Cultivating a new kind of practice.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about 2022. We’re in a low period of work at the moment, meaning we aren’t currently in an active development or rehearsal period for any particular show. As such, we’re working on preparation and planning, looking ahead to upcoming projects to solidify timelines, objectives, and processes. It’s something we’ve never had the chance to do before with either project timing, external factors, or our own ignorance about the usefulness of free time preventing us from making the most of these quiet moments. Previously, we’d just assumed that to be ‘inactive’ was part of an artist’s life, you work on a project until you no longer need to, and once it’s done, so is the work, until another project appears that you need to work on. As our practice matures, along with our knowledge of the complex relationship between creating art and making it your job, I’m learning that those ideas were grossly incorrect. It’s a continuous process and one that only enhances your practice if you commit to it thoroughly. The challenge is continuing to creatively engage in everyday life, but that’s an entirely different blog post that I’m not knowledgeable or experienced enough to write. That being said, if someone does know how to tackle that challenge effectively and can pass on some advice I would greatly appreciate the insight, currently staying creative means ending each day with 2 hours of the Sims to gain a sense of artistic progress. But no, what I wanted to write about today is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, and that’s the fringe experience. 

Fringe, for those who might not know, can be defined as theatrical performance outside of mainstream theatrical institutions. It won’t take place in large, established theatre venues in front of hundreds each night, and runs often last a maximum of a week, if that. Because of this, fringe has become known as a space where artists can play, experiment, and perform non-traditional, or theatrically challenging work. For years, the fringe space in the UK has provided artists of all backgrounds, budgets and visions the chance to show their work to an audience, and has become a vital pillar of what makes our arts sector diverse. But the word fringe has also, for many artists, become synonymous with feelings of stress, financial insecurity, and competition. 

For anyone not experienced with fringe performance, you may question why that is. Weeks of experimentation in spaces that are accepting, even welcoming, of new work and new voices? Sounds like a freelancer’s dream! And that’s the tricky thing about fringe performance because it is. Especially those artists who do not feel as though their work connects with a mainstream audience. Those artists tend to find that fringe is a lifeline to validate their work. The issue that comes is this. Fringe is wonderful in practice, but in execution it’s a different story. Let’s use Edinburgh Fringe as an example. It’s the largest festival in the UK, and one of the largest worldwide. As such, it’s a rite of passage for most artists to attend at some point in their careers. In February 2021, Edinburgh Fringe published its review of the previous year’s festival, which is available to read here. In that review, they reference that the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe hosted over 30,000 artists across 3,841 shows, in over 323 venues over the course of the 3 week period. In total 856,41 tickets were sold. The artist pool represented creatives from over 60 countries, with media representatives from 21. Before I dive into the ramifications of those statistics, let me state the obvious. They are absolutely phenomenal numbers, and Edinburgh should be proud to host a festival that opens its doors to so many artists, and engages so many more attendees. Our focus as creatives should not be to minimise this success, or to downplay it by focusing more on individual practice. But that being said, those statistics become a lot less exciting, and a lot more anxiety-inducing, when you consider them from the perspective of the artist. 

Allow me to paint a picture. You are an early career creative, let’s say for example that you’ve been producing work for the last 2 years. Maybe you’re fortunate enough to be attending as part of a larger company, say alongside 5 other artists. Your company can only afford accommodation and venue hire for a 4 night run, and you have 10 minutes on either side of your performance to get in and get out all of your equipment, as there’s another show coming into the space straight away after you. You’ve split an Airbnb between the 6 of you, and you’ll spend the fringe sleeping on your Director’s old air mattress with one of the other members of the acting company, which will slowly deflate over the course of the night making it ridiculously hard to achieve a full night’s sleep. That is if you even could sleep, which is difficult because you’re stressed from the fact that you’ve only sold 20 tickets so far for the entire fringe. You’re paying for all your expenses, and are giving your time for free because there’s very little accessible funding for small-scale fringe performance so the Producer can’t afford to pay you. The possibility there will be any monetary gain for the company you’re attending with is incredibly small. Alternatively, your work is written, produced and performed by you, so you definitely can’t expect to make any kind of money because, as a solo artist, you’re funding the performance out of your own pocket. You’re there for artistic growth and, if you’re lucky, the chance that the show could be seen by a talent scout or investor who appreciates your skill. You may do 4 incredible performances, but when you’re competing with 3,840 other shows, many of which may be backed by more money and therefore a greater level of marketing, the likelihood that your shows will be seen by a large spread of audience members is slim. And you know this before you begin. When you attended the audition for your part and saw the words Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the production details, or made the decision to take your performance on your own, you knew all the many many stresses that came alongside it. But you still auditioned, you still applied, and look forward to performing, because it’s the Edinburgh Fringe. The artistic merit of the festival outweighs the personal access issues. 

