Friday, July 15, 2022

Fringe 2022 - Returning Favorites - The Winding Sheet Outfit (Amber Bjork)


Arsgang: What You Follow Follows You - The Winding Sheet Outfit

On the dark night of the solstice, a brave soul seeking visions of the coming year must undertake a dangerous, quiet, supernatural pilgrimage through the still and snowy forest...although not truly alone....

This is another one of those “I really don’t have to sell you on these artists, do I?” posts.  Everyone enjoys a show from The Winding Sheet Outfit.

They were on my pre-Fringe Top 10 back in 2012 with their show Birds of Passage.  Since then they’ve been on a roll with great shows that were big hits with Fringe audiences like The Memory Box of the Sisters Fox (2017),  Blood Nocturne (2018), and one of my personal favorites, the whimsical and melancholy You Are Cordially Invited To the Life and Death of Edward Lear (2019). They didn’t even let the pandemic stop them.  Their virtual Fringe offerings included a video short in which Napoleon went to war with a pack of vicious bunnies (2020), and last year’s The Darger Project aka The Darger Project - a behind the scenes video that turns into an actual show about artists in isolation discovering the work of an artist in isolation.  Their work in the Fringe and the Twin Cities Horror Festival proves that they love the creepy - and this year’s Fringe will again be in that vein.  

The More Information tab on their show page says: “This year we will not be focusing on a historical person, but rather a historical practice.  Arsgang (ohrs-gohng) is a journey. A challenge. A ritual undertaken at great personal risk for the privledge to see what the future holds. There are dangers in the woods and rules to be followed. You must go alone. At midnight. On the longest day of the year.  And you must not speak, for death follows you.  Among other things.”

There’s a prequel audio play they did back in December 2020 with all the same characters called Midnight Mass of the Dead: An Arsgang Story, if you can’t wait till opening night and want to start Fringing right now.

 

(You can click on the following links to see a set of links to the full Top 10 list, the Top 11-20 list, a list of returning favorites, and the full coverage of the 2022 Fringe on this blog.) 

(Side note: Also during Fringe season, Minnesota has a primary election coming up on August 9th.  Early voting options are currently available.  You can also check out what's on your ballot ahead of time on the Minnesota Secretary of State website, as well as other voting services and information.  In Minneapolis, not only do we have the Governor and Lt. Governor on the ballot, but there's our U.S. Congressional Rep., our MN State Senator, the MN Secretary of State and MN Attorney General, as well as our County Sheriff and County Attorney, and two members of the Minneapolis School Board.  These are the people who decide what laws we live under and how they get enforced.  These are the people who decide whether or not we have voting rights.  These are the people who decide how our kids learn.  This is how we change things.  Personally, I'm alternately furious and despairing that my goddaughter and her little sister now have fewer rights over their own bodies than they did a month ago - there are things we can do, voting in the primary (and the general election) is one of them - here's a place you can go to do more.)

 

 

 

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