Posted February 20, 2025

Behind the Scenes – Edmonton International Fringe Festival

The Edmonton International Fringe Festival is the largest and longest-running fringe theatre festival in North America. Can you give us a brief overview of the festival?

The Edmonton Fringe first burst onto the scene in 1982. And since then, as you’ve mentioned, we’ve become the largest, longest-running Fringe Theatre Festival in North America. Every year, we welcome more than 750,000 site visits over the eleven days of Festival. We engage more than 1,600 artists from right here in Edmonton, across Canada, and around the world. Last year, I believe we had fourteen countries represented at the Festival, which is always exciting. That of course includes our 200-plus theatre productions that happen inside our venues across the city. We also bring incredible street performers from around the world to activate our outdoor site. We offer a free music series; last year we had eighteen free concerts over the eleven days of Festival that featured artists from here in Edmonton, the incredible talent that we have here. We also had a great partnership with Music Yukon, where we brought six touring acts from the north to come and perform on our stage. And then the heart of our festival, something that is so near and dear to my heart personally, is KidsFringe. We offer a free festival-within-a-festival for our littlest Fringers, 12 and under. That event itself offers about 300 free programs, workshops, performances, and hands-on opportunities, and sees about 13,000 visits. Of course, the most important piece, none of this would be possible without the 1,000 volunteers who offer their time, their skills, their hearts, and their passion every single year to lift up the small village to make the festival happen. We are so grateful for all the ways they support us throughout the year! We have about 250 staff who make the festival possible; we grow from a small year-round team of about twenty to more than 250 skilled arts workers—everything from managing our site to supporting our programming and our artists to making sure our volunteers feel engaged. It is truly like building a small city within a city every year.

I know that you host events year-round. Can you tell us a little bit about your other programming?

We never slow down over here! The Fringe Theatre Arts Barns venue is home to more than 500 events throughout the year. That includes everything from eight to ten small to mid-size festivals that we support through our infrastructure, to supporting incredibly well-established arts organizations like the Edmonton Opera, which rehearses in our space. Northern Light Theatre, of course, has been producing here for a long time. Common Ground Arts Society, and Azimuth Theatre are incredible partners of ours. Truly, we provide space and resources to independent artists who don’t have access to bricks-and-mortar creation space, to high school band competitions, to professional theatre companies who are a vital part of the Edmonton ecology. We take a lot of pride in supporting that work and in playing an important role in providing a safe, clean, professionally equipped space. You know, we have three beautiful theatres in the Arts Barns. We have two studios, and then we run our little Fringe Grounds Café that we’d like to refer to as a loiter-positive space. (You don’t have to spend money to be here. In fact, we really want you to come in and plug in your laptop and work on that next grant application, or finish that script, or hold your production meeting. It’s an invitation for the arts community to come in and take over this space.) As a cornerstone arts organization, we have so much to offer, and genuinely, we just want to kick open the doors and give it all away.

On top of that, we do also produce our own curated season outside of festival. Our artistic director, Murray Utas, works really closely with the local community. We meet artists local to Edmonton at that moment in their career where they want to take a big risk on something. So maybe the show has outgrown Fringe Festival because of course we know the festival has wild constraints; you have fifteen minutes to set up and fifteen minutes to strike at the end of each performance. And you try to run in that 60 to 75-minute sweet spot. The season is a chance for our artists to breathe, to take advantage of the great resources we have here, and to experiment wildly— to think about what that next step in their career might be. On average, we have three shows a season that we support. We steward a number of awards throughout the year, and one of them is a beautiful award called the Westbury Family Fringe Theatre Award that provides about $35,000 of in-kind support to a new work that’s presented as part of our season. It’s pretty darn incredible and we are very grateful to Dr. Bob Westbury, of course, a philanthropist who passionately supported Fringe for more than 25 years. He and his wife, Dr. Marilyn Westbury, helped us establish that award in 2017. It’s just one way that we’re able to give back to the community outside of the festival. We have a big focus on mentorship. We believe in mentorship at all levels. We run something called the Human Library, where folks can come in and they can take a human out of our library and get some mentorship. We’ll take care of the coffee, and we’ll pair you with someone who can support you in whatever it is that you’re interested in learning more about. For example, if you want some mentorship in writing a grant, I am super happy to go sit down with you for an hour and go over your grant and talk about strategies. Murray, our artistic director, can come and talk to you about creating a supportive rehearsal process. We have an incredible number of stage managers on our team who are always willing to talk about the importance of the stage management role. We really look at fostering opportunities for connection, for collaboration, making sure that that we are really playing an active part in the health of the local arts ecology.