That’s where I struggle with the Edinburgh Fringe. And with fringe in general, as the same problems persist just on a smaller scale regardless of which fringe you attend. When a small company, or a solo artist, is given the chance to perform to such a large audience pool, it shouldn’t come with the prerequisite that doing so will cause them mental stress, anxiety and panic, and will still leave them out of pocket at the end of it. But, on the other hand, how do we have fringe festivals with such an extensive reach without creating those environments for the artists who attend? I don’t have the answers to that question, but as Haywire’s main producer I consider it my responsibility to bridge the gap as much as possible within our work. How can I ensure that our fringe performance is successful (whatever that means), and is also a joyful, creatively stimulating experience for all the artists we work alongside? 

I think much of it comes down to how we use the word ‘success’. Recently I went along to an Edinburgh Fringe focused seminar that dealt with resilience at the festival, and how we can create a fringe experience that is more sustainable and accessible for a wider network of artists. One of the panelists, a brilliant Adelaide/London based performer called Victoria Falconer, used the phrase ‘places of abundance’ when discussing what should be our primary focus within fringe performance. It struck me as a wonderful way of addressing the issue that many artists run into when preparing for fringe, which, put shortly, is that we face too much pressure to succeed on a large scale and bring in considerable profit. Because of the business element involved, we approach fringe runs with money as a constant consideration, which is worsened in the case of high-profile fringes like Edinburgh as the majority of services needed (venue hire, accommodation, marketing costs) are ridiculously expensive because everyone knows the festival has worldwide influence. What happens if, as many panelists and attendees of that seminar pointed out, we switch our focus to instead be on creating a constantly energizing artistic experience that may also, and secondarily, make us money? 

Now, of course, that is an idea which is wonderful in concept and a lot more depressing in practice. Ignoring the importance of profit completely may mean you have a wonderful fringe experience in the summer of 2022, but it’s highly likely you won’t have the funds to tour again in 2023. Funding is, as many small companies or solo performers will attest, incredibly hard to achieve which also means you’re often working out of pocket for a performance run. This makes income even more vital, you need it to replenish the money you’ve already put in. We cannot act as though money is not important, but we can recognise that it should not be as important as artistic growth when looking retrospectively at the successfulness of a fringe run. It’s something I’d always considered, but hadn’t properly committed to thinking about until I sat in a (digital) room with other creatives, decades of experience between us, all flagging similar issues and concerns. Perhaps in the past I’d assumed the stresses came from the fact that, all things considered, Haywire is still in its earliest stages. Perhaps I’d assumed that once you’d been on the fringe scene for a decent while you discovered a magical secret that allowed you to navigate around them like the secret bits of road in Mario Kart that let you dodge the giant car-eating flowers. But it looks like I was mistaken. Nothing, not even 10+ years of experience, will protect artists from having their metaphorical racing car thrown off-track by a huge venus flytrap shaped ball of financial stress and anxiety. 

How, then, can we conquer these obstacles? If I’m perfectly honest, I’m not certain. I know there are things I’ll be looking to implement within our practice as we begin to work towards next year, ways of measuring mental and physical wellness within the company, how we can most effectively plan a run to allow for rest, recharge and regrouping between shows, and how we can structure our attendance at festivals to allow our whole company to artistically engage with other performances and artists, in a meaningful and abundant way. Will that fix the problem completely? It’s highly unlikely. But I’d like to begin this groundwork now, so that as the company grows and begins to expand the scale of our work, they’re instilled within our standard practice. And I’ll be watching closely to see how the rest of the sector will continue to explore these ideas. This last summer presented a different kind of fringe experience as the restrictions needed to protect attendees from coronavirus often meant less artists were involved, and audiences pools were smaller. Emergency funding also alleviated some pressures that would have persisted otherwise. But as we look forward to a fringe scene that doesn’t require social distancing and sanitized seats, I’ll be interested to see how much work the fringe sector puts in to nurture artists. We don’t want smaller fringes, but we do want to protect creatives from the mental and emotional turmoil that comes from a larger one. And how we all, collectively, walk the line between those two ideas is a very interesting question indeed. 

Lucy