Orlando Fringe executive director Alauna Friskics Credit: courtesy photo

As Orlando’s overnight temperatures dip into the 40s (aka “Florida freezing”), we could all stand a small taste of spring to help start off the new year, and that’s exactly what this weekend’s FestN4 at Church Street’s Fringe ArtSpace aims to provide. Formerly known as the Fringe Winter Mini-Fest, this curated four-day theater festival of favorites from previous Fringes is back with brand-new branding.

But this year’s fresh beginning coincides with an epochal ending for the organization, because executive director Alauna Friskics is leaving her leadership position. With this key cultural institution at a crossroads, I interviewed Friskics on the eve of her departure, as well as ongoing festival producer Tempestt Halstead, to hear their visions of Fringe’s future.

Friskics’ Fringe “origin story” starts in 1998, when she took a senior-year spring break trip to visit family in Orlando, and found herself volunteering with them at the festival. “I volunteered from sun-up to three in the morning the entire time; I saw shows, I volunteered and just dove in,” recalls Friskics. “I fell in love so fast, and so hard, which is similar to a lot of people’s stories — you see one show and you’re completely hooked.”

A chance encounter with former Fringe producer Matt Wohl led Friskics to move to Florida following her college graduation, and she soon found herself working for Fringe — first as volunteer coordinator, then associate producer. Even while attending graduate school in Chicago or running the Garden Theatre, she “always stayed connected to Fringe,” she says. “It was very ingrained in who I was and what I wanted to do as a career.”

Since becoming Fringe’s executive director in 2017, Friskics has overseen a stabilization of the organization’s finances, with over $500,000 distributed to artists last year, and an elevation of its international profile through her work with the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals (CAFF). “Not only am I very proud of helping uplift the local artists, but also the touring artists, which has been a huge passion of mine.”

Friskics’ largest long-term legacy might be last year’s opening of ArtSpace, which she says she’s been seriously discussing with the board for nearly half a decade. “We knew we wanted to create an incubator program; that’s why we were approached, and that was the original core of the idea: to help emerging artists grow,” says Friskics.

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Despite its potential, Friskics acknowledges that ArtSpace could also prove a problem for her successor if not managed creatively. “Being downtown is very difficult. It comes with its own set of unique challenges, and I think we were giving ourselves some space and breath to be able to figure that out and try a bunch of things; the artists have a lot of different ideas about what this space is or could be. But I hope there’s still a sense of curiosity that’s going to keep it going into the future,” she says.

“We have two very different lines of business right now: We have a 30-plus-year institutional festival that is very well-established and well-loved, and then we also have this brand-new baby of a theater,” Friskics explains. “At first we thought they’d just seamlessly sort of go together, and I think what we’re finding is they’re very different, [so I advise] giving grace to the startup and knowing that that’s going to take time.”

“I am an adventurous person by nature, and I need new challenges and obstacles constantly,” says Friskics when asked why she’s exiting just as ArtSpace reaches its first anniversary. “I feel like there were a lot of things I’ve accomplished with Fringe that I set out to accomplish in the beginning [and] I like to leave a party when it’s poppin’, so it felt like the right time, with the right team in place. … I’m sad to leave it, but I’m very confident in its future.”

One of the key members of that team carrying Fringe’s future is Tempestt Halstead, who started out while in college as a performer at the 2009 Orlando Fringe and joined the staff in 2017 — first as an administrative intern, and later as associate producer — following a career as a circus aerialist. [Disclosure: My spouse is also part of the Fringe team.] “I was really at a pivotal point in my life,” recalls Halstead. “The moment I stepped into the office, there was something so special about this office culture. It was so inviting, it was so freeing, [and] everyone was so driven by passion.”

Since succeeding Lindsay Taylor as festival producer last year, Halstead says she’s focused on “communicating with the artists [and] having that personal connection with each one of them; getting to know them, their goals, what their show is about.” To that end, she’s excited by her “open and honest conversations with the artists this last year about things that they want to see, because this festival is not just for Fringe. This festival is for the community; it is for the artists. So my job is, how can I best serve them?”

For this weekend’s FestN4, Halstead is serving audiences a carefully curated selection of the Festival circuit’s best artists, including prior Critics Choice award winners and acclaimed international acts new to town. She says the new name, ditching the minimizing “mini-fest,” distinguishes it as “a curated diverse experience [that] takes the guesswork out of going to see these shows,” in contrast to the lottery-based main festival.

To be frank, I’m fearful about Fringe’s future if the board of directors simply replaces Friskics with a newcomer unfamiliar with the festival’s culture; perhaps this would be the perfect time for a complete shakeup of the organizational structure. Despite the headwinds May’s festival faces — including the relocation of several venues from the Lowndes Shakespeare Center to the Orlando Family Stages — “this year is going to look different, but feel the same,” Halstead reassures me. “There are some really exciting shows that have gotten into the lottery, a lot of new emerging artists [that] have never done the festival before, [and] I am hopeful about the future. I feel like we have just started to gain our footing after COVID, and I’m just really excited.”


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This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2024.