! New Zealand is sending a ridiculous act over to your Fringe Festival. Git over there!” So I got over there.
On this particular Wednesday (the crowded Farmers Market night), Daniel Nodder and Fay Van Der Meulen have turned up at the OB Playhouse for a technical rehearsal. “We won the San Diego Touring Award at the New Zealand Fringe Festival in Wellington,” says Nodder. “It’s an exchange, so we come here, and someone from San Diego will be going over to perform in our next New Zealand Fringe Festival. It was the first time that our act has won a significant award. And we’ve been doing the Fringe for a few years now.”
Big story, small space: It’s all about the physical
Nodder’s winning act needs to be seen, not described, but here goes anyway: “It’s part of what’s called The Only Bones Project. It’s a challenge, basically. Various physical performers — clowns, acrobats, circus people, anyone — can bring their talents to it. And the challenge is you have to make a show featuring no more than one performer, one light, no text, so no words, light narrative, no set, no props, and all [performed] inside a square meter of space. So that’s the challenge: to entertain people for 50 minutes, all within the square. You can bend the rules, but basically you have to make something as bare-bones as you can. Another Kiwi invented this, Thom Monckton, who studied at the Lecoq School of Physical Theater in Paris.” Lecoq’s idea was to change the emphasis in theater from word-based to body-centered. “He created the first one and premiered it in 2016. And I’m the 11th one.”
So what does he actually do? “In terms of my movement, I come from a hip hop dance background, and then that’s become infused with physical theater, contemporary dance, mime and clown. So it’s a mesh of a bunch of styles to create a new form and make it work.”
But what act did he actually decide to create? “I settled on a space odyssey. So, the show is very silly but also cosmic-themed. We go from me looking over the universe to me being in it, and creating characters in it, and it’s all about the death and life-cycle of the universe. I create the Big Bang with my hand. All of the planets and stars and nebulae form. It’s the idea of things coming together and breaking. So shooom! Everything breaks apart, then prrrrrshsh! Things form. I do the death of the dinosaurs, so I create the dinosaurs and then kill them all with a meteor. I kind of train the audience to understand.”
Remember, it’s Fringe. And unlike a $100 million fantasy movie which serves up imaginary worlds pre-digested, here, you have to put your own imagination to work. But do people actually get it? “Trust me,” says this remarkable actor, “they get it.”
Here's something you might be interested in.
San Diego’s Fringe Festival includes award-winning New Zealand act
The Only Bones Project challenges storytellers to strip things down to essentials
San Diego’s Fringe Festival includes award-winning New Zealand act
The Only Bones Project challenges storytellers to strip things down to essentials
Ham for Cam: In the OB Theater’s Dressing Room, Fay Van Der Meulen, Daniel Nodder
Video:
GOLDEN DREAMS: SD’s Fringe Festival includes award-winning New Zealand act The Only Bones Project
When I hear Fringe Festival, I think of Scotland’s Edinburgh. Its Fringe Festival is as famous as its mainstream one, and it ain’t new. It started in 1947, when eight drama groups turned up uninvited and performed anyway. There was some precedent: a century before that, you had the French Salon’s Salon Des Réfusés, when all those who weren’t accepted into the main exhibition barged in and put on their own show (thanks, it turns out, to backing from a sympathetic Napoleon III). The event produced the likes of Cezanne, Pissarro, Whistler, and Manet.
Now, fringe is more mainstream. There are 250 Fringe Festivals around the globe, 50 in the United States. San Diego’s Fringe Festival has become a wildly popular artists’ “entry-level” (read: uncensored) exposure to the world of live and often experimental theater.
It was my true love Diane who called and said, “Manson! New Zealand is sending a ridiculous act over to your Fringe Festival. Git over there!” So I got over there.
On this particular Wednesday (the crowded Farmers Market night), Daniel Nodder and Fay Van Der Meulen have turned up at the OB Playhouse for a technical rehearsal. “We won the San Diego Touring Award at the New Zealand Fringe Festival in Wellington,” says Nodder. “It’s an exchange, so we come here, and someone from San Diego will be going over to perform in our next New Zealand Fringe Festival. It was the first time that our act has won a significant award. And we’ve been doing the Fringe for a few years now.”
Big story, small space: It’s all about the physical
Nodder’s winning act needs to be seen, not described, but here goes anyway: “It’s part of what’s called The Only Bones Project. It’s a challenge, basically. Various physical performers — clowns, acrobats, circus people, anyone — can bring their talents to it. And the challenge is you have to make a show featuring no more than one performer, one light, no text, so no words, light narrative, no set, no props, and all [performed] inside a square meter of space. So that’s the challenge: to entertain people for 50 minutes, all within the square. You can bend the rules, but basically you have to make something as bare-bones as you can. Another Kiwi invented this, Thom Monckton, who studied at the Lecoq School of Physical Theater in Paris.” Lecoq’s idea was to change the emphasis in theater from word-based to body-centered. “He created the first one and premiered it in 2016. And I’m the 11th one.”
So what does he actually do? “In terms of my movement, I come from a hip hop dance background, and then that’s become infused with physical theater, contemporary dance, mime and clown. So it’s a mesh of a bunch of styles to create a new form and make it work.”
But what act did he actually decide to create? “I settled on a space odyssey. So, the show is very silly but also cosmic-themed. We go from me looking over the universe to me being in it, and creating characters in it, and it’s all about the death and life-cycle of the universe. I create the Big Bang with my hand. All of the planets and stars and nebulae form. It’s the idea of things coming together and breaking. So shooom! Everything breaks apart, then prrrrrshsh! Things form. I do the death of the dinosaurs, so I create the dinosaurs and then kill them all with a meteor. I kind of train the audience to understand.”
Remember, it’s Fringe. And unlike a $100 million fantasy movie which serves up imaginary worlds pre-digested, here, you have to put your own imagination to work. But do people actually get it? “Trust me,” says this remarkable actor, “they get it.”
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