On the Fringe: Inside Looking Out
So the Edinburgh Festivals are over for another year. I know this because there were annoying fireworks last night and because of the obligatory articles recounting record-breaking ticket-sales (this year accompanied by an amusing – and significant – bean-counter controversy over the inclusion of ticket estimates from the free festivals). This has been the first year I’ve counted myself an Edinburgh resident, having moved to the city in June – and even with that subious pedigree, I can tell you things look very different from the inside.
The short of it is that it feels like the whole world came to party in my home, and I’m left on the morning after eyeing the half-full beer cans strewn on the floor and the torn posters on the walls. This is unsurprising, given that this is the world’s biggest arts festival we’re talking about. The pubs and parks I know have been thronging with tourists and performers, all looking a little lost and like they’re having the times of their lives. Edinburgh’s a quiet and beautiful town – always full of students and tourists, sure, with the hidden poverty and crime problems you’d expect, but with thriving local communities and arts scenes. And then for three weeks of the year it turns into this maelstrom of creativity, noise and spending.
I’ve been coming to the Edinburgh Festivals for years, often as a performer, and it’s always been one of my year’s highlights. The chance to take part in a crazy and exciting temporary community of performers – there’s nowhere else like it. But now that I live here, now that these streets are my home and I’m finding my way round the Edinburgh arts community, everything feels different. The criticisms my Edinburgh friends have always made of the Festivals are starting to make sense.
It’s not just that it’s pretty obnoxious to have to force your way through yammering crowds to get to work every day, not just thatyour public spaces have been taken over by private companie, not just that the streets are littered with a thousands discarded glossy flyers. It’s that the hordes of performers and audiences trample Edinburgh arts in their wake, doing their thing but ignoring what’s already here. Tourists in general are pretty bad at recognising they’re in someone’s home, but Festival tourists are even worse, because they’re turning Edinburgh into their home for the duration, and display all the resultant self-entitlement. It stops feeling like your home any more.
And this business about trampling local arts is serious. Coming to the Festivals as a performer, it feels like you’re really doing something special, taking part in this celebration of the arts, this community of creativity. But my thinking’s changed a bit, and now I see too much of the Festival as self-satisfied and self-serving, as being performed for a false community, unrooted, purposeless. I believe passionately in political performance – and by that I mean simply performance that speaks from where it stands, that recognises the many networks it’s part of and tries to articulate, with the help of the audience, what it might mean to exist in them better. People come to Edinburgh – remember, a city, not a month – to do performances as performances, not as part of something bigger.
The economic structures of the Festivals don’t help this.The big venues – the Smirnoff Underbelly, C, etc. – all come into the city and run private performance empires, with the vast majority of performers, audiences and employees coming from elsewhere. Meanwhile, crucial local venues find it hard to compete – the Big Red Door, for example. a year-round circus and community space, is having to close down permanently at the end of August. And sure, cafés and tourist shops are making a mint, but a three week income boost doesn’t compensate for the glut of voluntary and temporary staff undermining the jobs market. Meanwhile, ticket prices are always rising, with £10 hour-long shows as standard, hiking the majority of the festival way out of the affordability of most of the people who live here. Let’s not even speak about the unbelievably snooty marketing and inaccessibility of the International Festival. And with the programme itself dominated by out-of-town student shows, professional comedians and big budget spectacles, the Fringe isn’t even operating in its original function: as a venue for experimentation and discovery, a laboratory of performance.
There are exceptions, all-the-more precious by their rarity. I’m a firm believer in what the Forest Fringe is trying to do: making unique and otherwise unseen performances accessible, and paying attention to their local roots (even if not always to the building and social centre itself). And the various Free and Cheap Fringes are making brave attempts at carving our niches of creativity. This is all a glimmer of what could be possible. And yes, I did go to a lot of shows when I could afford it, and yes, as ever, I enjoyed myself immensely. But there was a sour taste in my mouth. If something of the spirit of Fringe is going to be recovered, then we all need to pay a little more attention to where we stand.
06 : 09 : 2010 at 21:19
the fireworks were fantastic.
but that aside (although it’s a bit hard for me to put aside. the spectacle of the Castle lit up by fountains of light celebrating from its battlements while an entire stretched out waterfall of radiance poured abundantly onto the rocks below and shattered there, like some kind of Niagara of the North done in lights, was magic, and magic is hard to come by), yes, that aside, I think you’re fogetting some pertinent realities. namely that culture is supported by wealth. period.
back in the day when everyone was a hunter/gather there was very little culture, very little human created beauty. it evolved as agriculture did, it evolved as our fod production became more efficient. it’s hard to have Rilke’s and Frida Kahlo’s when everyone has to spend all their time in food production, in the same way it’s hard to have heart surgeons. no time.
and so ya, when you look at the last several hundred years in western culture, where does most of the art come from? yep. the church. and the stuff the royalty sponsored. In fact, it was only in the last couple of centuries, as the pie of wealth increased at an unprecedented rate and the average citizen of the rich countries ended up finding that their tiny piece of it was enough for them to have an opinion, that artists started being supported by the populace.
