New York State’s largest multidisciplinary performing arts festival presents more than 250 shows and 650 performances at over 30 venues in just12 days

• World famous Italian SPHERE making their dazzling Rochester Fringe debut
• U.S. premiere tour of TRACES from the internationally acclaimed Théâtre de L’Entrouvert
• Renowned, immersive, outdoor light and sound experience SUBMERGENCE
• World premiere of the all-new CIRQUE DU FRINGE: CLAWS OUT

ROCHESTER, N.Y., July 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The ESL Rochester Fringe Festival held its annual “Big Reveal” press conference today at the Memorial Art Gallery, announcing the full lineup for the 2025 Fringe, which takes place September 9 – 20. Tickets for all events go on sale TODAY at 12 NOON at rochesterfringe.com or on the new ESL Rochester Fringe Festival App, which is available for download from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

Rochester’s not-for-profit Fringe 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. The 2025 Fringe will feature more than 250 productions and 650 performances at over 30 venue locations in just 12 days. This includes returning favorites, festival debuts and major U.S. premieres of comedy, music, drama, dance, kids entertainment, magic, acrobats, jugglers and so much more.

During today’s press conference, Founding Festival Producer and CEO Erica Fee asked the audience, “How will you Fringe,” emphasizing the range and specialness of options available. She further said, “Fringe is something you have to experience and you get the freedom to choose!”

Spectacular
After a year hiatus, the free, public spectacle at Parcel 5 in the heart of downtown Rochester is returning to this year’s Fringe, with four mind-bending performances of eVenti Verticali’s SPHERE. Italy’s eVenti Verticali is a performing troupe making their Fringe debut by bringing the magic of SPHERE to Rochester with a spectacle about our miraculous planet, and what can happen when greed, beauty, energy, fragility, and a collective embrace can occur. Picture a giant luminous sphere, suspended 60 feet in the air, surrounded by aerial dancers who abound with whimsy. Now add in mesmerizing lights, music and incredible acrobatics. The allure of the public spectacle draws thousands of people to Parcel 5 each Fringe season. Rochester Fringe is one of the only Fringe Festivals in the country that offers such spectacular, large-scale, free public programming.

Unique
Fringe programming supports a range of artists from local favorites to new and emerging talents. With another completely free, public art performance, Fringe presents TRACES, which is part of the U.S. premiere tour from the internationally acclaimed Théâtre de L’Entrouvert. TRACES will feature 25 people from Rochester of different ages, cultures and backgrounds. They are not actors, just people who will represent a cross section of the city, led by world renowned French ice 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 is a spellbinding public conversation of sculpture, sound, and movement used 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,” said Mohamed Bouabdallah, Cultural Counselor of France and Director of Villa Albertine.

New (World Premiere)
Premieres and debuts are anticipated each year at Fringe. This year, Las Vegas legends and Fringe favorites Matt and Heidi Morgan, are back with a world premiere of Cirque du Fringe: Claws Out. It is glamorous, dazzling, unforgettable–-and that’s just the cats! Audiences are invited to become fully immersed in an evening with beloved socialite and renowned opera singer Madam Kitty Ross. She is a purrfect host and the cattiest cat lady at Fringe. Will it be an evening to remember or turn out to be a real “catastrophe?” It is not to be missed. All the cool cats will be there—glamorous aerialists, mind-blowing acrobats, and a swashbuckling swordsman—from America’s Got Talent, Das Supertalent, Penn & Teller Fool Us, Spiegelworld’s Absinthe, Opium & Vegas Nocturne, Circus Roncali and NBA halftime shows. But be careful, with a cast of characters as dramatic as these, the claws are sure to come out. Cocktails will be served in the Spiegeltent…shaken, not purred.

Immersive
Immersive experiences are cornerstone to the Fringe experience. Submergence provides a large, immersive sight and sound experience that is outdoors and walkable. It uses many 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
When it comes to Fringe, there is always more to see, hear and feel. Fringe is bringing 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, for the first-time ever under one Rochester roof, 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 is back 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 people of 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 – 5pm, 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!
The reason Fringe is such an expansive and successful festival is 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 our 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, exquisite, exciting, quirky, new talents. Audiences are in store for everything from dinner theater to even wrestling at Fringe!

2025 venues include: Aerial Arts of Rochester, Austin Steward Plaza, Bop Shop Records, Central Library of Rochester, Dawn’s Spiegelgarden, Eastman School of Music, The Focus Theater, Garth Fagan Dance, Genesee Valley Sports Complex, George Eastman Museum, The Harley School, Java’s JCC, Joseph Ave Arts and Culture Alliance, La Marketa at the International Plaza, Memorial Art Gallery, MuCCC, Parcel 5, Photo City Music Hall, RIT City Arts Space, RMSC Garden of Fragrance, ROC Cinema, ROC City Circus, Rochester Music Hall of Fame, RoCo, The Rose Room, Salena’s, School of the Arts, Spiegeltent, Strangebird Brewery, The Hochstein School, The Little, The Spirit Room, UR Sloan Performing Arts Center, Washington Grove, Washington Square, Writers & Books, and St. Joseph’s Park.

