Artists not impressed by changes made to Fringe fest

Poor schedule, lack of promotion led to financial losses

When Natasha Perry-Fagant decided to attend her first fringe festival outside of Montreal she was excited. But after a week spent at the Regina International Fringe Festival, her thoughts changed.

“It’s one of those things that I know it’s not unique to me because so many artists had this same experience of very low attendance in shows, losing lots of money and just having a generally demoralizing experience,” said Perry-Fagant, who performed her show A David Lynch Wet Dream at The Exchange.

RIFF’s 13th edition ran July 2-8. This year’s festival saw the number of artists increase from 20 to 36 and weekday afternoon shows added. According to some Fringe artists, the changes led to low attendance and monetary losses.

“We want this Fringe to be successful and it’s just unfortunate that whoever decided to make the decisions to add this many shows thought for some reason that you could double a festival in size in a year, and that’s just not possible,” Bill Pats said.

This was Pats’ first time attending RIFF with his show Executing Justice, which he performed at The Exchange. He lost money at RIFF, only bringing in $292, before costs.

Australian comedian Lana Schwarcz stopped at RIFF for the first time as part of her Canadian tour with her show Lovely Lady Lump. She made back her registration fee but still lost money on the festival due to travel costs. Schwarcz brought in $246 after costs, but with other expenses she is short around $700.

Schwarcz said her show was one of the better attended ones due to an article in the Leader-Post ahead of the festival. During RIFF she attended other artists’ shows in the afternoons just so they would have someone sitting in the audience.

“Attendance in the afternoons while everyone’s at work, is like: Why? Why would you do that? Why would you schedule shows in the afternoon?” Schwarcz said.

Larger fringe festivals such as Winnipeg and Edmonton have afternoon shows, but Schwarcz said comparing Regina to those events doesn’t work.

“There’s so much buzz about (those) festivals that people take their holidays (around them), they take a week off just to attend shows,” she said.

RIFF is listening to the concerns voiced by the artists.

“It’s an organic process and you always have to reflect and look upon every year to help inform next year’s process of lining up venues and securing those, as well as determining what our festival will look like next year,” said Layne Arthur, chair of the RIFF board of directors.

Schwarcz said she didn’t feel there was enough advertising done for RIFF. Also, The Exchange was a new venue for this year’s festival and artists, such as Perry-Fagant said they found people didn’t even know it was a venue.

“There were a lot of people that did not know that the Fringe was happening. It just felt like we were plopped in the middle of nowhere with an audience that didn’t know we were there,” Perry-Fagant said.

Arthur said the intent of expanding the festival was to offer more variety and diversity to attract new audiences, and adding The Exchange as a venue was part of that. Arthur said the board will take the artists’ comments to heart and is responding to every concern voiced.

All three artists said they would not come back to RIFF. Pats did say he would consider coming back if RIFF removed some of the changes it made this year.