Fringe Technicians: The Men and Women in Black
"We are sort of an under-the-radar group," said Debbie Tallen, a technician for the
Minnesota Fringe Festival.
It is true that most attendees of the Minnesota Fringe Festival will never encounter a Fringe technician. They are the people in the back of the theatre dressed in black and keeping out of the public eye. "Generally, we
like it that way," acknowledged Tallen.
Just before the 2008 fringe got underway, I sat down with Debbie at the Chatterbox Pub in Minneapolis. I have often interviewed performers for this column over the years, but never had I sat down one-on-one with a technician. And I thought it was odd that I'd neglected doing so. Many of my friends over the past few years have been the folks running the lights and the sound and everything else at the Fringe venues. Despite attempting to cover Fringe from many different angles, somehow I missed one right in front of me.
"This is my 5th Fringe," Debbie informed me. Her first Fringe Festival was 2004. The venue? The now defunct Hey City Theater, currently known as Hennepin Stages, which was upstairs from Fringe Central that year. Fringe technicians are assigned one specific venue that they work at throughout the festival. Each venue has two technicians that are each able to run any of the shows that are being presented at that venue. Debbie and her "Fringe Buddy" are scheduled at the Southern Theater this year. The Southern is a special venue in many respects, not the least of which is that the venue's sponsor, Gopher Stage Lighting, supplied special LED lights for use in that venue.
Tallen, who works for Gopher as her day job, explained that the strip lights at the rear of the stage are all LED instruments. "There was an idea that it would be really cool to have an all-LED venue."
"It was a cool idea, but it's just not extremely practical," at least for this year, according to Tallen. Instead, "we are using the strip lights as a backwash on the brick wall at the Southern. It's a scenic element. A little cool. A little different. We also brought in two moving lights and are running it on a moving light board."
Basically, the lights that Debbie was talking about were ones that can change color on the fly, rotate, pan from side to side, and so on. They are far more technically advanced than those in most Fringe venues.
At the time of our interview, however, the demands of the Southern as a venue was not first and foremost in Tallen's mind. She was focused on the more teamwork oriented days ahead. Loading in the Fringe, getting each space ready, can involve bringing in outside lighting, climbing up into catwalks to hang new lighting, changing color medium (we used to call them "gels") in the lights, and the like. All the technicians worked on all the venues prior to the festival's beginning.
For actors and producers in the Fringe Festival the banter between time slots is often about what shows they've seen and where. Producers get a number of passes that allow their company members, actors and otherwise, to see shows other than their own. For a Fringe Technician, it is likely that they can only talk about the shows at their specific venue. How much time do they have for seeing other shows? The most performances that Debbie has ever caught outside her own venue: two.
"The fringe is different because it is unlike any other experience you're going to have in the theatre," Debbie related as she expressed why she still does the Fringe every year, but has removed herself from doing tech work regularly in the theatre community. "It's great. For me personally, it's like this
two week vacation where I get to hang out with my buddies that I never get to see."
A two week vacation that involves eleven 3-hour technical rehearsals, hanging lights, dealing with anything that goes wrong, and running half the shows in her venue? That's a vacation to a woman who usually works at Gopher Lighting full-time and also is the director of the Figure Skating Club of Minneapolis.
"It's like a vacation. I'm working my butt off. I'm still working my full-time job, and my part-time job, and doing this, too. But, I'm happier than I could ever imagine. I feel so energized. There's an energy that comes with doing the Fringe that's just an awesome part of being in Minneapolis."
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