The ESL Rochester Fringe Festival has announced the full lineup for its 2025 Fringe, featuring 12 days of bold performances, big debuts, and free public events across downtown Rochester.
Running from September 9 to 20, Fringe will feature more than 250 shows and 650 performances at over 30 venues. It has become one of the largest, most successful, and most prominent fringe festivals in the nation, the largest multidisciplinary performing arts festivals in New York State, and one of the region’s most anticipated festivals each year.
Fringe is something you have to experience and you get the freedom to choose!
Erica Fee, Founding Festival Producer and CEO
Spectacular
After a one-year hiatus, Rochester Fringe’s free outdoor spectacle returns to Parcel 5 with four performances of eVenti Verticali’s SPHERE– a spectacle about our planet, and what can happen when greed, beauty, energy, fragility, and a collective embrace occur. The piece centers around a giant, glowing 60 foot suspended sphere, and features aerial abound, accompanied by music, lights, and acrobatics. Rochester Fringe is one of the only Fringe Festivals in the county to offer such large-scale free public programming.
Unique
Another free public art performance is TRACES– part of the U.S. premiere tour from the internationally acclaimed Théâtre de L’Entrouvert. TRACES will feature 25 people from Rochester, all of different ages, cultures, and backgrounds. Each will represent a cross-section of the city, led by world renowned French artist and puppeteer Elise Vigneron.
Her work with ice has been featured in performances from the Seoul Performing Art Festival to the World Festival of Puppet Theatres in Charleville-Mézières, France, Mime London Festival in London, and the Chicago Puppet Festival. TRACES blends sculpture, sound, and movement to tell a unique story of the beauty and pain in our individual journeys and collective humanity. In TRACES, Vigneron will bring a poetic sensibility to the interdependence of humans with one another and the environment. TRACES will be performed during the first weekend of the festival and is made possible by funding from Villa Albertine, The French Institute for Culture and Education.
Villa Albertine is honored to support TRACES, through its 2025 Theatre & New Forms program. It is our hope that nurturing collaboration between artists in France and the U.S. will contribute to the robust creative dialogue that has nourished both nations for decades.
Mohamed Bouabdallah, Cultural Counselor of France and Director of Villa Albertine
New (World Premiere)
Las Vegas legends and Fringe favorites Matt and Heidi Morgan, return with the world premiere of Cirque du Fringe: Claws Out. Audiences are invited to become fully immersed in an evening with beloved socialite and renowned opera singer Madam Kitty Ross. Expect aerialists, acrobats, and a swordsman who’ve appeared on America’s Got Talent, Das Supertalent, Penn & Teller Fool Us, Spiegelworld’s Absinthe, Opium & Vegas Nocturne, Circus Roncali and NBA halftime shows. Cocktails will be served in the Spiegeltent.
Immersive
Submergence provides a large, immersive sight and sound experience that is outdoors and walkable. It uses thousands of individual points of suspended light to create feelings of presence and movement within physical space. In its entirety, the 12-minute piece forms an abstract narrative with a gradual increase in tension, building to a final climax. Each movement has its own elements, atmosphere and responsiveness. They are also all open to one’s own interpretation. Submergence has been shown in over 70 spaces and events on six continents. It was created by Squidsoup, who are artist pioneers in the use of light, sound and technology to create immersive installations and encourage people to view the world from different perspectives.
More Festival Highlights
Fringe brings back past favorites—Silent Disco, Bushwhacked, Dashboard Dramas and Pedestrian Drive-In—in the Spiegelgarden, which is a pop-up, urban lounge at One Fringe Place on Main and Gibbs and is the hub of the festival.
Other new highlights include Les Kif Kif: Jam Side Up and Les Kif Kif: Returns Department, which feature twin sisters from Quebec who have a zany flair for comedy, gymnastics, puppetry, magic and french-fries. Drag Me Home features three of the city’s favorite drag queens—Mrs. Kasha Davis, Darienne Lake and Pandora Boxx, all of which performed on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Shotspeare returns with an all-new adaptation of Titus Andronicus, which takes the world’s most beloved playwright, soaks him in beer, and flips him on his head. Then in The Event, which was honored with a Fringe First Award at Edinburgh Fringe and Best Actor Award at Adelaide Fringe, audiences watch as a man stands on stage in a pool of light and attempts the ultimate trick: disappearing while remaining in full sight.
Family-Favorites
Fringe offers programming for all ages, including families and children. Some family-favorite annual events, include Kids Day Saturday, September 20 with chalk art, pumpkin painting and Disco Kids; Street Beat regional hip-hop dance competition at MLK Park on Saturday, September 20 from 12:30 p.m. to 5 p.m., and Gospel Sunday on Sunday, September 14 in the Spiegeltent.
A quarter of the Fringe’s more than 250 shows and 650 performances are completely free. Additionally, Fringe has partnered with the Mary Cariola Center and Center for Disability Rights to have all Fringe venues assessed for accessibility and inclusion.
Go Big!
Fringe is an expansive and successful festival due to the hard work and dedication of the more than 30 venue partners who curate and host shows at their locations in their traditional and nontraditional spaces every year.
The Fringe in Rochester is unique due to their bi-furcated system—or Rochester Model—where both the Fringe organization and local venues curate shows for the festival and are complemented by large-scale, public performances. This results in a highly collaborative and unique mix of performances, where the shows are as unique as the venues themselves. This year, venue shows include world-class musicians, renowned dancers and documentarians, alongside emerging and exquisite new talents.
All 2025 season venues and more will again make the Fringe the event of the year–including the previously announced comedy headliner Chelsea Handler, performing on Saturday, September 13 at 8 p.m., at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre.
To support its continued growth and stability, Rochester Fringe also announced the launch of its Fringe Comprehensive Campaign, aiming to raise $1.575 million by the end of the year. So far, the campaign has secured $1.1 million in donations.
At the heart of this campaign is the acquisition of a rare Spiegeltent. The Fringe will have one of the world’s most unique performing arts venues, avoiding operating costs and creating new revenue streams through rental opportunities. To purchase naming opportunities for Spiegeltent booths, mirrors or floorboards, visit rochesterfringe.com. Funds raised during this effort will also be used to support international and domestic artists in bringing their shows to Fringe, as well as provide arts education and built-in reserves so they can continue to deliver programming for years to come.
The full 2025 Rochester Fringe program can be found at rochesterfringe.com, where tickets are also now available for all events. The printed festival guide will be available in mid-August at all ESL branch locations, as well as in the September issue of CITY Magazine. People can also build their Fringe schedules and purchase tickets with the ESL Rochester Fringe Festival App (Apple App Store or Google Play Store).
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