WILD THINGS
Artistic director hitting his stride as festival goes wild in its 38th year
Fringe keeps getting bigger
Fringe Theatre artistic director Murray Utas has a new office with a nice piece of art on the wall and a comfortable space for small meetings in the corner. But in Utas’s mind — always roiling with ideas — the office is poised to become a studio for a new series of podcasts he plans to record this season.
“It’s called ‘I Woke Up with Murray,’” he said with a chortle.
The title expresses a sense of the unexpected that infuses the Edmonton International Fringe Festival this year, its 38th, and every year. For its 2019 iteration — Where the Wild Things Fringe — the festival has expanded in substantial fashion. With 50 venues participating (up from 39 in 2018) and 258 shows being mounted (up from 227), the number of performances throughout the festival has hit 1,600.
Tickets sales — the real story — have also been moving in the right direction, buoyed by creative marketing (like the online Randomizer, which will select a play for you based on the time you have available in your schedule) and daily half-price ticket specials. Last year, Fringe patrons purchased 130,000 tickets, up dramatically from 2013, when 100,000 folks slapped down roughly $13 for a performance.
Utas is excited about the potential for the new series of podcasts, which would showcase the talent and expertise of the hundreds of artists roaming the streets of Old Strathcona throughout the 11-day festival and then be accessible through the Fringe website through the coming year to inspire the public and artists. Anything is possible.
After five years in the artistic director’s chair, Utas feels he has hit his stride. “I feel like it takes five years for you to start a plan in motion,” he said.
The goal as he enters his sixth year as an artistic director is to reinvent the $5-million-a-year Fringe Theatre (the mother corp, formerly known as Fringe Theatre Adventures) as a primary source of art that also helps others make art.
“I want it to be a home yearround for artists to take risks and explore,” he said.
With that in mind, 2020 will mark the first year since 2002 that Fringe Theatre will produce its own show with its own money. Called The Cave, it will be mounted in the spring as a “collective theatre creation, immersive and site specific.” This means it will involve a diverse team (including Christine Lesiak, of For Science fame) that creates a play involving the audience in a location that becomes part of the story.
The Cave will be part of The Off Season, a five-show series running within the 45,000-square-foot ATB Financial Arts Barns between November and May, when the $3.5-million Fringe Festival hibernates. The Off Season is just part of what goes on in the Arts Barns when it’s not overrun with fringers, including February’s Chinook Series, a Fringe Theatre partnership with Azimuth, Black Arts Matter and Workshop West.
“It’s a very busy space,” said Utas.
Shows in The Off Season may receive some funding and in-kind support from Fringe Theatre.
But with The Cave, Utas and his team fund the entire effort and will use the opportunity to offer a new kind of theatre experience for artists involved, who will be paid while they learn more about their craft.
The Cave, the first of the new prototype that Utas is developing, will have more time to percolate and to rehearse. Utas sees the prototype as another way to further develop the local theatre community that has already been substantially shaped by the Fringe Festival.
“We were born out of punk rock and we need to connect again with those punk-rock roots,” said Utas.