Canada gets ambitious at Edinburgh’s prestigious Festival Fringe
Large Canadian contingent hopes to get more local shows seen on international stages
In the performance world, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the largest English-speaking international marketplace of the year and, this year, an especially large Canadian contingent is setting off with the goal to get more Canadian productions seen in more cities around the world.
Michael Rubenfeld, who ran Toronto’s SummerWorks Performance Festival for eight years until 2016, has curated the Canada Hub, which is taking over a large, historic Edinburgh church, King’s Hall, as part of the Fringe’s prestigious Summerhall program.
The Fringe, running Aug. 4 to 28, is celebrating its 70th anniversary.
King’s Hall — one of the few Fringe venues that is highly curated, often earning it the title of the Fringe’s Best Venue — will host five theatrical productions and one immersive installation that will run in repertory throughout the entire month, as well as concerts, parties and more events to be programmed.
“In a way, it’s kind of like bringing a festival like SummerWorks to another country,” Rubenfeld said over the phone from Germany, where he was on tour with Counting Sheep, a contemporary musical about the 2014 Ukrainian protests by Toronto’s Lemon Bucket Orkestra. Rubenfeld brought that show to Edinburgh last year (to King’s Hall), where it had a sold-out run and won several prestigious awards, including the Scotsman Fringe First Award for writing and the Summerhall Top Prize.
“It’s because of the success of Counting Sheep that I’ve been able to do Canada Hub,” he said. “If I had never rented a venue, if I had never marketed the show, if I had never worked with a publicist there, there’s no way I could have imagined doing such an ambitious project.
“For the longest time I had been thinking about this question about mobility for Canadian artists. I’ve seen too many Canadian shows end after Canada.”
The works selected to travel to Edinburgh as part of the Canada Hub are a cross-section from across the country.
The East Coast will be represented by an anticipated collaboration between award-winning playwright Hannah Moscovitch and folk musician Ben Caplan to be produced by Halifax’s 2b Theatre and directed by the company’s artistic director, Christian Barry (also responsible for the mysterious, rhythmic Hawksley Workman solo production The God That Comes). The new musical, Old Stock, tells the story of Moscovitch’s own Romanian-Jewish grandparents, who immigrated to Canada in 1908.
Old Stock recently premiered in Halifax and will travel to Ottawa in July before heading to Edinburgh. Caplan is also to play a concert at Canada Hub during the residency.
Vancouver’s Theatre Conspiracy will be bringing the immersive, interactive Foreign Radical, meant to be performed for only 30 audience members at a time, inviting them to collaborate, work together and spy on each other in a story of mobile surveillance, security and espionage.
Foreign Radical is a production that’s tough to sell in Canada due to its limited scope.
“The economics are difficult; there are really only so many places it can go to in Canada. But in Edinburgh, I think it’s going to go quite well,” Rubenfeld said.
A show like Mouthpiece by Toronto actors and writers Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken, which the Star called “an engrossing and virtuosic performance” last fall, has the opposite problem.
“It has been such a huge hit in Canada that it has almost hit its expiry date. It’s been everywhere. And it’s a really perfect example of what happens. A show does really well in Canada, so now what?” Rubenfeld said.
Two productions are on the bill from Quebec: Thus Spoke. . . by Étienne Lepage and Frédérick Gravel, and Siri by Laurence Dauphinais and Maxime Carbonneau. Both will be performed in English, despite representing French Canada.
“The reality of Edinburgh is that it’s an English-language festival; it’s much harder for them to find an audience if they’re foreign language,” Rubenfeld said.
“The idea is to help these works to find lives in an English-language marketplace, so we wanted to give the work the best chance to find success.”
Finally, the indigenous arts collective Article 11 and its founders Andy Moro and Tara Beagan will create a site-specific installation that will last the entire Canada Hub residency, featuring video and performances that highlight international conversations around “indigeneity” and attempt to “indigenize” the Hub.
The installation will include an outdoor, daytime bar space for festivalgoers, extending the Hub’s artistic experience outside show times.
“I knew that if I was going with a program called Canada Hub, I had to go with a conversation around indigeneity being a big part of what we’re doing. I think it’s the most essential and unique conversation about our country in my mind. And the one with the most work that needs to be done,” Rubenfeld said.
With the success of Counting Sheep and the added momentum of the Canada Hub, artistic centres around the world might be in for a Canadian infusion, but Rubenfeld wouldn’t necessarily frame it that way.
“I wouldn’t say that the appetite is specifically for Canadian work; I’d say the appetite is for good work,” he said. It’s just time for international programmers to see it. Carly Maga is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with critic Karen Fricker.