News Archives - 2007

From August 3 to 12, Augsburg College will host the inaugural Manna Fest, a festival of theater showcasing issues of ethics and spirituality.

Over the festival, 23 different shows will be performed in three campus venues. The schedule is arranged so that playgoers can attend multiple performances back-to-back.

The performances range from entirely religious to vaguely spiritual and represent many different religious communities. Common elements across the performances are the formula for a fringe festival: artistic freedom, simplicity of venue, smaller casts, and shorter time-spans, enabling the audiences to attend multiple shows in a single evening.

"Augsburg's location in the center of a vibrant, diverse community, in one of the best theater cities in the U.S., along with its faith-based mission, makes it an ideal location for this festival," says Dean J. Seal, artistic director and adjunct professor of religion. "But we're not just talking about Lutherans. Manna Fest is a way for Augsburg's name to get into every church, synagogue, and mosque in town."

The idea for this spiritual-based festival grew out of the Fringe Festival, which began 60 years ago in Scotland, where amateur artists performed on the "fringe," or the outskirts, of a theater festival. The concept spread internationally and to Minnesota 14 years ago.

Seal says that during his tenure as producer of the Minnesota Fringe Festival, he saw at least five to ten shows on the waiting list each year that dealt with spiritual themes. Hence a new arm of the festival, called the "Spiritual Fringe," was born, and for two years events parallel to the main Fringe were held at Lake Harriet United Methodist Church. This year, the festival reinvents itself into Manna Fest at Augsburg.

"When we combine church and stage," Seal says, "we take leaps of faith as a community; at the same time, we open our doors to new neighbors."

For more information, visit www.augsburg.edu/mannafest