Nanaimo's 8th Annual Fringe Festival

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Friday, August 17th, 2018
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It's that wonderful time of year again; the Nanaimo fringe festival season is upon us and once again Harbour City Theatre will be exclusively occupied for the next week of August to coverage of the Nanaimo Fringe Festival and we have taken over Dodd’s Narrow Room at the Vancouver Island Conference Centre.

Those of you who are new to fringe theatre may wonder why we dedicate so much of our blood, sweat, and tears to covering the festival.

You may ask yourself, what is a fringe festival anyway, and why is it so important?

The main goal of Fringe is to demystify theatre and make it accessible to a broader audience but beyond making theatre accessible to those who go and watch it, theatre is also often inaccessible to those who create and perform it too.

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

All fringe festivals share a set of common guidelines with the aim of providing an easily accessible opportunity for all audiences and all artists to participate.

These guidelines include:

Ticket prices must be kept low (tickets to individual shows in the Nanaimo Fringe cost $12).

Theatre companies must have equal access to the festival.

Fringe festivals are non-juried and shows submitted to the festival are either admitted on a first-come-first-served basis or, as is the case with the Nanaimo festival, chosen by lottery.

There is no censorship of ideas and no limits on the content or title of a show.

Fees for companies must be kept low. For the 2018 Nanaimo Fringe Festival companies paid a fee of $20. to enter the lottery and $200 to present their show in the festival if they won a spot in the lottery.

There are no refunds and 100 percent of box office revenue is returned to the show's creators/performers. That also means that the Fringe Festival itself gets 0 percent of the box office revenue so it relies on grants, corporate sponsorships and the generosity of donors and the sales of its member buttons to keep operating.

Shows typically perform in rep (i.e. several shows share the same performance space) so shows are limited to one hour 15 minutes to set-up and tear down before and after each performance. Absolutely no latecomers are admitted. Because of the previous point, schedules are very tight at Fringe so be sure to arrive early for your performance.

This year the Nanaimo Fringe Festival is celebrating its 8th anniversary and presenting 56 shows at 2 venues. With so much on offer, the best way to experience it is not to overly plan it out and just go and take a chance on something that happens to be playing at any given time. I mean, it's only 12 bucks and about an hour of your time and you may discover something amazing.

Now get out there and enjoy some theatre! Happy fringing!

https://nanaimofringe.com/