This story originally ran on July 24, 2024, but it’s such a great telling of the roots of the Buffalo Infringement Festival that we’re featuring it again!

By Ron Ehmke

A.

Sometime in the late 1980s or early ’90s I was, in my capacity as the performance curator/programmer at Hallwalls, one of maybe half a dozen WNY arts administrators invited to meet with some folks associated with the Fringe Festival franchise: Building on the international success and fame of the Edinburgh festival, these executives were encouraging cities like Buffalo to hop on board the trend with a multi-venue, multi-date theater/comedy/performance event of our own.

Only it wouldn’t exactly be “our own.” For a rather substantial fee, the city would be allowed to use the “Fringe Festival” name/brand, and along with it these outsiders — who had seemingly done absolutely no research on the area’s existing arts scene — would generously provide their time-tested presentation strategies along with a full roster of participating performers from around the world, themselves presumably hopping from fest to fest like carnies.

For the first half hour or so of their canned presentation we locals sat quietly and politely, probably all of us silently sensing how condescending the proposition sounded. But when it came time for questions, I’m almost certain it was Mark Goldman — the man who had already single-handedly launched Chippewa’s transformation from red light district to entertainment hub — whose hand went up first. Would Buffalo artists be included, and if so, how would they be selected, and by whom? I asked an obvious followup: Why would Buffalo, a city with an almost preposterously vibrant cultural scene, need to rely on someone else to import their vision of contemporary theater? Mark and I then ended up tag-teaming the visitors with practical questions for the remainder of the meeting. The whole thing sounded like a scam: The city had to pay for the name, the artists (local and otherwise) had to pay for the right to be included, and neither party got much out of the deal except, perhaps, the cachet that might come from being part of this newly forming circuit.

That meeting was the last any of us ever heard of “The Buffalo Fringe Festival.” And thank god for that. Mark Goldman deserves vast credit for countless worthy projects he’s started in Buffalo over the  last three or four decades, but we also owe him a debt of gratitude for something he stopped cold, thus saving us from a McDonald’s / Holiday Inn version of culture.

B.

Flash forward to the early 20^th century and another invitation to another meeting, this one convened by Kurt Schneiderman, the young mastermind behind the Subversive Theatre. (When I say young, I mean he was still a student at Calasanctius School [RIP] when I had spoken to his class about “performance art” sometime around the ill-fated Fringe Franchise presentation.) Kurt and his company were back from a trip to Montreal for something called the “Infringement Festival,” started by a group of anti-corporate theater folk there in response to Montreal’s “official” (big bucks) Fringe. The idea had already spread through Canada, and Kurt wanted to bring it to Buffalo, assuming he could recruit enough like-minded colleagues to make it happen.

I don’t remember everyone who gathered at one big-ass table at Towne Restaurant (RIP) that first night, but I know the group included puppeteer Michele Costa, writer/director Scott Kurchak, writer/director Matt LaChiusa, actor/director Christian Brandjes, probably Brian Lampkin and/or Kristi Meal from Rust Belt Books and UB Media Studies profs Dave Pape and Josephine Anstey. If UB Art Gallery curator Sandra Firmin, student/artist Arzu Ozkal, and student/future arts administrator Lynn Lasota were not there the first night, they showed up soon thereafter, along with musician/presenter Curt Rotterdam. The more I think about it, I’m convincing myself even Mark Goldman made an appearance early on. (His main contribution this time was the notion of a festival event to be called “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot,” which it fell to Scott and I to make happen—only it became “Shakespeare in the Parking Space,” an even smaller stage.) Some were old friends and some I only knew by reputation; I was impressed by every one of them and by Kurt, who had the vision to find them all and bring them all together. I volunteered to be the publicist, a role I knew well by then from multiple day jobs.

A whole lot of the principles Buffalo Infringement still runs by today — including the 11-day format running from the last weekend in July to the first one in August, conveniently tucked in the downtime between the end of one theater season and the start of the next; a tongue-in-cheek organizational structure calling for each discipline and major task in the festival to be overseen by a “czar;” and the catchprase “art under the radar” — came up in the first two or three meetings. I remember it was very easy to draft a mission statement, because we just listed everything we collectively agreed was most interesting and important to us about the Canadian model as seen through Kurt’s eyes. Unlike the “real” Fringe, the original Infringers in Montreal imposed very few ground rules on later chapters like ours: No corporate sponsors. No entry fees for artists to apply. No tickets over $10 for audiences.

