One show I never got around to writing about last year was "A Trip to Coney Island with Uncle Zeroboy", seeing it late afternoon on the final Sunday. It intrigued me since it was listed as "multimedia" and I expected it to be a movie, but it was really a sort of tour of the place by acting out some of the people you'd meet at the park.
It reminded me of when lectures were big entertainment. Before tv, before radio, the lecture circuit was big, and people went not just to keep track of what was going on, but it was seen as entertainment. You wanted to catch Stanley after he'd found Livingston in Africa, not only for the story told, but because he'd been in the news. And without tv, movies or radio, the only live way to see such speakers was for him to tour about and come to your town.
When Ernest Shackleton got stuck in the Antarctic ice back in 1914, when they abandoned ship and then struggled across the ice and across dangerous open water, they get photographic plates because without them, the lecture would not be so interesting, and without the lecture tour, they'd never make the money needed to pay back the investors for the trip to the Antarctic.
Lectures make an interesting variation for a Fringe show. We've seen them, "The Bisexual Alphabet" that Shakti brought one year was really a lot less about entertainment than lecture. I guess all the "Teaching...." shows by Keir Cutler have lecture as a theme. Even MacHomer has an element of lecture, since it would be nothing without the drawings of the Simpsons characters.
But it becomes a dynamic way to show off something that would otherwise be static. If you have some drawing skill, you could get a Fringe slot and use it to display that art, but I can't see it working too well, the Fringe really is a performing arts festival and the art would be too static. But, turn it into a lecture, "I just got back from Alpha Centauri and here are some of the creatures I came upon...", it can become a vehicle to show off the art. Make the lecture entertaining, but the slides or whatever would be the key part. You can do things with a lecture that would be fairly impossible doing as performance. Too costly
to create costumes or sets, but if they exist only on a projection screen, they become doable. Yet the storytelling benefits from the visual element.
