the anti-fringe festival

"There's nothing makes a big dog feel like a big dog like gettin' some little fleas around it," says an anonymous performance artist who's helping launch FridgeFest, a new avant-garde theater series, this week. "We're the fleas!"

Just as eight theater groups showed up uninvited at the Edinburgh International Festival back in 1947 to become the very first "Fringe Festival," a collaborative team of writers, visual artists and actors is convening at Spirit Wind (a martial arts studio turned performance space) on Friday to conduct their own sidebar to Philadelphia's now-established Live Arts/Fringe.

Their three-day mini-festival will feature a dozen original performances, a "story slam," a 24-hour playwriting marathon and visual art installations — all centering around five actual refrigerators the artists picked up on bulk trash days.

"We think of the fridge as a frame," says FridgeFest producer "Ben Travoto" (Italian for "happily invented," one of many pseudonyms FridgeFest artists are assuming). "It's a small white cube of a gallery that holds food for thought." The five refrigerators at FridgeFest house kitchen-inspired art objects like a dozen papier-mâché "eggheads" crafted by a New York sculptor. Writers and actors have worked together for months, mostly by e-mail, to create performance pieces that "muse off of" these installations.

The Fridge opens with "Diva Divan," a 40-minute program of monologues from four mostly-female characters ranging from a childlike clown called Lucky the Loser ("Oops, I peed a little!") to a pregnant hermaphrodite (no easy costume design). "I enjoyed doing the Fringe in the past," says the actor who plays Lucky, "but you end up just a little blip in the guide." FridgeFest artists are hoping this new team venture will give their work a little more light — at least before the fridge doors shut.

FridgeFest, Fri., Sept. 2, Sat., Sept. 3 and Sat., Sept. 10, $15, Spirit Wind Performance Space, 213 New St. (behind the Painted Bride), www.fridgefest.com.