Forest Fringe 2010 Part 1: A Festival of Thoughts

(H Plewis' Cabinet of Ideas. Image by Finlay Robertson)

For some time at Forest Fringe we’ve been dreaming of a different kind of space for Edinburgh. We imagined a room that was always open, that you could drop in and out of as you pleased. A place where something would always be happening. A place where you could slip away briefly from the mayhem of the city and experience a miniature encounter that transforms your day, or where you could stay for hours – meeting people, talking, sharing, feeling at home. We wanted people to know, as they squeezed their way through the festival, that there was always somewhere they could return to, to rest and think and maybe experience something remarkable.

This year, thanks to the support of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, for the first time we’re going to be able to try this out. It’s another new experiment and we’ve asked a whole range of folk to help us realise it, from brilliant organisations such as Artsadmin and Residence to artists like Third Angel, H Plewis and Non Zero One. We also hope that you’ll all offer your thoughts and ideas and help us as we try and build something new.

So how will it work?

Between 12pm and 5pm every day there’ll be something happening to engage with. Miniature encounters, conversations, inspiration exchanges, living archives and sound libraries. Things you can alight upon fleetingly or devote your whole day to.

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DETAILS

Forest Fringe Microfestivals: Reminiscences and Restagings
Monday 9 & Tuesday 10

This year we’ve been travelling around the country finding ways of generating some of the unpredictability and experimentation of Forest Fringe in Edinburgh to new spaces and new audiences. This is a chance for you to find out about that adventure and experience some of the projects that came out of it, including work by Brian Lobel, Little Bulb Theatre, Shellshock Theatre and Stadium Rock. Drop by and see what we’ve been up to and help us start dreaming and planning for where we go next.

Future Editions - A collaboration between Artsadmin and Forest Fringe
Wednesday 11 & Thursday 12 August

An interactive archive of visions, involving a dizzying array of people from across Edinburgh and beyond. A chance to find yourself in the most surprising and inspiring of conversations, sharing somebody's dream of the future. More details coming very soon.

Hold Hands / Lock Horns (Non Zero One)
Thursday 12 & Friday 13

Join in / pass up; stick / twist; follow / lead; win a friend / gain an enemy.
Non zero one have some decisions for you to make. You do want the choice, don't you?

Residence in Residence
Sunday 15

Residence are a loose collective of artists and companies based in Bristol who we’ve worked with regularly over the last few years and are generally very inspired by. Their number include Action Hero, Jo Bannon, Tom Marshman and both Tinned Fingers and Search Party who will be performing at Forest Fringe in the week following this event. We wanted to give Residence the opportunity of a space to simply be in residence, with what that might entail left entirely up to them. You can come along at any time and join them, getting yourself embroiled in whatever it is they might be planning.

Travelling Sounds Library
Monday 16 & Tuesday 17

The Travelling Sounds Library is a wandering collection of audio experiences, captured on MP3 player and hidden inside hollowed out hard back books. A chance to escape from the festival and drift away into somebody else’s world. Featuring Stan’s Café, Blast Theory, Duncan Speakman & Unlimited Theatre, Ian Campbell many more.

SLOTORAMA
Wednesday 18

We wanted to play with the idea of getting yourself a slot in Edinburgh by offering people a chunk of time, stripped of all the proscriptions and baggage normally associated with it. We offered anyone the opportunity to apply for a slot, and indeed the chance to apply is still open. We’ll pick the names randomly out of a hat and those selected will be given an entirely free hour in which to do whatever they want – put on a show, have a rehearsal, hold a discussion or just sit and have a think for a while. If you’d like your name in the hat just email andy[at]forestfringe.co.uk.

Cabinet of Ideas (H Plewis)
Thursday 19

You are invited to buy or sell an idea. Prices range from 1p - £1. Ideas range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Inspiration Exchange
Friday 20

Developed out of an original idea by Alex Kelly from Third Angel, the inspiration exchange is an opportunity to hear a beautiful collection of stories detailing what has inspired some Forest Fringe’s artists and friends. In return we also want you to let us know what you’ve inspired by – whether it be a book, or a film, or a drunken conversation at 2 in the morning. Featuring Alex Kelly, James Stenhouse of Action Hero, Forest Fringe’s Deborah Pearson and Laura McDermott, joint artistic director of Fierce Festival, Birmingham.

