70 years of Fringe Festivals
Happy Birthday to Fringe Festivals everywhere, you make dreams happen!
By Holly Lombardo, Managing Director, World Fringe July 2017http://howlround.com/seventy-years-of-fringe-festivals
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society has a significant milestone
birthday this year, it is 70 years old and this means that ‘Fringe’ is 70 too.
Where there was one Fringe Festival in 1947 now over 200 Fringe Festivals
across the globe, facilitate hundreds of thousands of artists and performers to
reach a staggering number of people every year.
On World Fringe Day, 11 July 2017, we are celebrating the birth of
the Fringe Festival. Gathering together, virtually and physically, to share
Fringe memories, the opportunities Fringe Festivals have given us and how they
have influenced our lives. World Fringe day will highlight the importance of
Fringe within the cultural landscape as a development platform that reacts to
political and economic change.
There clear trends and reasons for new Fringe Festivals starting,
which demonstrate the reactive nature of this sector of festival. Where there
is a void, in pours a Fringe Festival to fill it. They start as a response to
something. This can be lack of access to the Arts in an area, an economic recession,
cuts to Arts Funding, a lack of venue space, a reaction to political agendas or
a need to change the way audiences consume and interact with culture. They
begin with a few like-minded, committed, entrepreneurial, forward thinking
communicators who want to encourage, share and see creativity experienced by
the many. Research shows that in the 33 years after the Birth of the Edinburgh
Fringe in 1947, less than 10 Fringe Festivals opened. From 1980 to the millennium
about 20 more popped up.
Since then there has been a sharp steady increase,
which shows over 200 Fringe Festivals launching over the last 17 years. This is
an extortionary expansion, which reflects cuts in funding for the arts
alongside cheaper travel and the growth of digital technologies.
Fringe can’t be defined by belief or structure alone. The
fundamental difference between a Fringe and a programmed Festival is mainly
understood by risk & who takes it, as well as financial and the direction
of the money streams. In a Fringe, there’s a shared risk, artists will often
invest in their own Festival attendance and with support of the Fringe Festival
administrative body, pay themselves via fundraising and ticket sales. On the
flipside, a programmed Festival will hold a large pot of money and invite an
artist or group to perform and pay them directly for their attendance; the
Festival will then take the box office revenue.
Fringe Festivals break the rules, even their own.
Often thought of
as a Fringe to a programmed festival, of which Edinburgh Fringe was the
inaugural example, they are now much less definable. This is a source of
continued debate as they now come in a range of models. Many are open access, meaning
anyone can take part; if a performing company has a venue booked in the area
within the festival dates they can register and are in the programme regardless
of quality or subject of the work. Some Fringe Festivals run a lottery and
literally pull names out of a hat to create the programme. This can normally be
watched live online beamed out from a pub or venue with the festival staff and
performers celebrating the start of the Fringe year. A few Fringe festivals are
completely open air, mainly in warmer climates, they reside in parks with day
long activities and markets. I know of one Fringe set up to try and change the
culture of arts consumption in a whole country where currently there is only an
appetite for re-runs of the classics and not for new work and writing.
The challenge is to understand why, if they are so different are
they all Fringe Festivals? What brings them together is the support of
creatives minds, artists and performers. It is also an ethos and a vision for
change, exploration and ‘doing things different’. Consider that each Fringe
Festival has its own identity, political agenda, unique structure and spirit, it
is rather difficult to encapsulate what Fringe means when one size does not fit
all. Some people believed that if Fringe is defined it is not a Fringe anymore
as by its very nature it defies definition.
Fringes are good at testing audiences who are encouraged to take a
risk on seeing something new. With generally low-ticket prices and shorter time
slots, spectators don’t have much to lose but an hour of their lives and a few
quid. The likelihood is they will come away having seen something ground
breaking, met a few people and been inspired to take a punt on another unknown.
They open the door to wider acceptance of diverse artforms and topics. No two
Fringe Festivals are the same and they never repeat themselves.
With a critical lack of financial support for development within
the Arts these festivals are essential to the state of culture in our
societies. Without them we would see a drop in new writing and the emergence of
new skills, for this reason they are vital. Fringes are accessible to all
social and economic backgrounds, ages and genres and allow performers and
artist to experiment, discover and be discovered They represent and encourage
community cohesion, economic growth, diversity, employment, acceptance and fun.
Through various touring and award networks Fringe performers can travel the
world, touring to different continents, countries, cities and towns. What they
carry with them is work from a vast variety of culture, inspiring the masses to
take part in art. Fringe Festivals are an essential development platform
supporting all levels of ability form amateur to professional; a beginning to
the creative food chain, launching the stars of the future.
Constituted through innovation of creative expression, the Fringe
ethos is, ‘If you want to do it you can, Fringes offer an alternative.
"This piece,
"70 years of Fringe Festivals" by Holly Lombardo was originally
published on HowlRound (http://howlround.com/seventy-years-of-fringe-festivals),
a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, 06/07/2017."
Holly Lombardo, Managing Director
World Fringe
World Fringe Day – 11 July 2017
#WorldFringeDay #FringeFamily #Fringe70
FRINGE
FACTS (2014)
19 million people see approximately 170 thousand performers in
60,000 free and ticketed events.
Over 8 million Fringe tickets are sold in over 6 thousand venues
across the globe.
Want to start a Fringe where you are? Contact World Fringe for
advice, consultancy and a global pool of knowledge. holly@worldfringe.com
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