Keybank Rochester Fringe Festival @ Home Announces Day Two Lineup

Of the festival's 170+ virtual productions, more than 70 are free of charge, including a new, Fringe-curated conversation series called FringeTalk. Each of the four, hour-long, live installments will feature nationally known guest artists plus a moderator discussing a specific topic. Today's 8 PM program is: FringeTalk: Black Lives Matter & the Performing Arts. Hosted by beloved former Rochester TV anchor Norma Holland, the panel consists of Thomas Warfield (Dir. of Dance Dept., NTID/RIT), Karen "KB" Brown (Harlem Dance Theatre, Garth Fagan Dance), and Jason Nious (Molodi, Cirque du Soleil). A live, Q&A Zoom will follow each talk.

Also free are two, Rochester-based podcast episodes released yesterday by Nate DiMeo's Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Memory Palace. Commissioned by Fringe and made possible by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, one is "High Falls," which debuted at 2019's On-Site Listening Experience at High Falls and tells the tale of famous falls-leaper Sam Patch. The other is a world premiere called "From a Parking Lot" about Rochester's revered Corinthian Hall, famous as the site of Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July" speech. The since-demolished Hall stood at what is now a parking lot at the corner of State and Corinthian Streets, just a block north of Main Street. DiMeo has woven the murder of Daniel Prude into his transportive tale. Both episodes can be experienced 24/7 via Radiotopia, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher, as well as at rochesterfringe.com.