Think Out Loud

Oregon Fringe Festival returns online and in-person with eclectic art and performances

By Sheraz Sadiq (OPB)
April 27, 2022 1:09 p.m. Updated: May 4, 2022 10:57 p.m.

Broadcast: Wednesday, April 27

"Mind Controlled Millie" is a 10-foot-tall interactive sculpture made of wood, plaster and other materials by Alex Brehmer, one of the more than three dozen artists featured at the Oregon Fringe Festival.

"Mind Controlled Millie" is a 10-foot-tall interactive sculpture made of wood, plaster and other materials by Alex Brehmer, one of the more than three dozen artists featured at the Oregon Fringe Festival.

Alex Brehmer

THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR:

On Wednesday, the Oregon Fringe Festival kicks off on the campus of Southern Oregon University in Ashland. Now in its ninth year, the five-day festival features an eclectic array of art and performances, from interactive improv to interactive sculptures, rock music to music made with beeping microwaves. The events are free and presented in a hybrid format that mixes live, in-person performances with work that can only be experienced online. Oregon Fringe Festival director Paige Gerhard joins us to talk about the festival’s celebration of “unconventional art and unconventional space.” We also hear from a returning artist, Alex Brehmer, who created an interactive, 10-foot-tall puppet called Mind Controlled Millie.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. The Oregon Fringe Festival kicks off in Ashland today. It is a free five day event featuring music, improv, visual arts and interactive installations. Paige Gerhard is the director of the festival. She joins us now to talk about it, along with Alex Brehmer, an interactive installation artist who is taking part in the festival for the second year. Welcome to you both.

Paige Gerhard: Thank you for having us.

Miller: Paige, first. The mission statement for the festival says that you celebrate unconventional art and unconventional space. What does that mean?

Gerhard: When you think of unconventional art in unconventional space, it’s really taking, for example, a theater performance, and instead of placing it in a traditional theater setting, it could be anywhere from the shores of a nearby lake to a painting studio, in a random street. So, experiencing a performance in a setting that you wouldn’t traditionally do so.

Miller: How does that affect the experience for the audience? And how does it affect the experience for the artist?

Gerhard: So speaking for the artists, it really allows the opportunity to challenge them to think outside of the box, and think about how they are going to be interacting with their viewers, because it’s gonna be a different experience and there are gonna be different technical elements involved. And just the way in which the performance functions. Speaking for viewers, and having been an audience member myself, it’s really just a unique experience, especially the first time if you’re attending a Fringe performance, because for me, it’s something that I had never experienced before. So my initial thoughts were, ‘oh I didn’t know this could be a thing,’ but it can be. So it really allows viewers to develop more open perspectives and think about what art really is and the many forms that it can take on.

Miller: Alex Brehmer, why do you like taking part in the Oregon Fringe Festival?

Alex Brehmer: I really like to make weird art and so it’s a really fun space to have that platform to do so, especially showing big installations. That’s the one problem we run into, is having a spot to show it.

Miller: What does weird art mean to you?

Brehmer: It’s just fun to make it sort of quirky, offbeat, definitely not something you’d put in a gallery, necessarily unless I was running the gallery.

[Laughter]

Miller: Can you describe your Installation, your interactive installation for this year  –  it’s called ‘Mind Controlled Millie.’

Brehmer: Yeah, so, Mind Controlled Millie is a 10 foot tall, four foot wide interactive installation. The premise being that you… so it’s a big puppet head, and you are the alien when you go into this sculpture. So it’s a big head at the bottom with light beams that go up to the top and an alien spaceship, you walk around behind it and you get inside and then it’s like, ‘Whoa, there is a control panel.’ So now you’re the alien inside of Millie.

Miller: And Millie is a human.

Brehmer: Yes.

Miller: Okay, so you have inhabited Millie’s brain?