When does this year’s Fringe Festival happen?

We run August 14th to 24th this year. We will have about 200+ theatre productions in 30-plus theatre venues across the city. KidsFringe will be making its triumphant return. Of course, our music series will be back again. In our post-pandemic return, we introduced something called the Pêhonân Series. It is an Indigenous-led, Indigenous-centred series that uplifts artistic voices local to Treaty Six and the Metis homelands. It is curated and supported by our Indigenous Director MJ Belcourt Moses. It is such a beautiful weaving of Indigenous artistry throughout the entire festival experience. So, you can find Indigenous artists on our outdoor stage as part of our music series. You can find them over at KidsFringe teaching a workshop. You can find them inside our theatre venues and our Artisan Alley selling artisanal wares. And then we also we raised two mikiwahps, or tipis, on our festival site, and we offer interactive programming as part of that. Last year we had a fish scale painting workshop that folks could participate in. We’ve had a knowledge keeper offer a durational smudge to teach our community about the importance of medicines. We’re just so excited to have that program expand this year. Right now, MJ is working on five big interactive art installations that will be installed across the festival site: Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon, Grandfather Sun, and Father Sky. I think it’s going to be so beautiful. There’ll be beadwork as part of it. The beads can be moved to form interactive imagery. We’re also bringing back our youth empowerment program, where we provide paid opportunities for Indigenous youth to develop their skills as artists. We bring them into the process. We introduce them to touring artists. We provide them with workshop opportunities. They get to create a work of their own. From the beginning of festival until the closing weekend, they engage in creative process and then they share a performance at KidsFringe as part of that. 

And then my personal fave—it’s the way I end every single night of the festival—is of course, Late Night Cabaret, which is making a triumphant return (we’re heading into year fourteen.) It’s an Edmonton Fringe must-do. Your Fringe experience is not complete until you end the night with us at the Late Night Cabaret! We moved it into a new venue last year; we took it out of our Backstage Theatre, which seats about 150, and took over an entire massive curling club, so we more than doubled our capacity. (There’s a delicious taco bar in there, so you have to come get your late-night tacos!) It is hosted by the fine folks over at Rapid Fire Theatre; they keep the energy going late into the night. We have the most crack house band you’ve ever heard in your life. It’s fronted by Audrey Ochoa, who is, of course, a jazz legend here in Edmonton, and she brings together the most talented musicians in the city. And we feature artists from the festival who come and share bits and tricks and hilarious skits that they maybe wouldn’t be doing in their regular shows. (It’s a chance for them to also pitch to the audience, of course.) And we have the occasional celebrity guest show up! So it is truly one of my favourite traditions. What I love too, is that we have the iconic Edmonton High Level Bridge Streetcar that runs right through the middle of our site. You can take the streetcar from the north beer tent on our site right to the curling club and the Late Night Cabaret. We’ll make sure that you get there safely.

Megan, I don’t like to put you on the spot…but could you tell us about one of your favourite productions from previous years?

I think the most important thing to say first is, of course, we love all of our children equally! My favourite thing about the Fringe Festival model is that anyone can be an artist, and it is a safe place to experiment creatively, and we encourage great creative risk-taking. But I will offer that we are so grateful for the role that we play in supporting artists in their development at any stage of their career. In 2021, we came back post-pandemic as a very small version of the festival. I think we were about 64 shows in eleven venues, which is about the size we were in 1982 when the festival first started. That was the first year that we introduced the Pêhonân Series. And as part of that, we presented a work called Bear Grease, created by Crystle Lightning and Henry Cloud Andrade, with a fully Indigenous cast. It’s an Indigenous joyride based on the original Grease. At that point in time, it was only about 30 minutes long. It was the first show to sell out its entire run at the festival that year. Tickets went so fast! Standing room only. They came back to us after the festival and they said, “We think we’re on to something.” And we said, “Yeah, we think you’re on to something, too!” Over the next four years, we helped them develop that show and we helped them grow it into a full two-act production. Last year it was presented at the Citadel Theatre as part of their mainstage series, and then went on to the National Arts Centre. Next, they’re going Off-Broadway. They are taking the show all the way from this tiny little venue in Edmonton to New York to do a full run. To me, that encapsulates the important role that the Fringe movement plays in supporting our artists and getting them to a point where they can go out and take over the world if they want to. And you know, that happens every single year, there are shows that are developed here, find an audience, and go on to other stages. It’s exciting to see how our artists evolve over time and take their work to new heights. That’s one of my favourite stories from the last couple of years, but my goodness, I’ve seen too many shows that have absolutely changed my heart and my mind and my perspective that I carry still in my pockets to this day.