EdFringe live-streams participants roadshow
Thursday 23 January event available around the globe
Kath Mainland, Chief Executive of the fringe will be on the panel for the participants roadshow. Photo © Janeanne Gilchrist
By Thom Dibdin
Potential Edinburgh fringe participants will get a chance to find out from the experts how to take part in the largest arts event on the planet, when the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society live-streams a participants roadshow on Thursday night through its website.
The fringe roadshows go round the world and have taken place everywhere from New York to New South Wales. On Thursday it comes home to Edinburgh at the Edinburgh University’s Appleton Tower on Crichton St, EH8 9LE – best known during August as Fringe Central.
The aim of the roadshow is to answer any question about how to take part in the fringe and it takes place in front of a live audience. Any fringe participant or potential participant, who is in Edinburgh on Thursday night, is welcome to join the roadshow audience, between 7pm and 9pm.
“The panel discussion will feature people who work at the Fringe society or who have taken part in the fringe in recent years,” the fringe’s head of external affairs, Neil Mackinnon told Æ.
Potential participants around the world can email questions to the panel in advance on participants@edfringe.com or take part on the night using #Edfringe on Twitter or Facebook. The live stream will be available through www.edfringe.com.
“This is a new development for us,” Mackinnon added. “This is just to see if we will reach more people than our historic roadshow format – which is meeting in a large venue and people just having to come along. We hope this will have a different kind of reach and, hopefully, a more extensive reach as well.”
The roadshow is designed for anybody who is thinking about taking a show to the fringe, whether it is this year, next year or at some vague point in the future. The point of the event, according to Mackinnon, is just to give people the idea of some of the things that they will have to consider.
Mackinnon adds: “The fringe is an open access arts festival and that really means that it is up to the participants who are taking part in the fringe to actually manage a lot of the process for themselves. So the discussion will be very much geared towards imparting information that will be helpful to people who think that they might want to take part in the fringe.”
Venues open day
In a second open event on Saturday 25 January, the fringe is hosting a venues open day from 10am to 4pm. There is an informal get-together between participants and venues in the Quaker Meeting House, 7 Victoria Terrace, EH1 2JL in the morning.
“People will be able to come along and mingle with the different venues,” says Mackinnon. “Then, if there are any of the venues which they particularly want to see, some of the venue managers will be in their venues on the Saturday afternoon, so they will be able to go round and actually look at the spaces.”
Although the fringe is not aware in advance which venues will participate, it is usual for a mix of the bigger, multi-space venues – such as the Pleasance and Summerhall – and smaller bespoke venues to be present.
Full details of fringe participants events are on the Edinburgh fringe website at www.edfringe.com/participants
ENDS
