Reports of the Calgary Fringe Festival's demise have been greatly exaggerated - second season surprising and shocking
For years, Calgary remained one of the few major Canadian cities without a festival, despite the claustrophobic presence of festivals immediately to the west (Vancouver) and the east (Saskatoon). Abortive attempts in 1999 and 2000 tried to establish a toehold, but after efforts finally stalled irrevocably in 2003, the prospect of a long-term fringe seemed like an untenable dream.
Then, in 2006, the fringe returned. Now, sandwiched between the Saskatoon and Edmonton events, the third attempt to create a lasting fringe festival legacy in Calgary is moving into its second year with a 10-day run featuring 38 productions. From returning remounts (Obscene But Not Heard's Jihad Me at Hello) to fringe favourites (Monster Theatre, Napoleon's Secret Diary) to complete newcomers (Tabloid Origami, Late Night Circus, and Napalm Blond), each one arrives with the dizzy randomness of the fringe festival's unjuried selection process.
By January 2007, 55 applicants had submitted paperwork and entry fees before being selected either through the Calgary Fringe Festival’s internal lottery or as part of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals’ (CAFF) touring lottery that allows companies to perform in all of the country’s fringe festivals. The festival limits its selection to ideally include one-third each of local, national and international content, with every fringe artist receiving 100 per cent of their show's ticket revenue
In a bid to recoup some of its $500,000 operating budget, this year’s fringe will include a mandatory fashion accessory fundraiser in the form of a $5, blue-and-red fringe button. Already being used by other festivals like Saskatoon's, the button is required to enter all indoor theatre events, with registration giving patrons the option to sign up for newsletter and e-mail updates.
On first glance, the button may seem contrary to the festival's otherwise unrestricted artistic model, placing a fence around the fringe. However, despite the limited membership the button imposes, festival director Michele Gallant remains cautiously optimistic that it won’t have an adverse effect on the festival’s accessibility.
“It’s always the unknown factor to see how (the button) is received,” she says, admitting that even as the festival director, the concept was “something that took me awhile to wrap my head around. Talking to other festivals the response was, for the most part, that for the people who come and see the show, the hardcore, diehard fringers, (they understand) — especially because they want to be kept in the loop. And it keeps things equitable, and you don’t take any of (the artists’) revenue.
“I’m sure there’ll be the odd person (who objects), here and there,” she adds.
Another second-year addition is the festival’s bare bones venue in the Royal Canadian Legion, a minimal “theatre” that provides artists with nothing but space and the lighting design possibilities of a light switch. In contrast to most shows’ maximum $10 ticket price, bare bones events like Bob Legare’s In Tow will cost no more than $5.
Where last year’s venues included locations spread across the downtown and Beltline areas, from a stretch of vendors and street performers on 17 Avenue S.W. to the more familiar Epcor Centre, this year’s theatres are centralized around Olympic Plaza. Venues include the Legion (which will also host the Fringe’s film festival and its artist and volunteer lounge), theatres in the Epcor Centre (Motel, The Big Secret Theatre and the Max Bell lobby), and the Glenbow Museum Theatre. Despite the festival's current downtown emphasis, festival producer Blair Gallant (married to fest director Michele) cautions that the festival's current core is not intended to be a permanent feature of the festival – "2007 is a stopover year downtown," he says. "Inglewood is where we should be, not downtown."
For a variety of reasons, ranging from the neighborhood's eclectic feel to the availability of parking to the wider financial accessibility over downtown, an Inglewood fringe would more closely resemble Edmonton's location in Old Strathcona — away from the city's core in an area with more greenery than glass. The focus on establishing a permanent home mirrors the festival's attempts to reach the distant homes of Calgary's urban sprawl.
This year, by way of an advance guard, the fringe created a touring community arts festival that visited neighbourhoods like Arbour Lake and Bridgeland. A collection of performances and attractions that included a mini golf course and outdoor theatre, the mini-festival will be the sole outdoor component for this year's fringe, opening the first day in Olympic Plaza followed by a day in Inglewood’s Jack Long Park — a far shorter run than the outdoor venue’s former 10 days on 17 Avenue.
“One thing we heard from other festivals (was) that (the outdoor component) was great but that we should grow more organically,” says Michele of the festival’s scaled-back outdoor component.
Instead of aiming to mirror the outdoor draw of Edmonton’s festival that includes street performers and vendors, the community festivals are essentially the fringe’s first tentative steps into the city’s own geographic fringe, the backyards of Calgary’s ever-expanding suburbia. With the festival still in its fledgling stages, spreading the Fringe Gospel is an essential survival technique.
“We had wanted to create something that would have more of a structured format that families could enjoy,” explains Michele. “We don’t want to be too edgy, that’s more for the indoor venues and the film festival component. I think it covers both areas — fun, free events for families, as well as an opportunity to make fringe more accessible.”
