[LINK] "What Is a Fringe Festival Anyway?"

[rfmcdonald]

Mooney on Theatre editor Wayne Leung reshared today, on the first day of the Toronto Fringe Festival, a a Huffington Post article he wrote last year explaining just what it is about.

I'll be covering some Fringe shows this year for this publication again, starting tonight in fact. I quite look forward to the experience again.

It costs a lot of money to produce and promote a show and because making theatre is so cost-prohibitive only a handful of professional and established not-for-profit theatre companies can afford to mount shows.

Fringe festivals are all about providing an accessible avenue for independent theatre artists to produce and perform their work in front of an audience. The Fringe is really the essence of theatre; virtually anybody can submit a show to the Fringe and the festivals place no limits on content so shows can be bold, raw and uncensored.

While the Fringe theatre movement started in 1947 in Edinburgh, Scotland, still home to the world's largest fringe festival, the first Canadian fringe festival was founded in Edmonton in 1982. Since then the movement has spread across the continent and the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals currently boasts 23 member festivals across Canada and the United States.