This August, I was one of the lucky three million-or-so to attend the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Newly recovered from the hurdles posed by the Pandemic, the Fringe showed no signs of decreased attendance; at the Festival’s tail end, the city’s historic Royal Mile was flooded with crowds at all hours. As it turns out, the overlap of a globally-singular arts festival with unseasonably warm weather will draw quite a large audience.
Before planning my trip to Edinburgh, my awareness of the Fringe was pretty limited. I knew that Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s much acclaimed Fleabag had debuted at the festival as a one-woman show, and that it was home to an array of fairly eclectic performances and exhibitions. While all of that is technically true, it is a far cry from the full scope of the event.
In the wake of World War II, the city of Edinburgh elected to host a major cultural festival, hosting artists from all over the world in the middle of the summer. Making the most of the crowds drawn by the event, hundreds of artists began putting on their own unregistered performances on the periphery of the Edinburgh International Festival – hence, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Since then, the Fringe has overtaken the International Festival itself to become the city’s largest tourist draw.
To better understand the size of the affair, it’s useful to cite some often-invoked statistics. 2023’s Fringe was the second largest to date, hosting 3,743 shows for a grand total of 55,088 performances. If that number seems overwhelming, that’s because it is. If you were to abandon any notions of sense or frugality and devote the month of August solely to seeing as many Fringe shows as possible, the maximum number you could attend is only around 319. Shows are spread across the city, springing up in pubs, theatres, clubs, and lecture halls – to say nothing of the nearly-ubiquitous street performances.
Walking down the Royal Mile, corralled on either side by the city’s ancient architecture and overrun by guitarists, acrobats, painters, and everything in between, there’s a sense that the city of Edinburgh has been converted into a full-size, 24/7 Renaissance Faire. Inside every pub, outside every church, and under every rock and overpass, there is something to watch, listen to, or pointedly ignore. Aside from a RenFaire or the Internet, I think the only place where you can be so totally surrounded by art and performance is, of all places, Bennington College.
Aside from a few key differences (Edinburgh is older, colder, and decidedly more urban) the atmospheres of the two places are strikingly alike. In Edinburgh – during the Fringe, at least – every variety of self-expression is permitted, even encouraged. Shows range from the perfectly conventional (opera and cover bands abound) to the radically unorthodox (see: “52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals”). Walking around the city, passing with every step a wall or fence sagging under the weight of posters, playbills, and advertisements, I couldn’t help but wonder how many Bennington students could find an audience for their senior show here, rather than in Martha Hill or Usdan Gallery.
Like Bennington, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is almost entirely a self-guided process. The Fringe Society offers several pages of advice and recommendations for Fringe performers, but does next to nothing to arrange or manage them. If you want to do a show, you can complete a form and they’ll put it on the website; the rest is entirely up to you. Where other festivals, including the simultaneous International Festival, would mandate some sort of selection process, the Fringe functions as a city-wide open mic. If you feel you have a story to tell or a talent to sell, the Fringe Society will give you a page on their site and a link to sell tickets.
This freedom, perhaps more than any other factor, is the origin of the Fringe’s success. With virtually no oversight regarding programming, the Fringe brings attention to performances that are too unconventional, too radical, or just too small to find an audience anywhere else. In Edinburgh, Bennington-trained artists would find not only a community which encourages the kind of art we’re apt to make, but with a potential audience of several million. Of course accruing an audience of more than a dozen is a feat in its own right, but we are Liberal Arts majors after all, and we aren’t here because it’s easy.
Perhaps more than global cultural relevance, more than its legions of people-handing-you-fliers, and perhaps even more than the millions of annual visitors, the clearest metric of the opportunity presented by the Fringe is one simple fact: a lot of the shows are just plain shit.
I’m serious. A lot of the Fringe is just straight-up trash – and that’s a good thing. In Edinburgh, a first-time playwright can put on their one-person show to an audience of six people, and it’ll suck, but at the end of the day, it is an artist with almost no resources performing in front of a live audience, and that is rarely accomplished so easily.
More than anything else, an abundance of low-quality media created by non-professionals is the surest sign of a well-democratized platform. Look at TikTok, for instance; anyone with a smartphone and a pulse can create and publish content, and you can get an audience. Obviously casting a wide net means you’re sure to reel in some of the worst performances you’ve ever seen, but it also means that you’re making yourself available to the kinds of genuine artistic discoveries only made by outsider artists who otherwise lack the resources or connections to reach a wider audience.
The beauty of the Fringe is the beauty of experimental art in general; it’s an expansion of the medium that, more often than not, widens the territory of art to include a bunch of bullshit. But sometimes, when you broaden your horizon beyond the big names and the fancy venues, you end up discovering something truly worthwhile – something like Fleabag. So go to Edinburgh, wade through the shit, and find the next Fleabag. Better yet: write it yourself, and we’ll all come see it at next year’s Fringe.
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