Jamming Talent Productions (www.jammingtalent.com) brings aerial dance to the Fringe Festival for the third year. As the only aerial dance company in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky - according to Jeremy Millsaps, the group's producer and one of the dancers - the group feels its attendance at Fringe is almost mandatory.
"What we do is one of the most avant-garde types of performances in Cincinnati," Millsaps says. "It's very experimental. Aerial is so new, especially to Cincinnati."
Millsaps, who was taught by ex-Cirque du Soleil performers, has found this form of performance to be a perfect fit with the Fringe Festival.
"The Cincinnati Fringe Festival is the only type of festival that comes through Cincinnati that gives artists like ourselves the opportunity to perform in front of large groups," Millsaps says. "And we know that the audience that comes to see the Fringe Festival, they're there to see something unique and different."
Travel provides that uniqueness with its color, movement and music. An experimental musician provides the soundtrack with live instrumentation over pre-recorded music, and there is a short video halfway through.
"When we first started doing this, we would do performances in small bars, and now we're doing big performances at Music Hall in the grand ballroom," Millsaps says. "So it's just the idea of traveling and traveling in growth and being a company, really, and learning to understand each other and trust each other and respect each other."
That trust comes into play when the three group members must adapt to venues that don't quite fit the criteria they're used to. Travel will be performed at Know Theatre because it's the venue with the highest ceilings. Those "high" ceilings are 16 1/2 feet high; the ceilings in the group's rehearsal studio are 35 feet high. And the only technical rehearsal the group gets in the space is the day of the first performance.
"We've been doing it so long together we kind of know what our routines are and our habits as performers, so we can kind of play off of that," Millsaps says of having to wing it.
Regardless of the challenges, Millsaps thinks being a part of Fringe is something special.
"What I love about (Fringe) the most is that throughout the entire year, Cincinnati really doesn't have much of a performance art scene at all," he says. "You don't see these people - but then the two weeks during the Fringe Festival, it's like this artist community all comes together."
