While sitting at the Hardware Café’s patio last night we noticed a band of masked performers wandering down the street. The patio was full of people who were enjoying dinner and drinks, and I think that the last thing they really expected to see was a lively art troupe walk, limp, and swagger by. Now normally there are some pretty interesting characters floating around artsy Allentown, and most people don't blink an eye when the everyday characters come out of the woodwork. The Infringement Festival takes the interesting elements of the neighborhood and multiplies them 100 fold.

 

Now that the Infringement Festival has been around for a few years, the people that live in and around Allentown have accepted these ongoing public performances as a way of life. It turns out that the performance that we witnessed last evening was a wondering theatrical group... and the crowd in attendance actually followed the group from venue to venue in order to follow the story. In-between the performance locations, the troupe would wander, still in character, to their next setup. Along the way the audience grew as the story unfolded. The last I saw of the group, they were stationed outside of a corner store, where a fantastic wall mural created the show's backdrop.

The Infringement Festival is currently attracting hundreds of performers and ‘gawkers’ to Allentown. How do you catch an act? Just hang around and the acts come to you. Or you can check out the intense festival schedule here. There're only a couple days left, so make sure you catch a performance… or let the performance catch you.

Photos by queenseyes and RoBear