Photo By JammingTalent Productions

Jammingtalent Productions' multimedia piece Wet Dream will be part of the 2007 Cincinnati Fringe Festival.

The Cincinnati Fringe Festival has announced 30 productions for this summer's two-week celebration of risk-taking performances (May 30-June 10). Showcasing artists who push the boundaries of the norm and experiment with style and content, the 2007 edition will present more than 150 performances in venues around the city, many on and near Over-the-Rhine's Main Street.

The Cincinnati Fringe Festival was founded in 2004 as a showcase for artists who want to take risks. Many of them don't define themselves in a single category; more often they assemble performances from a menu that blends theater, dance, music, poetry, visual art and film.

The 2007 Fringe used a broad-based artist selection process. Applications were reviewed by a selection committee of six local arts leaders representing different genres of art: Michael Haney (Playhouse in the Park), Jefferson James (Contemporary Dance Theater), Lynn Meyers (Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati), Victoria Morgan (Cincinnati Ballet), Brian Phillips (Cincinnati Shakespeare Company) and Jason Bruffy, Know Theatre's artistic director and Fringe founder and organizer.

They considered applications from all over the world. This year's festival features world-class regional artists, including performers from Canada; Kyoto, Japan; St. Louis; Austin; Pittsburgh; Los Angeles; and New York.

According to Know Theatre, there will be nine theatrical productions, two musicals, five solo performances, two dance programs, two multi-media events, five interdisciplinary programs, two works focused on gay/lesbian/bisexual and transsexual issues and three addressing women's issues. I prefer to sort these out a different way: Works coming here from out of town, some repeat performers with track records and a couple of intriguing first-timers with local roots. (A full listing of the 2007 lineup is at www.cincyfringe.com.)

Imports from all over
So Percussion is a quartet with rhythmic inclinations. They're from Kyoto, Japan, but now find themselves in Brooklyn, N.Y. Based on their recently released recording Amid the Noise, their performance -- using the same name -- is an accompaniment to and expansion upon 12 short films drawn from street scenes in Kyoto, Osaka, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Bali. Fringe organizers call it "interdisciplinary." I call it intriguing.

Cleveland-based dance duo MN2 Productions will present Ancestral Voices, a dance/theater piece that explores the divergent fates of two sisters. The story is drawn from Ukrainian Folk songs and poetry, and it's told using modern dance, puppetry, music and theater.

For the propeller heads, the Fringe is importing Calculus: The Musical from Austin, Tex., a hotbed of alternative theater. It's a comic review of the concepts and history of, yes, that's right, calculus. The group matheatre offers musical parodies from light opera to Hip Hop to "put the edge back in education."

Given the present polling on the popularity of President Bush, I Take It Back should be a hit -- or at least a guilty pleasure. It's another solo piece. This one follows an Ohio woman's quest to take back the vote she cast for Bush during the 2004 presidential election. It's been assembled by Odds & Ends Productions from Pittsburgh.

Proven commodities
In the 2006 Fringe, Richard Hess (who heads the drama program at UC's College-Conservatory of Music) had the golden touch. His (UN)Natural Disasters was the Fringe's most innovative work (and winner of the Producer's Pick), and The Catholic Girl's Guide to Losing Your Virginity, which he directed, was the most popular (and winner of the Audience Pick). This year, Hess is staging The Kid in the Dark, an original one-act song cycle dealing with love, loss, fear and hope. It will feature five CCM students performing original songs by a local team, Mark Halpin and Andrew Smithson. This one gets my "best bet" award.

Some of the most energetic theater on the local scene has been emanating from New Stage Collective, which recently announced a permanent space on Main Street. The Satori Group, a dimension of NSC, is undertaking an ensemble piece inspired by experimental writer Charles Mee, who encourages theater companies to take his works and evolve them into derived performances. They'll weave together Mee's material with spoken word poetry by Saul Williams and films by Jean-Luc Godard and Richard Linklater to create iLove -- what they're calling an "un-original original work."

Last year the Performance Gallery drew audiences to a provocative work called godsplay. This time around they're offering girlfight, another ensemble-created piece that explores conflict through physical theatre, sound and character. Interestingly, this work is described as a "challenge play" with another fringe performer, Louisville's Le Petomane Project. The two groups will mutually incorporate words, themes and props in their two separate performances.

Worth checking out
New work is emanating from Cincinnati and nearby sources, too, even if the groups are newly formed or composed of performers not yet on the radar of local audiences. Here are four that are likely worth checking out:

Wet Dream is one Fringe organizers couldn't stuff into one category. They describe it as "GLBT, minority issues, women's issues, comedy, solo, drama, musical, dance, performance art." Jammingtalent Productions is staging a multimedia piece that begins with a night of partying and evolves into a fantasy that uses aerial dance, live vocals, performance art and video.

Last fall we saw the renowned Cirque du Soleil. For the Fringe, it will be "Soque du Soleil," offering Extreme Puppet Theatre. I loved the tongue-in-cheek (foot in sock) wordplay of the title of a work that's positioned as an "adult variety show which exposes the sordid history, the hand-to-mouth lifestyle and bizarre sexual practices of today's puppet population." Soque du Soleil recommends leaving the children at home for this one, which is described as "Monty Python meets the Muppets on crack."

From nearby Yellow Springs, Maple Leaf Theatre Productions will present Noble Parasites, "a very funny post-apocalyptic tragedy about a society living underground." While this one comes from nearby, it's been tested -- and enjoyed -- at other fringe festivals. In Toronto, a critic said it's "shot through with trademark martini-dry humor" and praised it as "deliciously written sci-fi."

While theater is the dominant form at the Fringe, one of the more interesting shows could be a one-man musical piece by Jazz guitarist Todd Juengling, Think Fast Go Slow. He will create an electro-acoustic performance that uses guitars and four Simons, an electronic memory game with flashing lights and sounds, plus a few other musical devices. The description says, "Sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, humorous yet completely serious, a bit atmospheric but always in the groove." I want to be there for this one.

The 2007 Cincinnati Fringe Festival will also feature late-night, post-performance programming for its Bar Series and Celluloid Fringe, the experimental film series; an Outdoor Fringe Stage with events free to the public and Visual Fringe art galleries. Details on these programs will be announced at a future date.