If you know your late 20^th century grassroots-culture history, you will recognize much of this mindset from punk rock / DIY ethics and from anarchist and other non-hierarchical art and activist collectives. I would argue it is also very, very Buffalo, this scrappy, sincere dedication to making art not for wealth or fame, but for other motives (as simple as making audiences laugh and as ambitious as changing the world), and the need-driven knack WNY artists have always demonstrated for finding alternative ways to make art and creating alternative venues to present the art they make.

We anticipated possible issues with censorship, and ultimately concluded that if a proposal was both legal and physically possible to carry out, it was in. To this day I think those are pretty good criteria for most art-making situations.

We were thrilled when we hit something like 30 performances and 10 venues that first year. By Year Two or Three we were already at 100 acts and twice as many sites, including storefronts, street corners, alleys, cars, and apartment windows alongside more conventional nearby sites like Nietzsche’s, Squeaky Wheel in its Elmwood era, and especially Rust Belt Books, which was then on Allen Street and clearly the political, cultural and intellectual hub of Allentown from before 9/11 ’til its eventual move out of the neighborhood. There were many discussions in that era about whether to try to keep the core of the festival within walking distance (encouraging audiences to hang out in between shows in neighborhood bars and restaurants, well before “shop local” became a buzzword) or to allow it to sprawl out in every direction. The latter option eventually became a necessity after the number of acts swelled in size and we needed a lot more locations to host them. This led to some of the most memorable afternoons and evenings of my life, zipping from a program of movies at Hallwalls to a concert at Soundlab (RIP) to another at Mohawk Place, with three or four art gallery stops in between.

This diversity of media was also distinctly Buffalonian. The Montreal festival consisted mostly of theater and related performance forms, and our version started off with a lot more plays than it does nowadays — but from the beginning we welcomed artists of all stripes, from standup routines to painting exhibitions to VR gaming to outdoor movie screenings to martial arts demonstrations to future national trends like yarn bombing and guerrilla gardening. That said, the Buffalo festival almost immediately began to center live music more than  live theater (bearing in mind that there is often overlap between the two). That was due in part to the abundance of local bands WNY has long been blessed with, and even more so to the tireless outreach efforts of Music Czar Curt Rotterdam (followed, later, by Susan Tanner [RIP] and Marty Boratin).

You’ll notice I have referred to lots of meetings and discussions. These often went on for hours in a multitude of locations; at least one regular attendee regularly fell asleep during them. Occasionally strangers would wander into, say, Allen Street Hardware on a weekday afternoon, find a dozen or so of us embroiled in lots of yelling and laughing, and find themselves volunteering to poster Elmwood before they were done with their first beer.

C.

By the final Sunday night of the first year it was clear that we — along with the performers and audience members — wanted Infringement to become an annual event. From the beginning I have often compared it to its more established neighbor on the summer calendar, the Buffalo Garden Walk (which in the early days drew a noticeably different demographic than our funky, punky little startup). Both are free to participate in, uncurated, community-driven projects that show off and celebrate a specific aspect of what Buffalo does best, not just for the benefit of its resident-creators but capable of drawing suburbanites and tourists from farther afield.

Infringement is, in other words, the opposite of what the Fringe franchisers wanted to sell the city way back when. Like most of the other folks at that original Towne meeting, after the first four or five years I eventually burned out on what quickly became a year-round unpaid part-time job — but it is a real testament to the second wave of organizers that the festival survived the first wave’s inevitable departure. Over the last two decades Buffalo Infringement has both grown and shrunk, evolving in fascinating directions that never occurred to us in the early years.

It has also accumulated a rich body of traditions — parades, block parties, opening and closing festivities, the “Iffy” Awards (which anyone with a paper plate and a Sharpie can award to anyone else, a beautiful embodiment of the spirit of the whole thing), an annual off-season Festivus fundraiser — that mark it as a local institution, albeit one that is more of an anti-institution. Like everyone else who fell in love with the big idea that Kurt brought back from Montreal, I worked very hard to promote the concept far and wide. But I never really knew if all that effort was worth it until the bleak winter day a good ten years after I took off my publicist’s hat when I overheard a 20something outside Towne Restaurant — surely oblivious to its foundational role in the saga — enthusiastically telling a pair of out of towners about this big local phenomenon called the Buffalo Infringement Festival. “You’ve gotta come this summer and see it for yourself,” he said. “You won’t believe it.”

Ron Ehmke is a writer, performer, curator and activist of long standing in the Buffalo arts scene.