Fringe of Colour is taking an intermission
Fringe of Colour’s founder talks about why the project is going on hiatus and what that means to them.
We will be back when we are rested, when we have had time to consider the direction of the work, when we have given ourselves time to work on and finish other projects, and when we have reacquainted ourselves with a summer uncharacterised by intensive labour. We want to see the sunshine!
Personally speaking, I want to see the sunshine. I started Fringe of Colour in August 2018, the summer before I was due to begin my PhD in psycholinguistics. Back then, the prospect of filling a free summer with productivity did not chill me as much as it does now that I have dedicated the last four summers to semi-voluntary festival work. It has been interesting, balancing intensive study for my degree with what looks like on the outside to be a career in the arts, but was never intended to be so directional. I, like many people, had noticed the exclusion of Black artists and Artists of Colour at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as well as People of Colour in the audiences. I spoke on it, I created a database to spotlight those who were performing, then started a free ticket scheme for People of Colour to attend shows by Performers of Colour for free, and I have been a part of a dedicated team running our own arts festival online during prolonged global catastrophe.
We have been doing the work, so to speak, of not only showing where the problem lies in Edinburgh and in Scotland’s international festivals beyond the Fringe, but by showing how it might be done differently. In 2020 we focused on learning from the approaches of small organisations who had been finding ways to connect virtually during the pandemic and studying communication essentials such as audio description, captioning and sign language implementation as a baseline. In doing so, we have been able to connect with over 1,000 people as audience members across two years at our own festival, Fringe of Colour Films, along with around 70 artists from every continent but Antarctica (maybe next time), approaching topics from ageing to indigeneity, romantic love to political refusal.
There comes a time, though, when you must consider if the work, which you so deeply care about, is nourishing you as a producer. As the founder of this project of which I am incredibly proud, I have struggled with the demands of a community-focused arts project, which in many ways is a permanently pointed finger at white arts institutions, heavy in its perpetuity, along with my scientific research and my own creative work. How many of us who are working in a producer capacity can also say that we have put our own writing, filmmaking, creating on the back burner to set up these initiatives? For artists or creators distanced from hegemonic white cishet society there is a tiring phenomenon that, in order to take part in the spaces and opportunities you would greatly benefit from and very much need, you often need to firstly set them up yourself for others. I hope those of you for which this resonates are finding ways to include yourself as beneficiaries of your own projects.
By its nature, Fringe of Colour currently positions itself in opposition to whiteness – critiquing the institutions that continue to exclude and offering alternatives for how it might be done differently. It is now time to think about how the project might exist untethered to this concept, what beauty might emerge if we reframe the narrative. That’s not to say Fringe of Colour has been about whiteness, but much of the work has involved consulting with these institutions on how they can do better, or in their institutionalised words, be more diverse. My answer to this will likely be “burn it down, give over the reins, start over”, but that’s rarely the answer established organisations are looking for.
For example, collaborations such as our free ticket scheme served the Black people and People of Colour we created it for, but also served the white venue organisers and the Fringe Society as free labour and promotion of their spaces. Fringe venues do not technically need Fringe of Colour to continue with the scheme. Instead, they should consider how their own (paid) workforce could create the networks and engage with the communities required to rectify their demographic problems (or more specifically, overwhelming whiteness, ableist environments and financial exclusivity). Maybe this letter is a resignation from being their unofficial unpaid contractor, I don’t know, but I am willing those involved in making the Fringe happen to continue the work without me. To those employees who I have met at these venues and have connected with, let’s just get a drink instead?
I didn’t invent the concept of giving free tickets to people who would otherwise not consider themselves invited to productions – in fact, Fringe of Colour’s free ticket scheme was largely inspired by Tobi Kyeremateng’s Black Ticket Project, who I am sure was herself inspired by examples from preceding work. There should be many more schemes like this, yes, but there should also be a complete dismantling of the commodification of the arts. Tickets to the theatre and to festivals are often extortionate, with tiered prices that deliberately separate audiences by class, as if those who have more money to spare are more deserving of a better view. The arts need more funding, so that (among many reason) access can be subsidised and venues are not reliant on ticket prices to cover their costs.
Another element of Fringe of Colour, of which I am immensely proud, is our Responses project. Fringe of Colour Responses flipped the script on how performance and film could be approached by writers, rejecting the standardised methods of critique and the notion that art is quantifiable by stars and numbers of reviews. We also encourage writers who connect with the work on a personal level, either through their identity or their experiences, to meaningfully explore that understanding.
Once again, we did not invent the concept of “response”, but I am glad we have brought it to our festival, showing how powerful the work can be when you implore the writer not to leave themselves at the door. The Responses we published almost became like collaboration, in the way the writers and the artists were represented on the page. I would love to see more festivals making the transition from review to response. And if properly directed to the source of inspiration, if that is us, that evolution would be something I could look back on as a win.
Fringe of Colour Films is a humongous undertaking. For such a small team, we have made some wonderful achievements with this festival in a relatively short period of time. In only a few months, we put together a new podcast series to celebrate the very first films we commissioned, combining interviews and information inspired by audio programmes for vision impaired audiences. As festivals move away from wasteful printed programmes in a bid to be more environmentally conscious, they should also consider how else to introduce their programmes to a range of audiences, inviting them in from the launch. Audio programmes are a great example of how this might be done.
I am grateful to everyone who has supported Fringe of Colour Films, to all the artists who have trusted our platform with their work, and to everything I have learnt from being a part of the team – to whom I am also enormously grateful for. Running a festival was never a part of my wider plan, though, and it has been difficult to rearrange the project so that I am no longer required at the heart of it. That is in part because I am determined that if it does remain, it remains led by Black queer people based in Scotland who will love it for what it is and are not blinkered by rules previously set by large festival institutions or the white mantle of professionalism. To put it plainly, I need time to figure it all out.
Perhaps the difficulty also comes from the way Fringe of Colour Films was set up – with a whisper of impermanence. Our festival materialised as a response to crisis, when Black artists and Artists of Colour were being left behind at the beginning of the pandemic by performance spaces attempting to stay afloat through perceivably safer, whiter work. Just like in 2020, when we put the free ticket scheme on hold to produce our own work, it is possible that by 2023 we may be needed in a different capacity. There may also be other ways in which we might like to operate – I want to offer the team and myself the chance to explore that.
What might happen in the year we are away? I hope to see some of the work we have already begun reflected across festival spaces and beyond, but there is also a good chance no one will pay any attention to it. Regardless, the future of Scotland’s festivals has to take a backseat in my mind because I have life to catch up on in the present.
If you like, wish me luck on finishing my PhD, which has been patient with me while I’ve navigated festival life, but now refuses to wait any longer. And if you see me this summer, it should be as an audience member in a virtual or perhaps real-life auditorium, hopefully with a tan and a freer spirit.
In solidarity,
Jess Brough
Fringe of Colour Founder and Director