Brehmer: Exactly. There’s a lever right in the middle which actually puppets the eyes of the sculptural head, which is just an interactive element for the people around, but I also have a ‘choose your own adventure game’ that’s on a tablet. It’s very sci-fi, it’s really fun, it’s totally ridiculous.

Miller: What was your inspiration for giving people the opportunity to be an alien invader inside a human brain?

Brehmer: When I first made this piece, it was for a random alien-themed event, and I was like, ‘Oh, well, how do you do that in a way that’s cool and hasn’t been done before necessarily on this scale?’ So mostly I try to think about, what would I want to experience from an alien-themed sculpture? And then I tried to make it.

Miller: I watched a video of somebody’s experience inside Millie’s head and I saw the lever that, as you noted, moves the eyes back and forth, and the tablet, which brings the experiencer through kind of a ‘choose your own adventure,’ as you noted. There’s also what seemed like a canister of goopy slime… [Brehmer laughing], What was that?

Brehmer: Yeah, so, I was really trying to envision, ‘how do you make something feel like it’s in a spaceship?’ And I feel like a spaceship would probably be pretty gross. And alien textures… when you’re doing interactive installations you really have to think about what is my viewer feeling when they’re in here? Like they’re seeing all this silver, but what could they actually touch? So I have a little compartment full of just nasty goo I bought. So it’s super gross.

Miller: How do people react being inside this huge puppet?

Brehmer: I’ve seen really good reactions from it. It’s really different. People can be hesitant as to what they’re supposed to touch. You have to question like, ‘oh no, I know it looks maybe fragile, but it’s really not – you can kind of beat it up quite a bit.’ And it’s really exciting to see how many details they’re able to catch on to, like in the ship, I’ve got this journal which is written entirely in the futurama language, Alienese, which is just ridiculous. But I have a little cipher on it, so you could decode what it says in there. So it’s fun to watch people pick out these details that I’ve like built into creating this world for it.

Miller: So Paige Gerhard, folks at the festival this year, they can inhabit a human brain as an alien.

Gerhard: Yes!

THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR:

Miller: Can you give us a sense for what else is on offer this year?

Gerhard:  Yeah. So, what’s really unique about this year’s festival is that we are offering both online creative opportunities, as well as live creative opportunities. So speaking specifically for some of the online content, we have an amazing music performance that takes place by Dean Kyle and Delaney Jai in which they’re playing music on microwaves, which… who would ever think to do that? So that in itself really encompasses Fringe in that it’s unconventional. It’s something that you wouldn’t expect out of a music performance. Then another theater performance that I’m really excited about is Into the Unknown, and it involves a group of 25 different students from Southern Oregon University that came together, wanted to collaborate on something. It involves everything from live music, there’s a performer on stilts, amazing costumes, and it’s about these two brothers that have to find their way out of the forest before tragedy takes place. So it’s a  lighthearted fun performance, but it has all of these very different elements involved. With this year’s festival, I think there’s a little bit of everything for someone, depending on what they want to experience.

Miller: What’s the relationship between the Oregon Fringe Festival and the Fringe Festival that takes place in Scotland every year?

Gerhard: I’m not sure, there’s a fringe movement in which, gosh, I can’t even begin to describe how many different Fringe Festivals there are. But within that movement, there’s this mission of celebrating unconventional art and unconventional space. And it all started in Scotland when a group of performers, they weren’t accepted into the festival. So rather than taking their loss, they decided to perform on the outskirts of the Festival. So, being a little rebellious and that’s where the term ‘fringe’ came to be, because they’re on the fringe, literally performing, and from there, other artists and performers became inspired and it just turned into this movement. But specifically speaking with the Oregon Fringe Festival, it was a group of students who wanted to put on late night theater because that was something that wasn’t being offered on campus at the time. Word caught on as it always does. Then music students started to get involved as well as visual artists and then it just continued to grow into what it is today.

Miller: How much does the artistic scene in Southern Oregon, specifically, inform what happens there? I mean, I guess I’m wondering if you can feel the ‘Ashland’ in the festival?

