Austin's FronteraFest Prepares Its 29th Session, January 16 - February 17, 2024

FronteraFest 2024 Opens 29th Year 

 

Tickets are now available for Austin’s longest-running performance festival www.hydeparktheatre.org 

The Short Fringe – January 16  – February 17, 2024 Hyde Park Theatre – 511 West 43rd Street   

Mi Casa es Su Teatro – Saturday, February 10 , 2024

 

FronteraFest, Austin’s longest-running and most beloved performance festival returns for its 29th year. A unique collaboration between Hyde Park Theatre and ScriptWorks, FronteraFest attracts actors, artists, poets, dancers, and performers of all types throughout Texas and beyond. 

 

FronteraFest will include two different components. The Short Fringe (pieces 25 minutes or less) will run the entirety of the festival (January 16 – February 17), taking place at Hyde Park Theatre, 511 West 43rd Street. Mi Casa es Su Teatro takes place one day only on Saturday, February 10, primarily in private Austin homes.  

 

FronteraFest has attracted worldwide recognition and the participation of thousands during its nearly three-decade history. Recently, FronteraFest was honored with a Special Recognition from Austin’s B. Iden Payne Awards Council for “Arts Incubation”.  

 

FronteraFest is a synergistic, creative collaboration between two well-known Texas arts organizations; Hyde Park Theatre, an award-winning professional theatre in Central Austin, and ScriptWorks, a playwright development and service organization with members in Austin, the state, and around the country. 

 

Over the past quarter-century, performers have traveled from as far as Chang Ung University in Seoul, South Korea to perform a fascinating adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in both Korean and English. Other U.S. cities represented in this year’s FronteraFest include New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston among others.  

 

Thanks to its emphasis on nurturing creative freedom, FronteraFest is widely regarded as an incubator for new work. Many performances that germinated at FronteraFest have catapulted to become full-length, professional, and often award-winning productions. Austin notables Steven Tomlinson, Ron Berry, Hans Frank, Cyndi Williams, and many others have been widely recognized for their work.  

 

Many familiar faces and much-anticipated performers will return in 2024, including stage veterans Zell Miller III and Hank Schwemmer. Former Best of Fest participants returning include Jennine DOC Kreuger, Tristan Mercado, Janet Maykus and Tom Booker, Teresa Johnson and Gloria C. Adams, Collin Carrothers, Pamela Paek, and The Knuckleball Now (Mike D’Alonzon, Lee Eddy, Craig Kotfas, and Ace Manning), among others.

 

While the spirit of the festival is collaborative rather than competitive, there are weekly three-person voting panels as well as audience voting in the Short Fringe component. The highest ranked performances each week get to return to the stage each Saturday of the week they performed in the Short Fringe for a ‘Best of Week’ showcase.  

The final week of the Short Fringe is reserved for ‘Best of Fest’, which consists of all the pieces selected from each ‘Best of Week’, in addition to a special ‘Wild Card’ night which are pieces selected by FronteraFest staff and crew. 

Christina J. Moore, the Executive Artistic Director of ScriptWorks states that FronteraFest has provided an important outlet for artists of all age and experience levels. “FronteraFest began as a service to the community. Everyone has a story, and FronteraFest provides artists a safe and nurturing environment to tell those stories. We were very proud to receive the ‘Arts Incubator’ recognition this year from the B. Iden Payne Awards Committee, because it is exactly what we’ve all been working to achieve over the past 29 years.”   

Hyde Park Theatre Artistic Director, Ken Webster, who has been involved in every FronteraFest since the first Fest in 1993 agrees. “We’ve always said to ‘expect the unexpected’ when it comes to FronteraFest, and it’s accurate. Each year we host performances of all kinds: short plays, monologues, improv, dance, stand-up comedy, cabaret, performance art, and all kinds of experimentation. You never know what you’re going to see, which lends an element of excitement to the entire experience, whether you are a performer or an audience member. The incubator aspect allows established performers the freedom to experiment, and newcomer artists the opportunity to have their work seen.” 

Sponsors of FronteraFest include The Parlor, Worley Printing, and Travis Heights Wine and Spirits. Full details, show/performer line-ups and ticket information can be found at www.hydeparktheatre.org.  

 

About Hyde Park Theatre: 

Hyde Park Theatre develops writers, designers, directors, and actors from within the Austin community, while at the same time producing works by exciting new and established voices of the alternative theatre scene. We will work with a broad and diverse base of local artists to produce theater that confronts, challenges, and entertains. We have a strong commitment to paying local writers, actors, and designers a decent wage for their work, and to expanding the base of working artists in Austin. We hope to diversify and expand the audience for theater in Austin, making theater accessible and essential across lines of income, class, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. www.hydeparktheatre.org    

About ScriptWorks: 

ScriptWorks is a playwright driven organization that seeks to promote the craft of dramatic writing and to protect the playwright's integrity by encouraging playwright initiative and harnessing collective potential. www.scriptworks.org. 

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FronteraFest Short Fringe
by various
Hyde Park Theatre

January 17 - February 18, 2023, Tuesdays - Saturdays

Every Tuesday - Friday night through February 11, we present a new, unjuried bill of four or five plays no longer than 25 minutes each. Brilliant monologues? Plays in progress? Comedy improv? Cabaret singers? Avant-garde dance? Short films? Multimedia? We've seen it all. See this year's complete Short Fringe listings and ticket links, updated frequently. Most nights will sell out, so don't delay.

Every Saturday night through February 12 is a juried "Best of the Week" performance: these tickets go even faster, so grab your Best of Week tickets now.

 

The final week of the festival, February 14-18, is the juried "Best of the Fest"--with a few wild cards thrown in. These tickets go fastest of all so get your Best of Fest tickets as soon as possible.