The Sick of the Fringe in August 2020
by Lewis Church
I began writing summaries of The Sick of the Fringe’s annual activity in Edinburgh in 2017, outlining the conversations that we’ve had and the work that we’ve done in the city during the August of each year. These pieces were intended as an introduction to our thinking as a company, and to the interventions TSOTF have tried to make in the ever-evolving ecology of the festival(s) over the five years that we’ve been active. In 2020, of course, things are very different, and not only because Covid-19 has prevented any festival from taking place in person.
By the time the announcement of the live Fringe’s cancellation was made, it was apparent that it was coming, and it was a key harbinger of the mammoth and unprecedented changes to the ways that we all interact that we’ve had to become used to over the past six months. At TSTOF one of our first responses to lockdown was to collate information for artists and producers through our social media, amplifying the valuable work of many organisations to outline what support was and would soon be available. You can find more current information on available support here and here. But like all the artists, partners and institutions left reeling by the lockdown, it took some time for us to articulate how we might best contribute positively to the creative industries as they exist now and will develop in the future. During our fifth year of activity, the project of focusing on performance through a lens of health and wellbeing suddenly felt both more remote and more important than it had ever been. Would the systems we were critiquing even be the ones that emerged after?
In the midst of a global pandemic, we believe that art which interrogates what it means to be sick, or different, or disenfranchised by existing systems is absolutely essential, and at TSTOF we are committed to continuing to support artists, audiences and institutions to think differently and more openly. And so whilst there was been no physical Edinburgh festival this year, the work of TSTOF and our parent organisation Something to Aim For (STAF) has continued, alongside and with the support many of our partners and collaborators. Despite the lack of an in-person festival in Edinburgh we’ve seen and been part of new initiatives and programmes designed to keep some important conversations alive, whilst recognising the new and strange reality that faces theatre and performance after 2020.
What did take place in the past August, instead of physical events, was a ‘digital Edinburgh’, a broad series of online versions of different parts of the festivals that would normally fill the city centre and every hotel bed for miles around. Panel discussions, online performances and Zoom networking, plots and plans and new systems for sharing, solidarity, support and engagement. TSOTF has been involved with several aspects of this season, and we’ve engaged with many more as audiences, readers and close followers of the debates that are happening across our sector. The series of panels convened by the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society are perhaps the clearest example of this, and our participation in these events reflects the role that TSOTF has taken up as a strategic partner with the Fringe society, working with them to improve diversity, access and support.
Those digital events that we worked on posed the key questions that define our approach. They brought together artists and creative leaders to discuss what the Fringe will look like in the future, to ask how we can improve racial diversity at the Fringe, and to examine the experiences of disabled artists and audiences that might attend or present work. Each of these panel discussions reinforced essential aspects of TSTOF’s work over the past five years, and are important provocations to those of us looking to consider how the arts return after Covid-19. That first question, for example (on what the Fringe will look like in the future), reflected many of the difficulties faced by an industry devoted to bringing people together in one time and place in an age of social distancing. As a question it is relevant to the sector as a whole, not only to Edinburgh.
Immediately prior to lockdown, I was in Australia as part of the TSOTF delegation to the World Fringe Congress, a biannual gathering of Fringe directors, producers, programmers and organisers from across the globe, ranging from the smallest local festivals to the Edinburgh and Adelaide Fringes (two of the largest arts festivals in the world). By gathering together, these organisations are able to share best practice, concerns and successful strategies, and look ahead to the challenges facing the creative industries in the future. Little did we know that a pandemic would sharpen and reinforce many of these concerns, and perhaps even overshadow them for years to come. TSTOF presented at the congress to share the successes that we’ve had, raise the issues that matter to us and those we work with, and share some of our strategies for improving experiences for creatives and audiences. Our presentation addressed the burnout and culture of overwork that is rife in the arts, a factor that perpetuates inequality and hinders the health of those who work in them, as well as our anti-racism as an organisation, and our efforts to foreground access considerations that are often overlooked, from addiction to mental health.