What I Heard About the World: Research Map (Third Angel & mala voadora)
Saturday 21

Created out of Forest Fringe’s Microfestival in Glasgow as part of the development process for their new piece What I Heard About the World, this project is a 12 hour durational performance by Third Angel and Lisbon-based mala voadora. Over the course of the day they will attempt to map the world in stories collected from the audience.

For your eyes and for your ears

A massive thank you to Hannah Nicklin for making this lovely video.

Brizzle and Glazzgo

So it's over.

After a frantic, breathless, deliriously exhilarating few weeks we are back home from our Microfestival adventure. It's been an incredible experience. We've worked with 60 different artists or companies in 4 cities, with a total audience of over 500 people. We've had installations, one-on-one encounters, rock freakouts, secret games, haunting imaginary cinemas, an attempt at mapping the world in stories, Sir Walter Raleigh, a cabinet of ideas, a library of sounds, a human bird table, a man covered in salt, romance, music, heartbreak, tears, wonder, and in addition to all of that we've just a grand old time of it.

Thank you to all the artists and the venues and the volunteers and everyone who has helped make this such a fascinating and brilliant success.

We'll be bringing all that's happened together before Edinburgh so people can have a look at what we did but for now here's some links and photographs from Bristol and Glasgow to give you an idea of what went on. If any of you got a chance to come along to any of the four events please do feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments - we'd love to hear them.

BRISTOL

In Bristol we took over the Old Vic for the opening weekend of Mayfest. You can read a lovely review of the event here:

An evening that really had to be seen to be appreciated, the Forest Fringe was like tumbling down the rabbit hole - initially totally confusing, but once I left my reservations behind, and just gave into the madness. It was a novel, unique and memorable evening. If ever the Fringe crew are back in town, I suggest you leave any expectations of normality at the door and get involved.

Or check out Hannah Nicklin's brilliant Microsite which she was updating throughout the weekend, as a means for people to keep track of everything going on.

There's also a beautiful collection of images by Finlay Robertson here, some of which are posted below.

Action Hero

Peter McMaster

Search Party

Little Bulb

GLASGOW

In Glasgow we had the whole run of the incredible maze of spaces that make up The Arches. You can read Mary Brennan's truly wonderful review in the Herald here:

What was it like?

Like being a kid, let loose in a sweet shop full of tantalising choices... Much better than sweets. You can gorge on Forest Fringe and never get sick, or tired of the flavours.

We also have another lovely collection of photographs, this time by James Baster, here.

Abigail Conway

The Love Calculator

Jenna Watt & Rachel Moffat

Third Angel

Some reviews of Forest Fringe at BAC

Image by Ludovic Des Cognets

So like a more benign Frankenstein's Monsters with an affection for Canadian Indie music, the Forest Fringe Microfestivals have finally stumbled blinking out of the laboratory and disappeared over the nearest hill, screaming for someone to love them.

Things were wonderful at BAC - manic, exhausting, thick with atmosphere and generosity and everything we could have hoped. Thank you to everyone who came along and the all the artists who were involved and all the volunteers who supported us and helped make them such a special couple of nights.

We've had a few lovely review of everything that happened which I just wanted to flag up for you to have a read of.

First up Lyn Gardner in the Guardian:

Carpe Minuta Prima is just one of the pieces that form part of the Forest Fringe Microfestival, an offshoot of the successful Edinburgh outfit that has rethought the festival model as an artist-led initiative. Out on tour to four venues in London, Glasgow, Bristol and Swansea, the Microfestival offers a mixture of works-in-progress, intimate experiences and surprises from national and local artists over a pick'n'mix evening of art and entertainment.

Then a lovely four star review from Donald Hutera in the Times:

The artist-led producing team known as Forest Fringe has grown into one of the Edinburgh Festival’s brightest success stories. Now the people behind it are taking their loose but loveable brand of theatrical magic on tour...

