The Omaha Fringe strives to bring the different members of the Omaha theatre community together for one open access and inclusive festival where theatre artists can experiment with new works and audiences can experience new theatrical movements.

Theatre fringe festivals have a long tradition, starting in 1947 in Edinburgh when eight artists, not invited to perform at an arts festival showed up anyway and performed on the fringes. From that beginning artists all over the world have gravitated towards festivals that celebrate the arts in a similar way. A Fringe festival derives its name from those performers who began on the fringes of a recognized festival and is simply a place where artists of all types can come together and perform or show their art.

The works are generally performance based, self produced and self funded. The roots of Fringe are located in open access festivals, where all performers are given an opportunity free of adjudication.The heart of Fringe Festivals is performance and sharing new works of art in the community.

They are often unique experiences where the variety and organic nature of the festival creates an atmosphere of discovery and adventure. For audiences it allows them to experience a wide variety of shows; for artists it gives them a low stakes platform to try new things.

After Edinburgh, Fringe festivals began to show up all over there world. Currently, the World Fringe website states there are over 250 Fringe festivals in countries from Europe to Africa to Asia to America. They estimate that, “19 million people see approximately 170 thousand performers in 60,000 free and ticketed events. Over 8 million Fringe tickets are sold in over 6 thousand venues across the globe.” That’s a lot of brand new theatre being created and performed for audiences to enjoy.

The Omaha Fringe was created based on this long tradition of Fringe festivals. We felt that that there was a need in Omaha for this type of festival. In the true spirit of Fringe festivals, our festival allows anyone to apply and our applicants are chosen by lottery, so everyone has an equal shot at getting a performance slot.

Our first year festival produced ten different performances in two different spaces at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. We had over seven hundred audience members from all around the Omaha community come and celebrate the different productions our artists created. This year will be our second year of running the festival and we hope to make it a little bit bigger and reach an even wider scope of the Omaha Performing Arts community.