As Lyn Gardner discusses here for The Stage, producers and other strategic roles in the arts are often as affected as artists by these issues, with the increasing pressures of overwork, shrinking funding opportunities and growing administrative burdens having a negative effect on the experience of those involved at all levels. The lockdown and pandemic have only aggravated these factors and patterns of burnout and overwork, both in the general population and amid arts workers desperately struggling to switch to digital working and online presentation. Responding to this impending crisis, already firmly on our radar from our time in Australia, our online panel with the Fringe Society A Mentally Well Fringe asked what could be done to encourage those working in the arts who come to Edinburgh to take care of themselves. Our panellists Cheryl Martin, Jen Smethurst and representatives from NHS Lothian’s psychological support team detailed the small things we could all do to support ourselves (from taking breaks to engaging with available clinical help) as well as interrogating some of the deep, overriding questions that should be asked now during this fallow year. Is it acceptable that the Fringe too often leaves artists ‘broke and broken’? That the industry puts the pressure on those least secure to shoulder the most risk? Listening to the conversation, whilst positive and engaging, it was clear that the Fringe as it was reproduces patterns of burnout at all levels.
It is far from only Edinburgh that does this, however. In March many delegates at the World Fringe Congress shared the strategies they have begun to implement to guard against similar burnout, and much of our time there was devoted to strategizing ways that performance festivals can embed wellbeing at a more fundamental level than as an add-on or afterthought. Orlando Fringe (the next hosts of the World Fringe Congress in 2022), for example, spoke about their efforts to ensure there are safe spaces and support for artists, staff and volunteers during their festival. From agreements participants sign outlining expected standards of behaviour and conventions of respect for others, to support for audiences whose experience might be affected by their identity or personal connection to artistic content, many in the sector (pre-pandemic) were starting to put in work to establish clear parameters around behaviour, workload and to encourage awareness of other’s experiences. These are the systems that could be embedded at root into the new, post-coronavirus festivals, and to the creative industries as a whole. A care and attention towards difference and lived experience, a rejection of one size-fits-all models of funding or support, and a clear focus on who is most at risk.
For none of these conversations happen in a vacuum, and the global experience of lockdown has shown incontrovertibly the extreme variance in the lives of distinct groups of people around the world. For all the rhetoric of being in it together, social media feeds and testimony from others makes plain the truth of the gap between experiences of space and culture amongst different groups. This has perhaps been most apparent in relation to race, with Black Lives Matter and the experiences of people of colour around the world thrust into the glare of cameras before moving onto the street in righteous protest. From successive waves of police murder and repression to state-sanctioned violence and absurd and offensive pantomimes of political mea culpa, one of the objectives to be raised from 2020 must be to continue to make clear that the pervasive white supremacy found across all societies cannot be allowed to continue. We remember their names and continue our work accordingly.
This is an issue with profound implications on the way that the creative industries work too. Conversations about Black and global majority performers in theatre, TV, film and performance have been taking place within the context of Edinburgh for years, and it is important to recognise that despite this protracted debate progress has been extremely small. We’ve been talking about the extra barriers faced by Black and global majority performers for years. In 2015, the first year of TSTOF, Michaela Coel gave the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival where she detailed her experience as a Black performer and writer and the systematic discrimination against and inattention to her identity, her embodied knowledge and her talent. It’s strange to watch that lecture back in 2020, as Coel outlines the early stages of a series that would become I May Destroy You, one that has now been released and been sparking profound and important conversations about consent, sex, race and trauma after its premier in June, during the height of the lockdown.