Gerhard: Oh, most definitely. How do I answer that? There’s definitely a sense of Ashland within the Oregon Fringe Festival, but the Oregon Fringe Festival is special in itself because it’s the only Fringe Festival in Oregon, and it’s really one of the only festivals that celebrates that mission of unconventional art in an unconventional space that you wouldn’t normally find art in. So while there is this sense of Ashland, a lot of it is adapting to the Fringe.

Miller: Alex Brehmer, as I noted… Mind Controlled Millie is what you have this year in the Festival, but this is your second year providing something for the Organ Fringe Festival. What was your first creation?

Brehmer: My first  creation for the Oregon Fringe Festival was last year and it was called ‘When You Build a Bigger Bed: You Have More Bedrooms but Less Bed Room

Miller: Ah [Scoff]

Brehmer: It was a full scale paper mache replica of my bedroom. It was my first time doing a large scale Installation and I really didn’t know what I was getting into, when I started. I just kind of ‘wing it.’ One, I was like, I think I could do that, and then I did. And we displayed it outside, in the front grass field of SOU, and then it rained, so it got totally destroyed after two days

Miller: How long had you made your life size replica of a bedroom? How long did it take you?

Brehmer:  It took three months…

Miller: … and then two days of rain to just ‘soggnify’ it?

Brehmer: Yeah. It was actually really cool, because when you work on something for that long you hate everything about it. It reaches a point where you’re like, this is so disgusting. And I love it now, it’s been a year and like this was truly a stroke of genius. But the rain hitting it was actually cathartic. I was like, ‘This is perfect.’

Miller: And it was there, and then it was gone.

Brehmer: Yeah.

Miller: Catch it while you can…

Brehmer:  Totally.

Miller: Was that a pandemic creation?

Brehmer: Yes. Yeah, I guess.

Miller: I mean, was it emotionally a pandemic creation?

Brehmer: Totally.  I spent a lot of time in my bedroom with my partner and it was actually kind of wonderful. I had a wonderful pandemic experience getting to be home in a space that I was really loving and exploring making new art. And it was more of an homage to how wonderful my bedroom is. Like a real appreciation for it.

Miller: Has the pandemic affected the way you think about creativity?

Brehmer: You know, I don’t know.  I’ve always been a pretty creative person. I think now my focus is on just making whatever I want and whatever I can possibly imagine whether or not I have the capacity to do it. I really just shoot for the moon with these projects because, why not? You know, not much else to do.

Miller: Paige Gerhard, one of the ideas behind this festival, from what I’ve read, is that it should be a crossroads where artists can engage with each other. How do you foster that, and how do you foster that in the ‘dregs’ days of a pandemic?

Gerhard: I think one way that we’re fostering connectivity is that it’s providing visual artists the opportunity to interact with theater performers, theater performers to interact with music performers. This opportunity that may not take place in a traditional sense, because we’re focused on theater in a setting, or music in a setting. And I think festival experiences in general bring people together. You take a look at the schedule, you start talking about like, oh I’m going to attend this performance, this performance and this performance, and along the way you start to see similar faces you know, say, ‘Hi,’ and from there, this friendship is born and that in itself allows connectivity.

Miller: Paige Gerhard and Alex Brehmer thanks very much.

Gerhard / Brehmer:  Thanks for having me. Thank you.

Miller: Paige Gerhard is the festival director for the Oregon Fringe Festival, which starts today in Ashland, it goes through Sunday; Alex Brehmer is an artist specializing in interactive installations, and you can see her 10-foot tall puppet whose human brain that you can enter as an alien, it is part of this year’s festival.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show, or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.

THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR:
THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR:

Related Stories

Candidates for Oregon Governor: Tina Kotek

This month, we’re hearing from nine of the candidates vying to be Oregon's next governor. It's an open seat for the first time since 2015. Tina Kotek is seeking the Democratic nomination.