>>PREVIEW
COMMUNITY ARTS FESTIVAL
Runs until July 22
Calgary Fringe Festival
The Fringe Festival is a wonderful time of the year in Calgary. During its run, perfectly respectable, conservative Calgarians can guiltlessly wander into a bargain-priced theatre and watch a grown man strip naked, spit blood all over a bed sheet and dash around the stage claiming to be the Queen of Latvia.
While this is hyperbole to be sure, no one would dispute that the Fringe’s proudly uncensored criterion gives its programming a certain artistic "edginess." Due to all its creative spectacle, though, the Fringe necessarily remains, well, on the fringe of the community – often inaccessible to the layman. This is why Blair Gallant, producer for the Calgary Fringe Festival, with help from the A.O. Shirley Memorial Foundation, decided to put on a smaller Community Arts Festival – a sort of touring, G-rated version of the Fringe – in areas that might otherwise miss out. The festival is traveling to 14 communities, including Mackenzie Lake, Bridgeland Riverside and Chestermere.
"The cost to do this is well beyond the reach of most communities," says Gallant. "It costs us a little bit over $125,000 just to get things up and started, and then we have ongoing expenses over and above that. By doing 16 or 18 of them, it really makes it easier to do. We have the communities give us their input, so that we can fit their mandate. We bring everything out and set everything up, but it’s all kind of turnkey for the communities. They just provide some of the volunteers and some of the onsite stuff."
With everything from live theatrical performances to roaming fire jugglers, the Community Arts Festival offers the one thing the Fringe could never claim to: massively appealing, family-oriented fun. The difference in content is no doubt due to the difference in organization and financial backing. Where the Fringe is funded and organized by the "anything goes" Fringe Board, the Community Arts Festival is backed by the A.O. Shirley Memorial Foundation (a not-for-profit organization to support the arts). Though the two organizations do have a few ties, the A.O. Shirley is still a family foundation and prefers events with its name attached to be strictly vanilla flavoured.
"One of our fundamental principles of the Fringe is that we don’t censor and we give 100 per cent of the revenue back to the artists," says Gallant. "This doesn’t follow that model. The two got kind of linked, which is fine in a way, but they’re not really related. We break a lot of the principles of the Fringe Festival. Here, we’re trying to get people involved at an age appropriate level, so that years down the road they might want to see different kinds of theatre."
A good deal of the mini-fests took place throughout June, though a number continue on through July (Chestermere, Banff Trail, Marlborough Park, Mount Pleasant and Kingsland). Some, with a more adult tone, even occur during the Fringe proper, taking further advantage of the mostly unintentional cross marketing between the events. While this is only the first year for the Fringe’s little brother, it looks as though it could easily become a regular precursor – or even a kind of gateway drug – to the larger festival.
"In some of the communities, we’ve had five to 6,000 people out to some of the one-day events," says Gallant. "They’ve been really well-attended in general. So far, every place we’ve been has tried to book us for next year."
While the Community Festival has certainly triumphed by bringing out a large audience, they’ve also succeeded in another, perhaps unexpected way. More than just a scaled-down facsimile of the Fringe, the Community Festival serves a secondary purpose that can be trickier to pull off amidst bright colors and shrieking men in bloody bed sheets: bringing together neighbours who might have never spoken to one another.
"It was a neighbourhood initiative in that Calgary is growing into a major center where you can get lost in the shuffle a lot of the time," says Gallant. "This is a way to start building community within the neighbourhood – people have to come out, meet their neighbours and rub elbows a little bit."
For more information on the Community Arts Festival and if it’s coming to your community, visit http://www.calgaryfringe.ca/pages/community_fringes/schedule_of_community_fringes. |
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