Though last year’s festival was ambitious, featuring almost a third as many productions as its far more established Edmonton counterpart, the festival’s success depends on its ability to maintain itself, building an audience that cannot be grown overnight. For Gallant, the audiences flocking to street magicians and mini doughnuts are an entirely different breed than audience members who come simply for the indoor theatre. It's the latter, she says, who will ultimately keep the fringe growing. “The big lesson I took is, if you’re going to do something, do it well, even if that means you have to cut back, like the outdoor component,” she says. “We want to make sure that we are effective, concentrating on the artists and making sure that we take the proper steps to maintain stability.”
Stability is an essential component of the fringe, coming as it does in the wake of several failed attempts to give Calgary its own festival. Already under no small pressure to live up to the unchallenged domination of the city’s longstanding rival, Edmonton (which boasts the first and still largest North American fringe), the fringe appeared to be doomed when Loose Moose, which had mounted the city’s first full-fledged festival in 2000, fell on hard times. The improv company lost its longstanding venue in the Garry Theatre in 2003, and the fringe collapsed with it. The rights to the festival reverted to the CAFF, picked up later by producer Blair and then festival director Jason Rothery. The rest, as they say, is history, though the hope is that this city's particular history isn’t doomed to repeat itself. If the festival's organizers have any misgivings about its future, they aren't showing it. "First year, maybe a little. Second year, not at all," says Blair when asked if he was worried about the year's success. "We put together a solid financial plan and have already put plans in place for 2008 to 2010 festivals. Most of my time over the past three months has been dedicated to 2008 and not 2007."
Instead, Michele sees the festival's immediate goal as spreading the word in a city still new to the entire concept, all the while trying to keep that concept alive for the long-term. In addition to scaling back the festival's outdoor component, this year doesn't feature the same exponential jump in the number of productions seen in the fringe's first year. It's an attempt to create the kind of event that will stay around long enough for word to spread.
“We decided to keep it the same, and we’ll probably do that for the next two or three years at least," says Michele. "We want to make sure that the artists make money. No artist goes in hoping to make tons of money, but by the same token, if they can make money consistently, that’s what we want. So by keeping it contained and small over the first few years, it just makes it more successful for the audiences. For the first two or three years, I think it’s mainly going to be an education process for the audiences and media: What is a fringe?”
WHAT IS A FRINGE
"’Round the fringe of the official festival drama there seems to be more private enterprise than before.”
When Robert Kemp coined the phrase that would come to define an entire theatrical movement, he was simply pointing to a group of theatre artists — eight upstart theatre companies sticking it to The Man in church basements and other improvised venues — who hadn’t taken kindly to their exclusion from the first annual Edinburgh International Festival. Ironically, though fringe festivals still maintain their fair share of the wacky and wild, the institution itself has become exactly that, with last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival attracting more than 1,800 productions and an international fringe phenomenon still going strong.
Nowhere is the institutionalization of “Fringe” more evident than in Canada, where the term itself has been trademarked by the CAFF, an organization responsible for the world’s only fringe circuit that begins in Orlando, Florida, arrives in Canada via Montreal and ends in Vancouver. By maintaining control over “Fringe” itself, the association is able to enforce four central principles that define all Canadian fringe festivals:
1. Participants will be selected on a non-juried basis, through a first-come, first-served process, a lottery, or other method approved by the association.
2. In order to ensure the above, the audiences must have the option to pay a ticket price, 100 per cent of which goes directly to the artists.
3. Fringe festival producers have no control over the artistic content of each performance. The artistic freedom is unrestrained.
4. Festivals must provide an easily accessible opportunity for all audiences and all artists to participate in fringe festivals.
This means that artists reap exactly what they sow, leaving them free to pile on as much or as little manure as their hearts desire. The results, then, are a veritable artistic Russian roulette. Given enough pulls on the trigger, you're liable to blow your mind.
This leads to the most problematic requirement for any first-time fringe-goer: in addition to suspending your disbelief, it's often just as important to suspend your need for a safe choice.
Though posters and handbills featuring rave reviews are an essential part of any company's self-promotion, it's just as important to venture occasionally into unfamiliar venues and wait for the stage's spotlight to reveal the production. Given enough attempts (at 38 productions, the Calgary Fringe Festival doesn't want for chances), you'll leave with an abiding sense of theatre's range, its spine-tingling heights and the stomach-churning depths that remind audiences that it could always be worse.
The fringe is nothing but a collection of random productions, brought together under an umbrella designed to let artists freely practice their craft. Understanding what fringe really means, then, entails surrendering control, experimenting in a way that the mainstage season simply doesn't allow. It's eclectic, unpredictable and gone after 10 all-too-brief days. Fringe festivals have endured because they’ve found audiences that return, year after year, for the same netless jump. If Calgary's succeeds, it will be because it found the same kind of lunatics, willing to take risks on theatre’s fringe. Good luck.
