Editorial: An argument for the arts and a warm welcome back

There is something in the air. I caught a whiff of it this week, a familiar scent that has wafted over me throughout this year - throughout the entirety of this pandemic, even. It is sour, spent. It lingers in the news, in the mouths of politicians, in the text of strangers on social media. It could be mistaken for something as simple as panic and preservation but it’s more odious. A dark, favourable mistrust of the arts and entertainment has crept into public discourse. A wretchedness that has been laying in wait in the government’s plans for public spending and state support.

Ever since COVID-19 hit and the UK’s economy was threatened by business closures, job losses, tourism blocks and more, our government has been slowly working towards one of its long-term goals – dissipation of cuts and siphoning that puts arts funding, education and support on a tighter leash than ever. A conveniently precarious commodity that, without proper nurturing, might just wither away silently and die, if they are lucky. For a while, with empty theatres, galleries, and stages, it looked as if artists might never return. But we were never really gone – many of us had found ways to continue online, connecting with people in other countries we may never have dreamed of collaborating with, or finding how to reach audiences who had been excluded from these in-person venues for so long.

I did not expect to bemoan the government in my first editorial for our second ever festival. However, it turns out that I have a lot of feelings about the recent announcement that creative arts education at universities will face a horror movie-like slashing in the form of a 50% cut to high-cost subsidy for creative and arts subjects, the most recent in a long line of attacks against the UK’s artistic output. Instead, the money will allegedly be funnelled into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects.

A university does not validate you as an artist – it shouldn’t. I recently had a conversation with someone about the guise of professionalism – what it means to be able to say you are trained in something, versus what it means to have learnt as you’ve gone, outside of an institution. Many of the brilliant, creative people involved in Fringe of Colour Films are not professionally trained, did not study their craft at university, do not have the long lines of CV to show that they are talented and good at what they do. Meanwhile, some people have. They have been able to hone their craft in these spaces, to learn from other students and make use of a culture of criticism and feedback. Our filmmakers, writers and team members are a mix of both of these scenarios, simultaneously highlighting the importance of education and the power of following a passion.

For the last nine years, I have been in higher education training for a possible career in psychology or, if not a career, then the equipment for a lifelong curiosity about psychology and language. I founded Fringe of Colour the summer before I began my PhD, haphazardly using Google Sheets for the first time to create a database of shows at the Edinburgh Fringe by Black performers and performers of colour. Three years later, I am using the skills I gained through my STEM funded degree to play with code so that I can create a website fit to showcase the immense talent of this year’s festival cohort. What would Boris Johnson’s government say to such backtracking? Perhaps, if we all trained in data analysis and programming, we could all create our own empty festivals, free of creativity and art but with brilliantly designed quantitative surveys to send out after the gig is over.

The lack of freedom in decision making and opportunities is the reason I started Fringe of Colour, and the reason I founded our online arts festival, Fringe of Colour Films, back in 2020 with the help of then-Assistant Director Hannah McGurk. It is not enough to try to fit your work between the boundaries of the few opportunities that exist. We need as many opportunities as possible, we need platforms coming out of our ears, not cuts to arts education and funding resources. Black artists and artists of colour know this painfully well, because we are constantly existing within spaces that were not created with us in mind. Our work is often labelled as too experimental, too specific, too queer, too trans, in the wrong language, unprofessional, and not universal enough to be appreciated by the wider public. We see this in publishing, in film and TV and, yes, in festival circuits.

Fringe of Colour Films exists primarily so that these artists may have a platform on which to share their work, away from the usual judgements, premonitions or predetermined notions of what an artist from the Middle East should create, or a writer from Nigeria should be considering. We are unashamedly queer in the way we organise and in the work we celebrate. We know what it means to see gender as fluid, binaries as restrictive, and race as a double-sided mirror through which we see the world and the world looks back on us with an obscured and deceptive view.

So, we came back for a second year. We have made a few changes to the festival since August 2020, including bringing more people onto the team and reducing the length of the festival, along with the numbers of productions we are showing. There is a misconception that a project must get bigger in order to get better. I think we have grown inwards, rather than outwards. We have fewer shows, but with each film presented with an additional British Sign Language interpreted and Audio Described version, our programme is actually 30% larger than last year’s.

The makers of the 23 films in our programme and the writers for Fringe of Colour Responses have all had the option to take part in a new addition to the festival – the Fringe of Colour Saturday School. These have been a series of workshops intended to help creatives grow in their chosen fields, be that through learning how to pitch to an editorial platform, to turn theatre into film, to consider their mental health at the heart of their engagement with the festival and even how to create a podcast.

We have been able to reflect on and preserve last year’s work, through our new podcast series, Before the Applause, archiving discussions with the performers we commissioned in 2020 to make new work for the inaugural Fringe of Colour Films festival.

This year, our programme shines under the light of its deliberateness. With carefully curated themes, audiences will be able to consider how the different films relate to rituals, to flight, to protest and to self, challenging our notions that there are limited ways to think about each of these topics (read more about these themes and the films here). We have collaborated with Lighthouse – Edinburgh’s Radical Bookshop, to bring you reading lists based off of these themes. Audiences will be able to explore the work further by reading the Responses written by our writers about each of the films, who have been generous enough to bring their own selves to the conversation.

I won’t tell you exactly what to expect – that is up to you. Explore the programme, take a moment to turn down the lights and reduce the noise around you, and give some time to a collection of work that dispels the myth that uselessness pervades the arts and creativity. As a population, we must do what we can to support art at home and overseas, because without it, all we have is empty space.