Tampa Bay’s creative festivals practically disappeared when COVID-19 struck. May and June brought a slew of virtual art exhibitions to Facebook Live and Zoom, but still no festivals.
Then Creative Loafing Tampa Bay got an email from Tampa Fringe announcing the first digital Tampa Fringe Festival. And it features a 3-D Virtual Ybor Experience. A virtual Ybor!? Wait, what, how!? I’m used to Fringe doing things a little differently, but still. I didn’t see this coming at all.
A little background for the Fringe uninitiated: The first Fringe Festival happened in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1947 when Rudolf Bing established the Edinburgh International Festival. Bing wanted the nascent performing arts festival to harness the healing power of art and re-unite Europe post-WWII.
Tampa Fringe Digital Festival
Aug. 1-16.
tampafringe.org
Notice I said that Bing started the Edinburgh “International” Festival and not the Edinburgh “Fringe” Festival. The Fringe festival happened by accident. You needed an invitation to perform at The Edinburgh International Festival, but eight uninvited theater groups showed up anyway, staging their own performances on the fringe of the festival. Thus, Fringe was born.
Since then, Fringe festivals have spread throughout the globe. There are now 250 Fringe Festivals around the world, including 94 in North America.
When COVID-19 struck, The World Fringe Congress, the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals and the United States Association of Fringe Festivals got together virtually via Zoom to compare notes.
“I was in a number of different conference calls every week with the various Fringe Festivals around the world,” Tampa Fringe Festival Producer Trish Parry tells CL.
“Basically, we compared what was happening at each festival in each city in each country and what level of support each festival was getting, financially. I can tell you right now that the U.S. government's never in support of the arts. It's been much better in other countries for sure. Us American Fringe Festivals were sitting in these meetings just kind of being sad about money. We realized here that we would have to do something to retain our funding, so we started discussing digital festivals."
Initially, the Fringe conglomerates pressed for doing something together. Then in typical Fringe fashion, a bunch of people went rogue. It's good to see that, pandemic or no pandemic, Fringe’s rebellious spirit remains intact.
When the London’s National Theatre started streaming recordings for free, everyone met again. This time they discussed how Fringe could still attract people and remain fringe-y in this environment. Different fringe festivals had divergent ideas about how to accomplish this. Many preferred live-streaming to capture theater’s ephemeral quality. Parry, however, was more interested in preserving Tampa Fringe’s community aspect.
“What’s unique about Fringe is the sense of community,” says Parry, “so creating the physical community seemed like a more unique and interesting challenge.”
“What if we made it 3-D, like a first-person game?'” Parry asked the group.
Festival Director William Glenn and Creative Director Rob Brown were initially hesitant to adopt the idea, considering the technical challenges of creating a 3-D virtual environment. But Glenn does have some experience with the free game engine Unity, so they ultimately agreed.
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Wyitt Carlile, a game designer and instructor at the Tampa Museum of Science and Industry, describes Unity as “a professional-grade game engine that anybody can use. It's just a matter of watching some basic tutorials on how to get started.”
Carlile also points out that Unity works with pretty much any level of game development.
“It can be a simple 2D game, like for a phone, or a completely immersive world,” says Carlile. “It's all a matter of how much time you want to put into it.”
Thanks to some assistance from the Small Business Administration, the Gobioff Foundation and the Ybor City Development Corporation, Tampa Fringe spent many months perfecting its fantasy Ybor.
The team started by scanning Ybor City buildings using the soon-to-sunset Display.land app and editing the shots in the Blender open-source 3-D creation suit. They enlisted some folks from the University of South Florida to create images of Ybor City’s most iconic landmarks, like the Columbia. Then Glenn plugged all these images into Unity, creating a 3-D fantasy version of Ybor City.
“Not everything is in there, but we tried to get what was important to us and to the culture of the area,” says Parry. This includes several Fringe-friendly businesses, and of course this year’s venues: Silver Meteor Gallery, Hillsborough Community College, The Drip, The Hub, and the Attic. They’re hoping to add The Honey Pot last minute if they can get a decent scan of it with the windows all boarded up.
"Also, we happened to find an old 3-D model of the old New World Brewery,” says Parry. “That was our Fringe Central in Year 1, so we're putting old New World back in Ybor."
And Ybor just wouldn’t be Ybor without roosters and a trolley.
To participate in this year’s digital Tampa Fringe Festival, go to the Tampa Fringe website and download the 3-D Virtual Ybor. Within Virtual Ybor, you use the mouse to change the direction you’re looking and the directional pad to change the direction you’re moving.
“If you approach a restaurant in Ybor that’s open for take-out, something will pop up, like: ‘Would you like to see Bernini’s menu on Uber Eats?’” says Parry. “If you pass by a retail store like Revolve, it’ll pop up with: ‘Would you like to check out Revolve’s Etsy store?’ And if you approach a venue, a list of shows pops up.”
This year, you can watch all the shows for free because Tampa Fringe is giving the artists stipends. Be on the lookout for Zoom beer tents within the virtual experience, where you can hang with the artists and your fellow virtual Ybor explorers. And if you want to explore Tampa outside of Ybor, you just stand on the trolley platform, and a trolley magically appears to transport you to your destination.
I’ve been watching Tampa Fringe transform Ybor City for one week a year since 2017. In these brief moments, Fringe turns the entire city into a celebration of counter-culture. It used to be only our local actors, writers, musicians and artists who’d notice. Now the rest of the world can see it too.
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This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 6, 2020.