Rogue Festival 2006
Fresno's craziest performance event gets even bigger as its audience grows.
Just look at the poster.
It tells the story of this year's Rogue Festival.
They're breathing fire.
Each year, the muse that adorns the Rogue Festival's poster changes. In the last four years, it has looked seductive, contemplative and earnest.
This year, she's breathing fire.
It says a lot about the festival. And a lot about Fresno, too, which is on the brink of a creative renaissance that the festival has helped energize.
What started as a wobbly little head-scratcher of a festival five years ago is now right up there with The Big Fresno Fair as an event that local folks -- albeit a bit of a different group of folks -- look forward to year-round.
The festival, which starts on Thursday, features more than 200 performances from 70 different companies spread out around 13 different venues over two weekends.
Performances include theater, music, dance, visual art, comedy and just about anything else someone can perform.
This year, more than any in the past, the Rogue has swagger.
It's not an experiment anymore. It's a machine. One that a large community of artists and aficionados work year-long to make sure lives up to its fire-breathing muse.
"I think it's the first perfect muse at the perfect time," says festival founder Marcel Nunis, who is co-directing this year's festival with John Jordan. "We've been sort of herding people into the Rogue in very subtle ways, and this year, we just went BOO!"
This year's in-your-face Rogue is bigger than ever, up from 150 performances last year. There are more venues, more companies and more anticipation.
The city of Fresno even has plans to proclaim March 2-11 "Rogue Performance Festival Week" on Tuesday.
Ain't that worth breathing a little fire?
Once again, performers are coming in from out of town. But most of the schedule still is made up of locals who put together shows that are unique, interesting, experimental and sometimes just plain weird.
They don't call it a fringe festival for nothing.
The year's enormous list of performers (go to www.roguefestival.com to see the whole thing, as well as times, venues and prices) includes fringe festival traveling act "Fear of a Brown Planet" by comedian Nile Seguin (a five-show run starts at 7 p.m. Friday at Starline), local off-kilter theater favorite Baba for Now's "Lost and Found on the 99" (starts at 7 p.m. Saturday at Dianna's Studio) and newcomers like "It's OK to Like Porn!," an NC-17 monologue by Aaron Bonilla about a student working in a sex shop (three shows, including 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Spectrum).
There are also two new local theater companies -- Epic and Artists Repertory Theatre -- making their debuts at the festival, along with the very-new Woodward Shakespeare Festival.
This year adds "Half Nekkid Thursday," a show/gathering at JavaWava that explores blogging as an art as bloggers post photos and accompanying stories about a part of their body.
"You look at the Rogue and there's so much," says co- director Jordan, who has a background in dance. "There's more than you can do. It's the opposite of there's nothing to do. Even if you wanted to do stuff all the time, you couldn't [see it all]."
This year's festival comes at the same time Fresno's creative class is on the rise.
The mayor's Creative Economy Council is pushing for the arts to be a big part of downtown revitalization.
Fresno bands are getting signed to record labels.
New theater companies are forming.
ArtHop is bustling.
It all points to a larger artistic revolution in Fresno -- something Rogue organizers are happy to be a part of.
"Here was the idea," Nunis says. "If we can show that this can actually work, that has to spur people on to start opening more venues for performance -- not just for the Rogue, but year-round."
His motives, he says, were selfish. He wanted to live in an artistic community. And he'd rather start a festival than move.
"Fresno has always had a low self-esteem about itself," Nunis says. "I think this is something that Fresno can be proud of, from that standpoint that, hey, something is happening here. All the artists and musicians and theater people -- kudos go to them for basically putting their faith into something like the Rogue."
The Rogue Festival started at Nunis' Theatre J'Nerique, but dates back even further, to his backyard, where friends gathered in the summer for "Weed-Whacker Theatre."
After attending the San Francisco Fringe Festival, he thought something similar could work in Fresno.
A friend called him on it. And the Rogue Festival was born.
Now, it operates with a core team of 15, with about 60 volunteers helping out during festival weeks.
This year it's also started getting attention from the circuit of fringe festivals -- there are about 20 in Canada and nine in the United States.
It's a sign that people outside of Fresno are realizing that something interesting is happening here, too.
"The Rogue has been a great catalyst, or maybe facilitator," says Jaguar Bennett, a comedian and writer who has been a part of the Rogue since its inception. This year, he's a performer and the promotion coordinator.
"Back in the bad old days, what I'd always hear is an artist saying 'I've got a great show [but] I can't get anybody to see it' [while] nonartist people were saying 'there's not anything to do in this town. I want to see something more.' It's really just a matter of bringing these two groups together. I think the Rogue is a great forum for that."
It's also a great forum to help people get to know their city and its local artists.
Every year, Tony Briceno at Veni Vidi Vici, one of the longtime venues, gets the same question: What's the Rogue Festival?
His answer: "It's a group of people who are creative getting together to expose themselves."
"There's a lot of people in Fresno that are not exposed," Briceno says, "and they needed that little push to get them out, so they can grow themselves."
One thing the Rogue organizers are adamant about is that attendees shouldn't just stick to what they already know.
In a festival full of oddities, try something different, they say.
"For an hour of your time, and $7 tops," Bennett says, "the Rogue can expose you to an entirely new experience. Everyone should take a risk and see something really new -- and you'll probably even enjoy it."
"Like it or not," echoes Nunis, "audiences want a sure thing. This festival is not about a sure thing. It's about trying stuff and bouncing it off an audience and seeing if it works. From that standpoint, it's actually pretty radical from where Fresno's concerned."
Not more radical than, say, breathing fire.
The reporter can be reached at mosegueda@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6479.
