Iarrived at my first Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival on the day Oilers owner Peter Pocklington exiled Number 99 to the Los Angeles Kings and dismantled the world’s greatest hockey team: August 9, 1988. Street vendors were selling hastily made T-shirts, badges, and posters to commemorate the great disaster. When I saw the buskers working the crowds outside several of the Fringe’s makeshift theatres, I convinced my stage manager to borrow a guitar and start strumming. Ten minutes later, we were serenading the crowd with our parody of “Bye Bye Love,” scoring cheers as we sang the chorus: “Bye-bye Wayne. Bye-bye Stanley Cup.” When we hit the refrain, “Let’s lynch Peter Puck,” our guitar case swallowed hundreds of coins. If we had spent the afternoon busking, we might have earned more from the song than from the show I had written.
That was year seven of the Fringe, which had already earned a reputation as one of the world’s biggest and best theatre festivals. Performers from the US and the UK were arranging international tours so they could hit Edmonton in August. Albertans were lining up vacation days to attend shows and take part in a summer street festival that felt like Mardi Gras without the breasts and beads.
The early Fringes still inspire and intrigue a generation of young performers. Last summer, as I sat in the artists’ beer tent at the festival’s thirtieth anniversary, recalling my first Fringe, I felt like one of those ancient Dylan fans talking about seeing him before he went electric.
“You really saw Mump and Smoot’s first show?” asked one newbie.
Yep, back when the iconic Canadian clown duo performed with a sexy, scary, painted dominatrix named Wog.
No other festival in Canada has had the same influence and impact on artists, audiences, and the global performance scene — not even the dead playwrights’ festivals in Ontario. The Stratford Shakespeare Festival has presented just over 600 plays since 1953; the Edmonton Fringe has hosted over 600 shows since August 2008. While one Stratford production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is likely to have a bigger budget — and almost as big a cast — as all Fringe Festival shows in Edmonton combined, most of the latter’s productions are original and Canadian. And many of them are life changing, if not necessarily for the audience then for the actors, playwrights, and directors getting their first taste of making theatre for money. Because no matter what they did in school, that first paying gig is graduation day.
Now at the adult age of thirty, the Edmonton Fringe has inspired, trained, and arguably corrupted a generation of playwrights, producers, directors, actors, and audiences. There are sixteen Fringes held in Canada and five in the US (New York, San Francisco, Orlando, Indianapolis, and Boulder, Colorado) that follow the Edmonton commandments, as codified on stone tablets by the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals. And there are at least ten other US Fringes that haven’t joined, or are no longer part of CAFF, that pretty much conform to the Edmonton template, as well as overseas Fringes in Athens (the one in Greece, not Georgia) and Bangkok.
Liz Nicholls, the Edmonton Journal’s long-time theatre critic, calls the festival “the most strange and seductive thing Edmonton has ever produced. Its most contagious export. Its best idea.” How audiences feel about this Fringe contagion depends on their taste in theatre. Fringers know how to create and develop their own work and are aware — probably too aware — of their audience. No matter how much they want to focus on their art, working on the Fringe forces every artist to channel his or her inner Mirvish.
Like so many great Canadian cultural institutions, the Edmonton Fringe started with a government grant — except in this case it began with a grant being cut in half. In 1982, the city slashed the budget for summer arts programming, including Northern Light Theatre’s summer Shakespeare program, to the point where the only logical conclusion was “not to be.”
When $50,000 got tossed back into the pool for funding summer arts programming, Brian Paisley, then artistic director of Chinook Theatre, had an idea. He had attended the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival in Scotland the year before and thought a similar festival might work in his hometown.
