Artistic Fringe

For theatre people, the greatest theatre experience on the planet may be the Edinburgh Festival and its Fringe, conducted each summer in Scotland since 1947. Theatre artists and organizations from around the world, big and small, pro and am, conventional and unconventional, gather for the month of August to present to the greatest crowd of theatre patrons ever. Lots of street performance and side-show work, of course, but some quite meaningful in content.

I've never attended but have followed it. The 2017 Edinburgh festival is gone as of this weekend, but in 2018 it will run August 3-27.

The Fringe began in 1947 when eight groups were refused performances at the newly formed Edinburgh International Festival. They performed on the streets, the "fringe" of the main event. 2017 marked the 70th anniversary of these groups' defiance, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is now the (self-proclaimed) largest arts festival in the world. The online program lists some 700 events.

Nobody is denied entry. The nature of the fringe events vary from generally traditional small-cast or one-person works that are quite provocative, to larger scale events that might engage and incorporate the audience. From images of the festival, it also includes many street acrobats and jugglers, rope walkers, flame eaters and the like.

Several years ago there was an attempt at a Boston Fringe. It didn't get far, I think because there was no concentration of venues and events. I attended a few productions listed, but the venues were all over the larger Boston area and poorly promoted. The few shows I saw were somewhat unconventional and fairly well put together, but poorly attended as I saw them. Other major cities likely have more organized fringe efforts.

University theatre can be the most exciting theatre around, and the annual regional festivals sponsored by The Kennedy Center offer some unconventional work that is quite good. Annual high school festivals very often have conceptually exciting pieces, as I've learned from years of judging them. There's quite significant festival cross-fertilization among schools. It's more difficult to find theatres, players and audiences to support that work outside educational environments. The EMACT community theatre organization in Massachusetts maintains a festival for committed groups that also features interesting work and theatre ideas developed primarily for competition.

There continues to be something vaguely called "experimental theatre," a term that once had some actual meaning, when most theatre was conventionally scripted stories with conventional characters - today's TV mysteries and sitcoms. Those experiments largely have yielded their results and much has been incorporated into convention. We have learned to become sceptical of strangeness for it's own sake, while at the same time celebrating things that are different because they are different.

American Repertory Theatre notably has always had a reputation for unconventional works under Brustein, Orchard, and now Diane Paulus. ART's audience-centered cabaret event called The Donkey Show is quite popular. Other theatres routinely take unconventional approaches to works. Such shows as Blue Man Group have become popular, which have much to do with theatre and nothing to do with the drama.

I reflect on John Lahr's 1973 tome Astonish Me about the experimental theatre at the time. The Edinburgh Fringe festival pushes to astonish us. It's easy to be astonished by what is racially/sexually/politically/religiously offensive to us. But we still have the capacity to be astonished by art. And acrobats.

Arthur Dirks

August 26, 2017