Orlando Fringe Winter Mini-Fest is here to help us shake off the hellish past year Perhaps no area organization exemplifies the dizzying pivots artists have been forced to perform since March better than the Orlando Fringe festival, which was among Orlando s earliest major arts events to go fully virtual back in May. Under the leadership of executive director Alauna McMillen and producer Lindsay Taylor, Orlando Fringe hosted nearly two solid weeks of daily streaming content, providing a financial lifeline for festival performers whose livelihoods were on lockdown. Now, Fringe is here to help us shake off this hellish past year and welcome the new one with its fifth annual Winter Mini-Fest (ofwinterminifest.com), which kicks off Orlando s 2021 cultural calendar on Jan. 7-10. While virtual was the watchword for 2020, hybrid is now the name of the game, at least until vaccines are widely distributed. This year s Winter Mini-Fest is no exception, with a blend of socially di
Orlando Fringe best exemplified the ingenuity shown by our artists in this pandemic year
As we warm ourselves beside the dwindling embers of the dumpster fire that was 2020, it s difficult to remember anything positive about this past year, especially amid the devastation of Central Florida s cultural community. But despite bearing a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 s economic impact, Orlando s artists and entertainers agilely adapted, inventing new ways of connecting to audiences despite social distancing and serving as beacons of hope or at least desperately needed distractions during the pandemic s darkest days.
After the initial shock of last spring s shutdown subsided, I discovered unexpected joy in watching how local performers adapted to our abnormal new normal.