Halloween weekend is, of course, the perfect time to go out in search of the offbeat and unusual. This year, Durhamites won’t have to look very hard.
October 30 marks the first day of the Durham FRINGE Festival, a 10-day festival that will feature 50 performing artists across a sprawling 25 venues, from downtown to Golden Belt and back. There will be dancers in the bars, musicians in the bookstores, and more than one flash mob.
This inaugural festival is part of the Carolina Theatre’s year of celebrations, marking 100 years since the venue opened in 1926. There was a moment when the theater almost didn’t make it past 50: In the late 1970s, the theater closed and was nearly demolished, and it is only thanks to volunteers that it remained open and, in the early ’90s, was established as a nonprofit.
Theater President and CEO Randy McKay takes this history to heart. Centennial celebrations like the FRINGE Festival were designed, according to McKay, with downtown Durham’s business and artistic communities in mind.
“The theater was restored by the city as an economic driver at a time when downtown was completely boarded up,” McKay said over a Zoom call. “It really is a continuing part of our mission to ensure that we are supporting the small-business community that surrounds us.”
McKay and festival organizer Myra Weise spent years getting community input on the centennial plans. A consistent theme emerged.
“The responses weren’t surprises,” said Weise. “What are artists needing? It’s rehearsal space, it’s opportunities to present their own work.”
Weise, who is both a dancer and the founder of a production company, suggested a fringe festival—an opportunity for numerous artists to present their work.
It’s difficult to summarize the kind of art that the Durham FRINGE Festival will host, and that’s part of the point. Events take place all over, from standard venues (Mettlesome Theater, The Fruit) to bars and bookstores. Every act is by an artist from or working in Durham; participants were selected, in part, by how daring their submitted work was, relative to their body of work.
There will be music, dance, puppetry, clowning, live painting, spoken word, and less-categorizable performances like a collaboration between a potter and local poets in which participants will have to choose whether they want to keep a clay piece or smash it to read the poem hidden inside.
The festival takes its name from and is loosely modeled after the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, or Edinburgh Fringe. Edinburgh Fringe started in the 1940s, when a few theater companies that weren’t accepted into the city’s official arts festival set up their own shows right outside the main programming. These DIY shows on the “fringes” continued the next year, and more performers joined for every iteration. In 2025, Edinburgh Fringe ran for nearly a month, selling millions of tickets to thousands of shows with performers from dozens of countries.
This space for experimental performance has spawned similar festivals on five continents and led to many breakout shows and movies. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag was initially a one-woman Edinburgh Fringe show, and Hannah Gadsby first ran their breakout comedy special Nanette for Scottish Fringe audiences. Mindy Kaling got her first jobs in television after she and her roommate, Brenda Withers, wrote and performed a play in the 2001 New York International Fringe Festival.
Weise is excited that Durham’s version is in keeping with the exploratory nature of the original.
“It’s not a festival for a band just to play a set,” Weise said. “We want it to be the band submitting an idea that is, for them, an experimentation of what they typically do.”
The 50 performers in Durham’s festival went through a fee-free application process, and the final group was selected by a jury. Festival organizers then took care of the rest—coordinating venues, managing ticketing, and covering any tech or venue fees. About half of the shows are ticketed, with prices running from $10 to $25. The funding for all 10 days of performances comes mostly from a capital campaign the Carolina Theatre ran for its many 100-year celebrations; a small portion also came from city funding.
For Jackie Bennett, a performer, dance teacher, and clinical social worker, the festival was the inspiration she needed to make new work. After a stressful few years that included a surprise move and extended illness, Bennett saw the call for applications and decided to choreograph a new piece for the first time in years.
In the performance piece So this is Shedding, Bennett will use dance and spoken-word poetry to dig through the stress and heartbreak of sudden life changes.
For Bennett, the experimentation is multiple. She’ll be performing in Cecy’s Gallery, so the performance will be a unique, site-specific event. But the piece also treads new emotional ground.
“It is about the shedding that comes with unexpected changes—and then sometimes the changes that we have to make ourselves in order to adjust,” Bennett said.
Ultimately, Bennett, a Durham native who graduated from Durham School of the Arts, hopes the festival will activate others the way it did her.
I’m hoping that it just sparks something within the community where maybe even more festivals are put on, where people feel encouraged or inspired to present work in different spaces.”
jackie bennett, performer
“Durham is a community where everyone is usually pretty open to the arts,” Bennett says. “But I’m hoping that it just sparks something within the community where maybe even more festivals are put on, where people feel encouraged or inspired to present work in different spaces and just enjoy each other and community, if nothing else.”
Over the next five years, McKay hopes to expand the festival and welcome some artists from out of town to raise the event’s profile, while reserving “a majority of slots” for Durham artists. But for now, much of the actual organizing is as much an experiment for Weise and McKay as it is for the artists.
“Part of what we’ll do this year is survey sample sizes of the audience attending, and the artists in terms of their planning experiences,” Weise says. “It’ll be a little bit of a dance of seeing what works and where it’s landing.”
So if you see zombies at the farmers market, puppets in the improv theater, painters in the bars, dancers in the galleries, or clowns out and about well past Halloween weekend, don’t worry. They’re just trying something new.
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