For the past three decades, Frontera Fest has given performers, writers, directors, and other artists a way to connect with audiences. Each year, the fringe arts festival presents dozens of shows of all kinds – performers can do pretty much anything they want with their 25 minutes of stage time (as long as they don’t hurt anybody or break any laws), and that unpredictability is key to the fest’s mission. Hyde Park Theatre artistic director Ken Webster has been there every step of the way.
“I've been involved in all the previous 30 Frontera Fests,” Webster says, “and this will be 31. As a performer, writer, director, panelist, producer… [And] I'm the emergency fill in if somebody drops out at the very last minute because I can talk about just about anything for 25 minutes.”
While many arts festivals tout their curatorial process, Frontera Fest is a proudly first-come-first-serve sort of operation. “There's 80 shows,” Webster says. “We take the first 80 applicants and every night you'll see five shows. And they're totally different, except there's one night [this year] where there's two improv groups. But otherwise every night, totally different shows that people will see. One person shows, multiple cast, multiple character shows… it's a really fantastic arts incubator that was invented by my predecessor Vicky Boone. Vicky Boone and Jason Phelps and Annie Suite were at Ted's Greek Cafe on Congress in 1993, and they came up with this idea of a theater festival. You get one guaranteed performance. If you make Best of the Week, you get two performances. If you make Best of the Fest, you get four performances. We provide all the staff, you just have to show up with your actors and your script.”
Webster says that one of the things that keeps him interested and engaged in the festival after all these years is the mix of artists who participate every year. “It's a great combination every year of people who've been around for a while… and brand new people on the scene,” he says.
One of the people who’s been around for a while is veteran Austin theater artist and Teatro Vivo co-founder Rupert Reyes; he’s participated in Frontera Fest many times over the years. “This is one of the things that is wonderful about Frontera Fest ,” Reyes says, “is the access that it provides for people – especially non-traditional actors, I would say people from the Latino community. Last year we did a piece that was inspired by tales from the residents of Chalmers Court, the public housing down on 2nd Street… where they got to write about experiences that they had with racism in Austin or throughout their lives.”
In more recent years, he’s mostly participated as a writer but this year Reyes will be back on stage as a performer, with his new one-person show One Day on the Camino, based on a recent experience from his own life, on a very hot day on a Spanish pilgrimage trail. “I feel like it's an important message,” Reyes says. “It's almost like [I’m] preaching to people with this play ‘cause it's about rediscovering unconditional love on the Camino de Santiago, de Compostela in Spain. It's something that… I've walked it so much I'd become a tourist. And then one day, on this path last year, [I] ended up… walking with another pilgrim. And then we saw something that you might kind of think about, a kind of kooky miracle kind of thing. But Saint James – there's an image of him in silhouette as a pilgrim – and there was a tree off in the horizon that looked exactly like that. We were standing in a tunnel under an overpass. It was shady, it was cool. We were looking out and we both saw this image and this tree formed this weird image, so it was kind of a message.”
Months later, Reyes found himself still thinking about that experience and wanting to turn it into a one-person show, and Frontera Fest offered a great way for him to workshop the piece in front of an audience.
“I keep saying arts incubator,” Webster says of the fest, “but so many theater companies and directors and writers, and actors got their start at Frontera Fest or did some of their earliest work during the festival. It's just such an incredible thing… seeing the people who've done it year after year coming up with new material and seeing the brand new people on the same stage every night.”
