New Chinatown festival celebrates performing arts

Hawaii has festivals for Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Filipinos. It has festivals for aloha, storytelling and gay pride.

Improv group "Oil in the Alley," along with local and visiting acts, will perform at the Oahu Fringe Festival. —Courtesy Photo

Now it has a Fringe Festival, which, as much as it sounds like it is a Festival for Everything Else, is in fact a festival for performing arts that defy categorization. And that’s really the point, said festival director Misa Tupou.

“At a food market or a farmers market, for example, there’s a variety of stuff you can get,” he said. “At a fringe festival … you are able to see one show, then you are able to see another show. So it generates a huge, huge interest in the arts.”

Fringe festivals originated in 1947 at the Edinburgh International Festival, an event for “traditional” performing arts like classical music, theater, ballet and opera. A writer coined the term to describe the performances taking place on the outskirts of the festival, and the name spread.

There are now fringe festivals held throughout the world, from Prague to Singapore, including at least 15 in the mainland U.S. and 14 in Canada.

Each location has its own character, Tupou said, but he went back to basics for Oahu’s first, which will feature about 20 different performances at four Chinatown venues starting Thursday.

“I tried to stay with the original concept, which was (that a show be) uncensored; anybody could join, whether you’re a young emerging artist or an established artist,” he said. “And all you have to do as an artist is provide a show with audience participation and within the fringe theme or performing arts.”

THE EXPERIENCE can be liberating, said Tupou, who has performed theatrical works in fringe festivals in his native New Zealand. “You can perform anything you want, and because of the open-access policy, it allows you as an artist to create something original,” he said.

In fact, some of the acts at the festival will not just be original, they’ll be improvised. That’s what Sean O’Malley and R. Kevin Garcia Doyle, two stalwarts of Honolulu’s theater community, will be doing in their act, “Oil in the Alley.” Along with a drummer and bass player, they’ll act as if they were rock “megasuperstars from the ’90s” who somehow managed to write songs about everything and anything the audience can think of.

“We talk to the audience, and whatever they say, we’ll insinuate that phrase was a song title we used,” O’Malley explained. “We’ll say, ‘You’re hinting you want to hear this song,’ so we’ll supply the lyrics to a song.”

O’Malley and Doyle have honed their act in several performances. “It’s a huge rush,” O’Malley said.

“Part of the fun about it is that we get to get up and play the roles as a character, but the audience gets to play their role, too, because of course an audience for a superstar rock act is a different creature.

“We’ve had a lot of different experiences with the audiences just loving it and screaming and yelling, and girls coming up on stage.”

BIG ISLAND multimedia artist Bonnie Kim’s contribution, “Hokulani and Tutu’s Garden,” has a more serious tone. Using puppetry and video, Kim weaves the story of a hungry family together with the story of taro, or kalo, and its significance in Hawaiian culture. The story is one of food stability and security, Kim said.

“In Hawaii the main staple has become rice, and we don’t grow rice here,” she points out. “Kalo was the main staple, and Hawaiian kalo is really easy to grow.”

Kim grows her own kalo and makes poi from it. “Kalo is considered very sacred in Hawaii,” she said.

Many of the acts reflect a performer’s personal journey.

Jenn Thomas will essentially tell her life story in theater in a show she calls “My Life as Featured Ensemble.” Her performance is based on the perspective of someone who has “the one solo line in a song that helps the lead figure out what their problem is — and is never seen again.”

“One-woman shows are traditionally performed by famous former divas late in their careers, and cabaret is usually done by young singers hoping to be discovered,” she said. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I combined these two ideas in the midst of my own mediocre career?’”

Ben Sota, a theater student at University of Hawaii-Manoa, also has a personal connection to his act, the three-person “Zany Umbrella Circus.” He grew up in a two-generation circus family and mixes tightrope walking and juggling into the act, but the show itself is based on Sufi poetry that deals with “how people need food, they need shelter, they need love,” he said.

Sota wrote the work while living in Italy and working with a women’s shelter that had lost its funding — but he says the piece retains a sense of humor.

“I would say it’s funny ha-ha but like, not a white-faced, sophisticated funny, if I may say that about myself,” he said. “There’s nothing dark about it.”

Acts in the fringe Festival include Joy Nash, whose story “My Mobster” garnered great reviews at the Hollywood Fringe Festival; Jim Loucks, whose show has been called “a classic Fringe one-man show”; and local performers Cherry Blossom Cabaret, the Island Drama School Troupe from Kauai, Convergence Dance Theatre and the Waikiki Acrobatic Troupe.

“I can’t say what it actually will be like for our very first one,” Tupou said, “But generally it goes beyond the usual meaning of ‘arts.’”

—Steven Mark / smark@staradvertiser.com