Delighted to be crazed

by John Munger • July 4, 2008 • Why am I delighted to find myself steadily getting more and more crazed?

With each passing day the magnitude of The Fringe looms larger and closer. We even have concrete events in our faces. This Monday, July 7, the first of two Fringe-For-All showcases happens at The Ritz. Migawd. It’s happening already. The Fringe Festival is my favorite time of year, crazy as it may be.

On Wednesday the 9th I’m hosting a showcase of “Dance Shows That Got Into The Fringe” at Bryant Lake Bowl at 7:00pm (doors at 6:00pm). If you’ve been to BLB you know the scene. If you haven’t, let me say that you can drink and eat in this cabaret setting, that the show is a comfortable one-hour duration, and that with a $6 – $10 pay as you can scale it’s totally affordable.

Going Through the Movements is the blog of John Munger, one of five bloggers covering the Minnesota Fringe Festival for the Daily Planet.

This is my first blog-post in several months. For those of you who are new to this whole situation, I focus especially on dance. I have a bias and a mission to write about dance on The Fringe (and elsewhere in the TC) in a way that I hope serves as a gateway. To that end, I am carefully restrained about most of my own inclinations, tastes and prejudices.

It takes a downright rip-off, complete with artistic dishonesty and utter cynicism, to get a pan out me, and it takes a masterpiece to get a rave. I’m not a reviewer. I’m an observer and an educator. I try to discuss the work in ways that will inform and encourage readers to see more dance and to make up their own minds about what they see, knowing more than they would have known without my blog.

So welcome to the start of the 2008 Fringe season. Read on, friends!! Despite the disclaimer above, I can be pretty pungent.

John Munger has been performing, teaching, choreographing, researching and writing about dance for about 40 years. He teaches at Zenon, day-jobs for Dance/USA, and still hasn’t gotten much of it right.