Fringe benefits

Forest Fringe is an independent festival in the midst of the Edinburgh Fringe. Now in our fourth year, we host a range of experimental and unconventional performance work. We are not part of the Edinburgh Fringe and do not feature in its monumental yearly brochure. We don’t, however, see ourselves in opposition to the festival. Such thinking is self-defeating. If we have been able to achieve anything it is directly as a consequence of the festival, and without it we would not exist.
An entity like the Edinburgh Festival is deliciously uncontrollable. It is a vast allotment in which something will always grow, whether it’s what we intended or not. Recently, the tendency at the fringe has been towards the kind of unchecked growth on which the relentless acceleration of late capitalism has been built – bigger is always better. Its all too chillingly fitting that the Festival’s major sponsor continues to be the Royal Bank of Scotland, a shared philosophy fuelling their twinned expansions.
It’s one of great strengths of the fringe that the most eloquent critique of this present system is to have a go yourself; to build an alternative way of doing things. We chose to create a space that resisted the cruel economics of the larger commercial venues and countered the concomitant creative proscriptions placed upon companies which perform there. We felt a desire from artists and audiences for a different way of doing things and we tried to respond to that.
We created a space collectively maintained by the artists that perform there, who are neither paid or pay to be a part of it. The financial cost is kept as low as possible in order to encourage risk and experimentation, both on the part of the artists and on the part of me and Deborah Pearson as curators and co-directors. We aim to create a space in which we as a community are able to achieve things we would never be able to accomplish individually; to come together to create something of lasting value to everybody involved.
Value is an important word. We’re realistic about the importance of money. But we also believe that there are other kinds of value for artists implicit in the experience of Edinburgh, foremost amongst them the opportunity to work amongst producers, journalists, artists and perhaps most importantly an audiences that you are unlikely to find in any other context. The rewards of Edinburgh are not contained by Edinburgh – they are whatever fires may be started by its spark. That can be commissions and profile but it can also be new collaborations, new ideas and a different perspective on your own work. The role of Forest Fringe, as we see it, is to continue to explore these other kinds of value. To create an environment founded on collaboration that provides an opportunity for artists to be part of a community, as well as an industry.