All of this and so much 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 8pm, at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre.

The full 2025 Rochester Fringe Festival program can be found at rochesterfringe.com, where tickets are also 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).

Future of Fringe
To ensure the future and stability of Fringe in Rochester, today the organization also announced that it is undergoing a Fringe Comprehensive Campaign to raise $1.575 million. The campaign committee reports that it has already secured $1.1 million in donations to date, and hopes to meet its goal by year end.

At the heart of this endeavor is a capital element – the acquisition of a rare Spiegeltent. Now, 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 that we can continue to deliver outstanding programming for years to come. 

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ABOUT THE ESL ROCHESTER FRINGE FESTIVAL:
The 12-day ESL Rochester Fringe Festival, one of the nation’s largest fringe festivals, has also been recognized by the New York Times as “one of the country’s more prominent multidisciplinary events” and is the current winner of CITY Magazine’s Best of Rochester Award for Best Arts Event. Nearly a million people have attended more than 5,700 performances and events at the Fringe since its inception in 2012. The non-profit organization’s mission is to offer platforms for artists, new audiences for venues, and unparalleled public access to incredible art. It strives to be diverse and inclusive, as well as to stimulate downtown Rochester culturally and economically. The Fringe showcases the work of regional, national, and international artists from emerging to superstar.

ABOUT ESL:
With more than 100 years of locally owned history, ESL Federal Credit Union serves as a full-service financial institution to more than 438,000 members and 17,200 businesses. Founded in 1920, the company provides personal banking, business banking, mortgage services and wealth management services through its locally based 24-branch network; telephone, mobile and online banking; and live chat center. The Rochester-based financial institution employs approximately 950 people in the Greater Rochester area and holds more than $9.4 billion in assets. Since 1996, ESL has paid out 30 consecutive Owners’ Dividends to its members totaling more than $320 million. Since the creation of its Community Impact initiative in 2018, ESL has reinvested more than $153 million in grants throughout the community. The company has appeared on Great Place to Work^® lists since 2010. ESL Federal Credit Union is headquartered at 225 Chestnut Street, in Rochester, and can be found online at www.esl.org.

ESL ROCHESTER FRINGE SPONSORS:
ESL Federal Credit Union, New York State Council on the Arts; Rochester Area Community Foundation; City of Rochester; University of Rochester; Monroe County; Dr. Dawn F. Lipson; 7Crest; Ames Amzalak Memorial Trust; Daisy Marquis Jones Foundation; Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; ESL Charitable Foundation; Waldron Rise Foundation; Elaine P. and Richard U. Wilson Foundation; Louis S. and Molly B. Wolk Foundation; Konar Enterprises; The Rubens Family Foundation; Mary Mulligan Trust; The Pike Company; Lake Beverage; Garber Automotive Rochester; The Inn on Broadway; Finger Lakes Distilling; Visit Rochester; Nazareth University; St. John Fisher University; Monroe Community College; 13WHAM TV; CITY Magazine; D&C Digital; WXXI; Albertine; J.M. McDonald Foundation; Hyatt Regency Rochester; The Harley School; The Spindler Family Foundation; Aspire Transformation Services; Hamilton A/V; Wilkins RV; McCarthy Tents & Events; City Blue Imaging; France Institute (Institut Francais); Villa Albertine; Quebec; Wegmans; Canandaigua National Bank; Broccolo Tree & Lawn Care; Yelp!; AdHouse Productions; the House of Guitars; Bond Schoeneck & King; A-Verdi; Kids Out and About and the Mary Cariola Center.

ABOUT FRINGE FESTIVALS:
In 1947, eight theatre groups showed up – uninvited – to perform at the newly established Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland. Although not listed in the official program, the groups performed anyway, at venues they found for themselves. The following year, a Scottish journalist coined the term “festival fringe” to describe these non-curated shows that began turning up annually. The Edinburgh Fringe is now the world’s largest arts festival and the third largest event after the Olympics and the World Cup. Today, there are more than 250 Fringe Festivals worldwide, with nearly 50 in the United States. The ESL Rochester Fringe Festival was the first in Upstate New York.

Image & Online Press Kit 
More information and high-res image can be found online: Press – Rochester Fringe Festival. 

SOURCE Rochester Fringe Festival, Inc.