Hello people of the internet,
I hope you are all as well as you can be considering basically everything.
We wanted to let you know about two big things happening with Forest Fringe in the next 12 months or so.
A year off from the Edinburgh Festival
Firstly, we have decided that in 2017 we will take a year off from presenting a full programme of work at the Edinburgh Festival. After 10 chaotically joyous summers at the fringe we have decided we need to catch our breath.
Whilst we have been furiously busy in the last decade just ensuring Forest Fringe happens each year, the festival around us has changed enormously, and much that was perhaps once only possible at Forest Fringe can now happen at venues across the city to packed audiences and rave reviews. And yet at the same time the possible ways people have for getting involved with the festival remain annoyingly limited and exploitative, with seemingly little will from the festival as a whole to support greater diversity and accessibility, meaning that the world’s biggest arts festival continues to exclude many brilliant people we know and love.
We want to give ourselves some time to reassess what we do at the Edinburgh Festival and why we still do it, to re-think our presence there so that Forest Fringe remains a radical, hopeful and experimental part of the fringe; somewhere unexpected and unpredictable that invites us to imagine new relationships with art and with artists.
We plan to still be in Edinburgh this August and we’ll have details of what we’ll be up to in the new year, but without the pressure of running a full programme we look forward to spending more time thinking about and exploring the rest of the festival.
Forest Fringe in London: a three day gathering on memory, survival and resistance
9-11 December
Our temporary hiatus from Edinburgh is also giving us more opportunity to focus on some of the other exciting things we are currently working on outside of the festival and in particular a six-month project thinking about the past, present and future of Forest Fringe through a series of talks, residencies and events taking place across the UK and Europe.
As part of this project we are thrilled this December to be gathering people in London to think back over the over the last decade of Forest Fringe’s work and explore some of the things that matter most to us today. Spread across several rooms, the event will be open throughout the weekend and everyone is welcome. There will be performances, talks, workshops, conversations, installations and exhibitions. Confirmed participants include Action Hero, Andy Field, Arike Oke, Deborah Pearson, Gigi Arguropolou, Farah Saleh, Ira Brand, Jemima Yong, Liberate Tate, Rima Nadji, Season Butler, Simone Bowes and They Are Here, with more to be announced soon.
Whether you have known about Forest Fringe for many years, or have never heard about us before, we hope that this will be a space of exchange and experiment, a place to share good ideas and to encounter brilliant people doing interesting things. In the dying embers of this most grimly disheartening of years, we hope to begin for ourselves the task of asking where do we go now, and how we can work together to begin to make things better.
Access to the event is always free though some portions of it will be ticketed. A full programme of events and details of the venue will be available later in November. This event is supported by Arts Council England, Creative Scotland and Jerwood Charitable Foundation.