In its newly completed fourth iteration, the Denver Fringe Festival experienced a 50 percent jump in growth over 2022 from 3,000 to 4,500 attendees, founder Ann Carey Sabbah reports.

Adventurous audiences took in 53 anything-goes shows spread over 14 venues in and around Denver’s RiNo and Five Points neighborhoods from June 8-11. That was in addition to an outdoor circus show, sidewalk pop-ups and the making of a live painting created at the intersection of 26th and Walnut streets over the span of the four-day festival. Another 300 took in free “Kids Fringe” activities at the Savoy Denver. Nothing cost more than $15.

Sabbah pulled all that off, along with 30 volunteers and 30 contracted staff, with a budget of just about $50,000. And 70 percent of ticket revenue, went paid back to the artists themselves.

“Frankly, I can’t believe we can do that much with so little,” Sabbah said. “I don’t know how we do it. That’s crazy.”

Fringe performances can include aerial, immersive, comedy, dance, magic, street performances and even a few good old-fashioned theater plays.

“Fringe is essentially alternative art that otherwise would not typically be seen in a standard theater,” Sabbah said. “It is all original, often provocative and always creative.: In other words, it is the flip side of traditional, large-scale, generously-funded performances. 

“It’s fresh, new, unconventional, intimate, boundary-pushing and often surprising,” she said. “Nothing else brings together such a broad diversity of voices and nowhere else can people access such a stimulating array of new performance art.”

But, more often than not, Fringe offerings turn out to be developing one-actor stage memoirs told by interesting people who do not necessarily have much of a theater background. I popped in on one queer woman showing-and-telling the story of how she got into a life of dance (“Shoes“). Another told tales of her rather ribald sex life (“The Year of Sluttery.”). On the other end of the experience spectrum, accomplished local playwright and actor Tracy Shaffer’s “Spontaneous Dance Party” told of her life’s intersection with a mermaid, a princess, a surfer, a cowboy, two movie stars and a zombie. As lives do.

The Fringe is a no-judgment zone. The Fringe fest is intentionally not curated to keep access open to as many artists as possible.

One big hit was “Reject,” written and performed by 80-year-old Anthony Meyers, a funny fly fisherman from Durango. His piece traced his history with rejection from youth through systemic ageism.

“When we find the strength to be resilient, we can turn the pain and heartache of arbitrary rejection into monuments of truth, beauty and art,” Meyers said. Sabbah saw Meyers’ performance as an example of “radical empowerment.”

The Fringe attracted audiences of all ages, but freaky theater tends to draw older audiences who may have had more exposure to experimental theater than younger audiences today. Not that all of it was freaky.

Visionbox Theatre, a deadly serious local acting studio, took a deadly serious approach to its original look at drug and alcohol addiction with “American Addict.”

Fringe, Sabbah said one of the distinctive parts of creating any fringe festival over time is the innate community-building aspect that goes along with it. “That can’t be underestimated, and it’s an essential part of the arts ecosystem that makes it possible for artists to boldly create and bring to audiences things that otherwise might never be seen,” she said.

Four years in, “I am just so incredibly excited,” she added. “It feels like it is coming together exactly as anyone would want it to.”