In 2017, my first year as TSTOF lead writer, Selina Thompson’s powerful testimony of her experience presenting SALT was published in Exeunt and Alexandrina Hemsley’s experience as an audience member appeared via TSOTF, a piece that was later used to introduce the play’s published script. These pieces made clear again the embedded inequalities and additional pressures placed on performers of colour by the Fringe context, asking for not only acknowledgement of the problem but solidarity and action to resolve it. The problem has endured however, and progress has been slow. Last year TSOTF published two reflections from Demi Nandhra and Sage Nokomis Wright on the experience of performing at the fringe as a British-Asian and Indigenous Canadian artist respectively, where again they detailed the everyday barriers and discrimination they faced, many of which were exactly the same as those detailed by Cole, Thompson and Hemsley. These conversations have been happening for many years at Edinburgh, and it is important that we don’t fool ourselves that one fallow one will bring about massive change. What happens next year that will be different, once the Fringe returns? Will there be more opportunities for Black, Asian, global majority and Indigenous artists? At what point do cultural institutions, venues and leaders in the arts stop saying that Black Lives Matter to them and start acting like they do?
These conversations are essential to be had now, before the Fringe comes back, before people once again throng the Royal Mile and the cramped little venues are full to the roof. Assuming of course that it will be possible to return to something like it was. As I write this now, worrying second peaks are beginning to erupt, and the pandemic is far from over. There may be more fundamental changes to come. Interesting conversations around whether the Fringe and other festivals should still be concentrated in August have begun to be had on social media, new kinds of work are being proposed that are not so reliant on seated rows of people, and, of course, the digital continues to look like the short to mid-term future for many artists. We have seen the innovation that comes from new technologies used to great effect, from the Shedinburgh Festival of streamed shows from sheds and gardens to the Fringe of Colour Films commissions released over August.
At STAF (parent charity of TSOTF) we’ve been working with partners to develop our own digital space, Us In the Making, a hub for performance that is safe, secure and open for experimentation. Us In the Making is a way for us to provide a platform to communities at risk due to the lack of in-person contact, those often overlooked by major institutions and whose work happens on the edges in basements, pubs and attics. In June 2020 we were delighted to host RAZE Collective for a live cabaret night of Queer performance as an inaugural event, bringing together a diverse spread of artists in a celebration of digital potential without losing the liveness they thrive on or the sense of community made by a really good night. We will be hosting many more events on this platform going forward, and we’re excited about the opportunity it poses to foster togetherness when we’re divided by screens.
My community at the Fringe is one that I’ve missed this summer. This is the first August that I’ve not spent any time at all in Edinburgh since 2015, although my first time at the Fringe was in 2007. I’ve been a reviewer, a writer, a delegate and a performer on and off since then, making it a part of most of my adult life. There was a funny reminder of that first 2007 Fringe from Sh!t theatre in their ten-year reflection of making work together, published during lockdown, and I found the memory of making made a bad play with my friends was profoundly bittersweet during the height of pandemic. During that run we obviously lost money, got sick and often performed to less than three people, but it was fun, and that is one aspect of the Fringe that has been extremely hard to recoup in 2020. No unexpected adventures, no late-night chats over chips, no moments of reunion with acquaintances that you only ever see once a year in the Summerhall Courtyard. It would be wrong not to acknowledge that I missed it a bit, and that that sense of fun is something to value going forward when it finally reappears.
The forced reimagining of our patterns of work brought about by this pandemic has undoubtedly been a challenge. A difficult period in which major changes to our sector, our systems and our lives will linger in a long tail of cause and effect. Some organisations will unfortunately not recover, some will change, and things will, in a very real sense, never be the same again. But perhaps that is right. Perhaps things should not return to what they were, to where we’ve been and systems we’ve become used to. This is a strange opportunity to actually address root and stem problems, inequalities and ossified tradition. Much of the ‘old normal’ was unfair and bleak, and we owe it to ourselves to ensure that we don’t fall too deep into nostalgia for how things once were.
So to sum up this long summary, of TSOTF in 2020 and our ‘Edinburgh’ experience this year, we are striving to maintain our focus on those most at risk, and will not allow the logistical disruption to shift our focus away from the issues that are at the heart of our work. At STAF and TSTOF, our mission is to embed considerations of access, diversity, intersectionality and engagement in the new arts sector to come. Watch this space.
