By Janna Willoughby-Lohr aka MC Vendetta:
Every summer, the streets of Buffalo come alive with scores of events by local and visiting theatre and dance companies, puppeteers, media artists, poets, comics, musicians, cabaret acts, digital designers, and miscellaneous insurrectionists.
The annual Buffalo Infringement Festival provides artists and audiences of all backgrounds the chance to come together, take chances, push boundaries, and explore uncharted territory because exciting art can happen anywhere, anytime, without a blockbuster budget. (Or any budget at all, for that matter.) And this summer is no exception! Buffalo Infringement will be bigger and better than ever. We have tried to consolidate venue locations, coordinate more group shows with several genres of work in one place and keep the fest a little more organized than in previous years. This year is special, in particular, because we have finally been recognized as the Best Event of the Summer in WNY, it’s taken 9 years of hard work but we made it and we invite you to come and see for yourself what everyone has been talking about.
There really is no theme, as it is always anything goes, but we have more out-of-town acts, interesting new outdoor projects and new exciting venues. If people want to see what to look forward to, please come to our big press launch event, Emerging At Merge, where 50 artists from the fest will each get two minutes to pitch their proposal to the press and to hand out fliers for their events. Great way to get a heads-up on what’s going down. Thurs. July 11th at Merge, 5-8pm.
And by the way… a message to all you AWESOME Infringers…
I wanted to thank you all for participating in this year’s festival. We are getting so excited…it’s going to be the best one yet. We were just awarded the 2012 Buffalo Spree Best of WNY Award for BEST SUMMER EVENT. We would LOVE to start a winning streak and keep dominating summer in WNY.
With that, we are having a little VIDEO contest. Upload a video to tell us WHY you LOVE Buffalo’s Infringement Festival. The organizers will vote on the best video and ONE talented winner will receive this year’s T-shirt FREE! Post from now until July 8th—winner announced at Emerging at Merge, Thurs July 11th 5-8pm.
Make a quick video with your phone, flip or whatnot and upload it to our Facebook page:
We will be sharing our favorites…
ALSO, our IndieGoGo campaign has exactly two weeks left to go and we still need a good amount of money to reach our goal and our goal is actually lower than what we really need before the festival starts, so we are really hoping to blast the goal out of the park.
Here’s the link for that:
PLEASE make a donation if you are able, and then share the link with your friends, family, fans, local business owners, random people on the street, etc. If you can’t donate yourself please please please share the campaign as much as you can. We put the whole festival together starting with $0 every year and none of the organizers get paid for all the work we do. It really means a lot to us to know that the artists are invested in making this festival a success for everyone. Infringement isn’t just a DIY fest, it’s DYP (Do Your Part) Fest and the time is now.
You can also support the festival by purchasing this year’s T-shirts (available at Coming Home Buffalo 140 Elmwood Ave.). They are Made in America and printed in Allentown. We have green, charcoal and black (black has glow in the dark ink). Because they are MIA and the extra cost of glow ink they cost is $18 each, or two for $30 (save $6) – so get a friend and go buy yours today.
We also need VOLUNTEERS. If you haven’t already sent an email to infringevolunteers@gmail.com please do so. We need people to hang posters, hand out postcards at local events, distribute schedules when they arrive, overseeing venues, driving equipment around, running sound and more. WE NEED YOU!
Thank you so much for making Buffalo such an amazing place to live, dream, love, make art and take action.
Your Faithful Literary Czarina, Online Funding GuRu, and General Cat Herder for BIF ’13,
Janna Willoughby-Lohr aka MC Vendetta | www.infringebuffalo.org