Inspire School of Arts & Science’s theatre teacher and students headed for the Festival Fringe July 30-August 12, 2022
CHICO, CA — This isn’t the first time that Inspire School of Arts & Sciences has participated in one of the world’s premiere arts festivals, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Theatre teacher, Erin Horst, led a group of thirty-nine Inspire students in 2019, and returns this summer with fifteen students. “This is a life-changing experience,” says Horst. “Our students will have the opportunity to perform their original adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at the Fringe through the American High School Theatre Festival.”
Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe is among the world’s largest and most prestigious arts festivals. Each August, Edinburgh becomes the most magical and exciting place on earth as performing artists from all over the world converge to take part. The whole city becomes a stage, and visitors can view performances everywhere from playgrounds to conference rooms, from city parks to churches. The Fringe includes over 3000 different performances of music, theatre, dance, and comedy during its three-week run. This year, the Fringe celebrates its 75th anniversary this year.
The founding principle at the heart of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – to be an open-access arts event that welcomes anyone with a story to tell and a venue to host them – mirrors that of Inspire School of Arts and Sciences. At Inspire, students connect with their passions and explore them on a deeper level where everyone is welcome. Attending the Fringe is another way for students at Inspire to live out that core value of exploration.
Inspire students decided to adapt Frankenstein into a physical theatre piece. Told from inside the mind of Victor Frankenstein, the stage serves as Victor’s brain, the other characters as impressions, and the story that takes place as the inner workings of Victor’s mind and emotions. The script was written and devised by the fifteen students traveling and will be performed and produced by those same students in Scotland this August.
Horst, teacher and theatre director at Inspire, was selected by the American High School Theatre Festival (AHSTF) Board of Advisors, made up of college theatre professionals, to represent Inspire and our community as part of the 2022 Fringe. The selection board reviews all invited applications and identifies the top high school programs and directors based on their most recent bodies of work, awards, community involvement, philosophies, and recommendations.
You can support these students’ production costs by donating to their GoFundMe page. Each student worked hard to pay for their individual travel costs and now all that’s left to fundraise for is their production costs. They have a goal of $600 and are nearly there. You can help them reach the finish line by visiting: inspirechico.news/fringe-22
Follow their travels on Instagram by following @inspireedfringe and @inspire_chico