Also some really thoughtful and interesting personal recollections from Hannah Nicklin and Jake Orr. Always delightful to see people taking the time to tell their experience of it and a real example of the space for thoughtfulness and expressiveness that the internet and blogging offer.

From Hannah:

The microfestival at BAC was a vibrant and buzzing combination of short experiences, fuller scripted pieces, sound work, music, installations and intimate performances. Some of the pieces were more ‘finished’, whilst others just setting out on their first period of R&D. The whole event fitted into the nooks and crannies of the BAC building, and filled the spaces in between with live music and discoveries aplenty – one highlight being the items of clothing dotted around, inviting you to take them in exchange for you’re an item of your own, and it story. Like any good festival, there was more than you could see in one night, and each attendee built their own experience.

And Jake:

The Forest Fringe is now on tour! Another remarkable achievement by it’s two co-directors Andy Field and Debbie Pearson, who have now created Forest Fringe Mircofestival – a smaller version taking residence in a number of cities before August in Edinburgh once more. The Microfestival gives the chance for a festival atmosphere to be replicated in various locations, bringing theatre to the people, and above all – a space for creativity and audiences to meet, play and experience.

So thank you kindly to all those folk.

My own thoughts are mainly that I was delighted by how possible it seemed to recreate the kind of strange and generous atmosphere that we've been able to foster in Edinburgh in other spaces and contexts. People approached all the work and artists with a sense of wanting to understand what they were trying out and why. I loved the atmosphere in the building both nights - the excitement, the conversations that I heard floating round the building. And I loved the way that this diverse collection of pieces were able to sit together as part of a coherent evening - that we had video installations, durational performances, wild experiments, work-in-progresses and everything in between all complementing and supporting each other to make a really diverse, unusual and memorable night.

I think there's still work we need to do on how people sign up for the tinier experiences. We want to be able to accommodate things that only have a very limited audience but it's so hard to do so without it becoming a situation where a very limited number of people get to experience them and everyone else feels that they've missed out. Not only is that not fun for the people who feel they've missed a special treat but it's also difficult for the artists themselves as it then builds an anticipation around their performance which can sometimes be quite difficult to overcome if the piece itself is intended simply as something very tiny and very understated.

How then to be able to include these things whilst giving everyone at least a chance of getting to see them and ensuring that people who don't aren't too disappointed? A lottery? Just keeping those events completely secret and leading people off at random? Will that frustrate people more?

It's a challenge - an exciting and important one and something we're still exploring and experimenting with. I think it's incredible important that we find a context in which these very tiny pieces can be seen by new audiences in different parts of the country, but it has to be the right context and the right experience - for those that see them and those that don't, and of course for the artists.

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts and ideas.

Thanks again to everyone who was involved in making it such a memorable and succesful weekend - hopefully we'll see some of you in Glasgow, which is where we're off to next.

Image by Ludovic Des Cognets

Forest Fringe Microfestivals

Is this country a big place?

Put into context obviously not. It takes three days non stop to drive half way across Canada. And yet you could realistically sleep for almost two of those days and miss virtually nothing bar prairie. Travel from the West Midlands to South Wales in a couple of hours and you’re moving between two different worlds.

We’ve had plenty of time to think about these kind of questions as we’ve roamed up and down the country in the last few months. I’ve learnt new things. I’ve become more outraged by the cost of petrol. I’ve discovered how hard it is to be vegetarian at service stations. I’ve fostered a deep, ingrained mistrust of thetrainline.com.

The result of all of this is that we have a programme of Microfestivals for you – beginning in London in April and ending in Bristol in May.

Each will be a unique weekend of strange events, intimate encounters and performance installations. In each place one ticket will allow you to be a part of everything.

It goes like this:

In London on the 2 & 3 April we’ll be working with our long-time supporters BAC, using a dizzying array of spaces scattered across the beautiful Old Town Hall in Battersea.

In Glasgow on the 16 & 17 April we’ll be with The Arches in their epic subterranean maze of railway arches beneath Central Station.

