Renegade Fringe Festival

05/29/2026

A friendly reminder from the team at Renegade Fringe Festival: we are rapidly nearing our application deadline!

04/06/2026

Thank you, Bridgette Redman at Lansing State Journal for this look at Renegade past, present and what's planned for Renegade Fringe this summer. Do you have a favorite Renegade memory? Please share!

https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/life/2026/04/01/renegade-fringe-revives-festival-spirit-in-reo-town-with-august-return/89394841007/?fbclid=IwY2xjawRAt49leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEej4ADefthih_SqKQDP7rX6wWdd4fZz-iP5oglgGRhtChFjsZr-wI1XBZOWys_aem_HEHdypkZmjAh4pwSHXkSqw

A reimagined Renegade Theater Festival will return as Renegade Fringe at numerous sites throughout REO Town Aug. 7-8

04/02/2026

It’s so exciting to see we’re already receiving volunteer and performance applications! However, we're missing some key information from the first couple performance applications submitted. If you submitted a performance application on Wednesday or Thursday, please contact us via direct message or [email protected]. Thank you!

04/02/2026

Thank you to Nicole at City Pulse for chatting with us about the festival this summer!

Check out the article and tell us what you’re most excited to see at the Renegade Fringe in August!

Renegade is reimagined as Renegade Fringe Festival

Now anchored firmly in REO Town, it's more (and less!) focused.

New name: Feature all kinds of "fringe" people in Renegade Fringe Festival
New focus: Any performing art
New location: REO Town (instead of Old Town and downtown and REO Town and ...)

04/01/2026

Renegade is returning!

No jokes here.

After retiring the festival in 2022, we’re bringing it back to Lansing, reimagined as the Renegade Fringe Festival: an inclusive, artist-driven celebration of bold, cross-disciplinary performance, creative experimentation, and community connection.

This August 7–8, 2026, REO Town will be filled with new work, fresh voices, and boundary-pushing art.

Performing artists of all kinds—this is your invitation. Come be part of something that proves just how vibrant and necessary the arts are in our community.

Applications are now open on our website and will be accepted through May 31.

https://www.renegadefringe.org/participation

05/18/2022

Some of Chad's favorite Renegade memories, in no particular order (Part 2 of a 4 part series):
• Our die-hard volunteers: Antonio’s smooth, persuasive way of working the info tent, Jennifer keeping everything in line and in order, volunteer speech givers holding their jingling cardboard donation boxes.
• The moment just after 7 and 9pm when shows had started in all of the venues and I could grab a quick bite to eat at Pablo’s or an ice cream cone to get me through the rest of the night.
• Having 12 different Renegade t-shirts in my drawer that only came out for three days a year.
• The last-minute cram when an artist either dropped out of the festival or wanted to be included in the festival and ALWAYS finding a way to make it work.
• When a show would finish and an audience would spill out into the streets and you’d hear the glorious snippets of reactions from what they had just seen. It was always such a wonder to host up to 20/30 different shows over the course of three days and not really know what they were going to look or feel like. I loved how audiences would fill in those holes as they’d rush in to the streets chattering about the show and we’d slowly understand the shows that would draw crowds and the ones that were more….experimental.

05/16/2022

Some of Chad's favorite Renegade memories, in no particular order (a 4 part series):
• Getting the keys to the old coffee shop in East Lansing as a performance venue and opening the doors that clearly had not been moved in YEARS! We TRANSFORMED that dingy old place into a pretty cool performance space!
• Running ALL over Old Town with a jangle of keys opening up spaces, turning on lights, welcoming theatre companies into vacant, closed, office buildings, baby clothing stores, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, art galleries and telling them to have a great show as they looked around like, “THIS is where we’re performing”. 😊And the major trust of business/space owners to allow us into their spaces!
• Hauling, and dragging and pulling chairs out of nowhere to make sure that every space had at least 50 seats!
• Our yearly wrap-up meetings that turned into brainstorm meetings where we dreamed of what Renegade might/could be…..a huge parade to open the festival with giant puppets, end of festival parties with winning playwrights announced, staging the festival all along the river trail, hosting Renegade events throughout the year across town, partnering with the Pulsar awards to cap off the festival…..
• The generous support of Ciesa design in the early days that really established our vibe and our aesthetic. Our tremendous designer Dotty actually cross-stitching our logo for the poster our second year! Amazing.

05/11/2022

HEAR YE! HEAR YE! The Renegade Theatre Festival is retiring after almost 20 years of providing a Lansing area festival full of theatrical variety for everyone to enjoy each summer. The Renegade Theatre Festival board voted to retire the festival, making way for new endeavors and opportunities.

Since its founding in 2005 in East Lansing, Renegade has been an inclusive and free festival open to independent theatre artists and to existing theatres seeking a space to experiment. With the promise of a place to perform, 50 chairs and publicity, the Festival put few limits on what an artist could bring, and theatre-goers only knew to expect the unexpected. The history of the all-volunteer Renegade Theatre Festival is rich with participants, supporters, sponsors, volunteers and donors, and it reflects a community deeply committed to the theatre arts.

The organizers are grateful to be retiring the Festival on such a high note and with a plethora of theatrical memories. We hope everyone will celebrate the Renegade Theatre Festival by sharing their own memories on the Festival’s page. The organizers will be doing the same over the next two weeks and recognizing the many contributors who made Renegade Theatre Festival possible!

Thank you - thank you - thank you!

08/23/2020

Missing Renegade? Catch free live outdoor socially distanced theatre in Lansing tonight with a lot of local talent! Starts at 6pm, Sharp Park Amphitheater, 1401 Elmwood, presented by Ixion Theatre and Jeff Croff (our Renegade Ruckus coordinator).

08/20/2019