And now that they’re supported by the populace they’re supported by that portion of the population that has money. Given that art must be supported by wealth it seems strange to me that the prices of the shows offend you (shows at 10 pounds apiece). Professionals need to make a living in a way volunteers do not. It also seems strange to me that you bewail the trampling of local year round art. In the first place local artists get an opportunity to be exposed to the (really) paying public that they normally wouldn’t have short of uprooting themselves and going to London. In the second place, the “paying public”, such as they are, have clearly indicated that they appreciate certain acts more than others; rather than evaluating the quality of art based on geographical happenstance they have indicated with their money what they like best. This seems delightfully democratic to me, and I would hate to tell anyone they should prefer a show, or an ice cream, or an idea, just because it was developed in Edinburgh. (well. until the environment comes into it anyway)
I enjoy reading your updates, but it’s often a wee bit boring because I tend to agree with you. This one gave me a bit more leeway
08 : 09 : 2010 at 15:49
> the fireworks were fantastic
I’ve started to see them as a bizarre celebration of militarism and excess . . . but that’s another story!
> namely that culture is supported by wealth. period.
That’s not what I see when I look at the paintings at Lascaux, or when I listen to folk sessions down at Sandy Bell’s and the Captain’s Bar, or when I go to community panto in Orkney, or when I sit in a group round a fire telling stories, or when I go to Outsider Art / Art Brut exhibitions, or when I jam with my housemates this evening, or . . .
> back in the day when everyone was a hunter/gather
> there was very little culture, very little human created beauty
But you can have no evidence for this assertion, surely? The only evidence would be through surviving artefacts, and even those could (and do) only show you particular kinds of culture — namely, culture which is overtly concerned with posterity and, later, authorship. The archaeological record can never tell you about music, storytelling, a lot of sculpture, ritual, &c. &c. So your “very little” seems pretty spurious and ideologically-based to me, driven by a civilisational understanding of what counts as art, or culture.
> “everyone has to spend all their time in food production”
Actually, there’s a very strong current in anthropology arguing that hunter-gatherer societies spend far *less* time in food production that agricultural societies, starting here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
> and so ya, when you look at the last several hundred years
> in western culture, where does most of the art come from? yep.
> the church. and the stuff the royalty sponsored.
Again, this is a restrictive definition of art, tautologically defining it as what is enjoyed and supported by the state hegemony, ignoring what grows from the population. And there’s a reason those in charge sponsored such art: because it supported and sustained their hegemonies, being propaganda, ritual tool and distracting entertainment all in one!
> Given that art must be supported by wealth it seems strange
> to me that the prices of the shows offend you (shows at 10
> pounds apiece). Professionals need to make a living in a way
> volunteers do not.
Less theoretically, as Seth pointed out, the economic structure of the Fringe is that the vast majority of the performers constitute an underpaid or voluntary workforce ruthlessly exploited by the venues, who literally control the means of production. In the theatre sphere of things, when production companies do profit, it’s usually the company that profits and not the performers, given the decline of the theatre co-operative. But the vast majority of shows barely break even: the Fringe is run on volunteer labour, and the big venues profit.
More theoretically, I’m as deeply sceptical of the concept of the professional artist as I am of the professional activist. Both roles are based in the division of labour, the idea that these people are specially qualified to be creative or to drive change in a way that the majority of the population is lot — a theoretical structure which drives hierarchical economics.
> n the first place local artists get an opportunity to be exposed
> to the (really) paying public that they normally wouldn’t have short
> of uprooting themselves and going to London. In the second place, the
> “paying public”, such as they are, have clearly indicated that they
> appreciate certain acts more than others; rather than evaluating the
> quality of art based on geographical happenstance they have indicated
> with their money what they like best. This seems delightfully democratic
> to me, and I would hate to tell anyone they should prefer a show, or an
> ice cream, or an idea, just because it was developed in Edinburgh.
Again, I think you’re missing something about the economic structure of the Fringe here. As Seth pointed out, we’re not dealing with an ideal cultural free market: we’re dealing with a situation where a few companies unlevel the playing field by bringing in huge economic and resource power, and thus control the means of semiotic production — advertising, press coverage, hype-driving, and so on. Companies coming with less power struggle to gain a foothold, and more often than not get exposed to a more limited audience than they would have done if they’d started from where they stand, worked to find their community and demographic, rather than launching into the vicious bear-pit of the Fringe.
I hope i’m not sounding too aggressive. You did say you liked disagreeing
07 : 09 : 2010 at 11:54
The big venues are a problem, coming into the city every year employing (well actually mostly volunteers) people from outside the city, bagging the profits from over-priced tickets or performers who have to pay for venues they can’t fill. Us locals see none of this money and I tend to make less money in August.
As for Hilary’s idea that its ok because democratic – the reason the big venues do better is because they are bigger, they coat the town in posters, dominate the media, in the city and outside. Concepts like the Comedy Festival – basically the big four venues on an ego trip – add to the problem. And the over-priced tickets have a) nothing to do with performers and b) the performers won’t see the profits just the empty seats when the punters refuse to pay.