A crowd watches performers during the Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival. The festival said that it has still not caught up with the loss of an expected $3-million of income after cancelling its 2020 edition during the COVID-19 pandemic.Marc J Chalifoux Photography/Supplied
The Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival said Monday that it requires immediate financial support to stay afloat as expenses skyrocket and revenue becomes less dependable.
The festival, which bills itself as the longest-running and largest event of its kind in North America, said that it has still not caught up with the loss of an expected $3-million of income after cancelling its 2020 edition during the COVID-19 pandemic’s first wave.
Its story since reflects the tumult that a growing number of institutions in Canada’s performing arts sector have undergone. The rising costs of everything from event space rentals to talent since 2020, augmented by the past two years of interest rate shocks, have led to perilous financial situations across the sector.
In building community around independent theatre productions, fringe festivals can be boons to local theatre scenes and springboards for talent, generally returning all profits to artists. k.d. lang’s earliest breakthroughs came as a performer at the Edmonton Fringe; plays such as Kim’s Convenience and Da Kink in My Hair both had their debuts at the Toronto Fringe Festival, going on to receive critical acclaim and beloved TV adaptations.
But these festivals also lack the guaranteed revenue of pre-existing commercial blockbusters, deepening their financial precarity, especially in times of economic uncertainty.
“The need is substantial and evolving,” said Megan Dart, the Edmonton Fringe’s executive director, in a phone interview after launching a campaign to find new donors Monday morning. Insurance costs alone, she said, have risen by more than 45 per cent in recent years. Even as the festival broke its first-day ticket sales record and had the most attendance per show in its history last year, “we’re holding struggle and success in the same hand.”
While she said the festival could not put an exact dollar value on what it needs to raise to be successful in the long term, it would need at least monthly $5 commitments from “our most dedicated festival goers.” Without a financial boost from donors, she said, organizers may need to scale back the size of the festival’s four-city-block site by as much as a third for this August’s edition.
The Edmonton Fringe is hardly alone in reckoning with financial strain. The Toronto Fringe Festival plans on programming 80 shows for this year’s edition, down from 100 in 2023. Just last week, the Vancouver Fringe Theatre Society e-mailed supporters to say that its future is “uncertain” as it faced skyrocketing rents and shuttered venues; as they sought donations, organizers said they would need to reduce the festival’s size by about a third.
Corporate sponsorships and individual donations are down, said Duncan Watts-Grant, the Vancouver Fringe’s executive director, while costs including labour, infrastructure and venues have risen. “With nothing changing,” he said, the likelihood of continued full-scale fringe festivals across the country “will not be possible.”
Government funding, meanwhile, has not kept up with inflation. Both Mr. Watts-Grant and Edmonton’s Ms. Dart said that much of their municipal and provincial funding has been stagnant, at best, for years. And they both lamented that an $8-million boost to the federal Canada Arts Presentation Fund that began in 2019, which both tap into, is scheduled to end this year.
In presenting untold or undertold stories, “these cultural institutions have such a significant and massive stake in the way we understand our communities, and our societies and our culture,” Mr. Watts-Grant said of the Fringe movement.
Amy Blackmore, the executive and artistic director of the Festival St-Ambroise Fringe de Montréal, and president of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, said the key to the future of these events “is going to be greater public education and acknowledgement that the arts sector is important.”
This, she hopes, will better breed a culture of philanthropy to sustain fringe events. As it stands, however, “I think we’re all looking ahead at three to five years from now and getting a little nervous.”
Josh O’Kane