I’m not here to be grumpy about First Fridays (not today, anyway). Open gallery doors, quality art, plenty of places to eat, special events at established spaces—delightful. But for a while now I’ve been wondering: where’s all the weird stuff that used to be part of these monthly deals? Where’s the next generation of messy buskers, mimes, performance art, and guerilla installations?
It pleases me to report that the fringe element is creeping back into the Arts District. This past First Friday, performance artist Shiloh Heart set up in the back of a U-Haul truck with a piece called “Apology”: people could come one at a time into the truck, where the artist knelt at their feet and offered them an apology, a flower, and a moment of spontaneous, genuine connection. Down the street, Trueson Daugherty came up with a “Creative Spirit” adoption event, offering little googly-eye-pipe-cleaner friends that came with plastic habitats, bedding, and care instructions. Street dance styles from across the region spilled across the Guthrie Green stage at the 2v2 dance battle. And Austin Gober and Val Esparza’s show at Living Arts, while not technically guerilla, delivered some very useful reflections on our distorted reality.
It’s not just in the Arts District, either. The next day was Cyberfest, which Henry Roanhorse Gray wrote about for The Pickup. The day after that, I saw Anna Puhl and Ben Morgan’s brilliantly original, bloody, moving, hilarious independently produced play called “The Dead Guy In The Pool” at Studio 308. One Aux, a bastion of outsider music since 2023, has new stickers that bring the request home: “more weird sounds please.”
Fringe events like these tend to be haphazardly funded, whether through drumming up donations and sponsorships, resource-sharing, bartering, or other such practices that have kept art growing between the cracks of bureaucratic spaces for centuries. And they’re often marked by an especially supportive, honest, and inclusive energy. Unlike some creative provocations Tulsa’s seen in the past, these current projects don’t tend to have a classically punk “let’s tear it all down” vibe, though that spirit’s in the room. The thrust is more like, “it’s all torn down already, so let’s get creative about how to live together in a broken world.”
We do our best here at The Pickup to make sure you know where to find stuff like this, as it often happens in out-of-the-way places. This weekend, some of that “fringe” energy is getting concentrated into a stacked two-day Tulsa Fringe Festival at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center. In the Lynn Riggs Theater and other spaces throughout the Equality Center, which is now under new leadership, nearly 100 local performers are bringing everything from music and theatre, to poetry and cosplay, to the frankly uncategorizable.
“To me, a ‘fringe’ is about whatever's in your brain that's not against the law and doesn't hurt people, that’s one of the performing arts, and that you want to put up and explore with an audience—that's a ‘fringe’,” says Machelle Miller Dill of Echo Theatre Company, who co-organized the festival with Dennis Neill, Twisted Arts' Kevin Lovelace, and Oklahomans for Equality's Mitchell Smith.
Part of the reason for the festival is to let local performers know that the Equality Center space is available to them, says Dill (who has had her theatre work shown at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which inspired Tulsa’s). Another goal, she says, is to “get audiences who may have never set foot in this place to learn about this little gem that we have here. The more we talked, the more we realized that we could serve multiple things at one time: serve OKEQ and the Lynn Riggs Theater, but [also] do a service to the performing arts community.”
For artists, it can be tough to find affordable, appropriately sized venues to put on non-mainstream performing arts; this one comes with a variety of spaces, full technical support, and even a bar. And in contrast to many venues at the Edinburgh Fringe, performers don’t have to pay to play here. There’s no rental fee for participants, the artists keep every dollar earned in ticket sales, and each performing group will receive an honorarium. (We love to see artists getting paid.)
Many events during the weekend are free, and at those that aren’t, ticket prices are under $20. “If you’re dead broke, there’s stuff for you,” Dill says. Threaded through the performances, the Tulsa Fringe Festival includes a maker’s market, a panel discussion with Create Tulsa about AI and the arts, Saturday morning family cartoons with Twisted Arts, an SPCA adoption event, a Saturday night mixer, and food from Inheritance Juicery and 918 Maples Tacos & Cantina. In a moment when queer-friendly spaces are being described as a threat to us all, this is an opportunity to remember that, for anyone and everyone, the fringe is often the most welcoming and nurturing place you can be.
