by Jason C. McLean, The Talking Stick
originally published on Outside The Box (http://jasoncmclean.blogspot.com)

With over 300 projects in over 50 venues, the fourth-annual Buffalo Infringement Festival, opening this Thursday, promises to be the biggest infringement yet. We now present a look back to last year’s event, from the point of view of a Montreal infringer…

For the third year in a row, Car Stories played the Buffalo infringement Festival, for the third year in a row, I made it down and for the first time, I found a bit of time to write about it.

Now entering it’s third year, the Buffalo festival is, without a doubt, the largest in the International infringement circuit (so far). While the Montreal infringement improved audiences and developed the local infringement community this year by pulling itself back and focusing on less shows centered around the Plateau neighborhood, Buffalo’s event keeps getting bigger and better.

With over 140 acts this year (up from last year and almost quadruple the number of acts in the original 2005 Buffalo event), the growth in the festival’s size is matched by it’s growth in intimate community feeling and original, spontaneous ideas.

That’s not to say that the festival doesn’t have it’s critics, or should I say critic. Among all the praise and in-depth coverage found in Buffalo’s media, there was one editorial (um, “survival guide”) in the Artvoice urging the festival to drop it’s claim to support and represent underground artists with something to say by giving them a place to say it.

I’m not sure if anyone took that advice to heart, but it sure didn’t look like it on the streets of Allentown (the festival’s epicenter) during the festival’s opening weekend and the subsequent few days we were in town.

As people were busy completing their “self-infringement” assignments, pulled out of a box at Rust Belt Books, four separate public performances turned Allen Street into a spontaneous artistic celebration. On Monday night alone, three of them co-existed simultaneously.

The surreal experience started when Subversive Theatre’s fantastic street-theatre version of Berthold Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule (which I had the chance to catch a day earlier) made it’s way down Allen parade-style past MC Vendetta’s Open-Lot (a musical open-mike in a parking lot) to Day’s Park.

We started preparing for Car Stories, while taking in some of what was happening around us. Just before our first showtime of the evening (with a new show every 30 minutes, Car Stories has several), The Exception and the Rule made it’s way back to Allen Street and took over the parking lot next to Nietzsche’s, briefly trapping one of our actors behind the scene. It moved on to the parking lot where Open-Lot was taking place, just as they went on break.

Categories: analysis, reports
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