In Swansea on the 24 & 25 April we’ll be sharing an unusual space with National Theatre Wales’ Assembly programme as part of their month of events in the city.

And Finally in Bristol on the 8 & 9 May we’ll be helping launch the brilliant Mayfest by taking over the whole of Bristol’s legendary Old Vic Theatre, from stages to workshops to backstage corridors and other hidden corners of the building.

In each of these locations we’ll be working with a mix of local companies and Forest Fringe artists from across the country. You’ll be able to see some of the most exciting events that we supported at the Edinburgh Festival last summer, and a collection of brand new pieces, many of which we hope will be journeying to Edinburgh with us this summer.

For each of the individual Microfestivals we’ll be announcing a full line-up of artists closer to the time but already we can tell you that featuring in the programme will be Melanie Wilson, Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells, Co-creator of the amazing Home Sweet Home Abigail Conway, the legendary Stoke Newington International Airport, Tinned Fingers, Action Hero, Search Party, Brian Lobel and Emma Benson as well as a host of incredible young artists such as Tania El Khoury, Peter McMaster and Swansea’s Shellshock Theatre. We’re also still programming more events for all the locations so if you’re an artist and you’re interested in being involved leave a comment below or get in touch via our website.

The Microfestivals will also see the launch of the Forest Fringe Travelling Sounds Library, an exciting new collaborative project bringing together a brilliantly diverse range of audio-pieces into an interactive library made from recycled hard back books and mp3 players. But more on this very, very soon…

So that’s it, basically.

Hopefully we’ll be coming somewhere near you. We’re stupidly excited by it all and we hope you will be too. As always, if you’ve got any thoughts or comments or questions – just leave them below and we promise we’ll get back to you.

Otherwise – bring on the spring.

Back once again...

(img. by Brandon Christopher Warren)

Well hello there sports fans, we’re back again.

So I know we’ve hardly been gone long, but DOES IT EVER FEEL LIKE IT.

It’s been a busy, dizzying, breathtaking few months and we’re still trying to figure out quite what to do about it all. First off – thank you to everyone who has supported us or congratulated us or has just been pleased for us in winning the Peter Brook Empty Space Award. We listened to the lovely things Dominic Cavendish had to say and shook Peter Brook by his wrinkly and surprisingly small hand and couldn’t quite believe it was all happening. But happen it did and that encouragement (and the £2000 that accompanied it) have been a huge help in the plans we’ve been working away on since then.

Oh and what plans.

Best way of thinking about it is to imagine we’ve been squirreled away in some subterranean laboratory from the golden years of Hollywood, pouring coloured liquids into other coloured liquids and plugging wires into frogs until eventually in at the end of an ever-accelerating montage of experiments something has crawled off the Petri dish and wandered out into the world. We meanwhile, appear blinking into the sunlight trying to figure out where our creature has gone.

But now it’s out there. It’s roaming the streets stealing apples from market stalls and trying to understand this thing they call love. So we figured that we would tell you all about it, before anybody else did.

The Forest Fringe Microfestivals

So Edinburgh has been a wonder the last few years. A truly delirious journey. We’ve learnt so much from the people we’ve worked with and the successes (and failures) that we’ve had about how to create an environment of risk and generosity that can really nurture and support exciting new projects of all forms and sizes. We’ve been able to bring together a brilliant community of artists who collectively make work as exciting as anywhere in the country. And we’ve been able to generate a level of profile for those artists and those ways of working which felt like a really valuable opportunity.

We wanted to do something with that opportunity. To explore something new. To find a way of taking everything that was exciting and vital about Forest Fringe in Edinburgh and showing that it needn’t remain in Edinburgh. That the kind of messy, creative hub that developed there could be re-imagined in numerous other sites and contexts.

And so cue the coloured liquids and the smoke and the Petri dishes and the arguments and the experiments and finally we’ve just about figured out what it is we’re doing. And we called it a Microfestival – a model for a new kind of event, somewhere between a festival and a tour and a scratch night and a gathering.

With this Microfestival model, we wanted to be able:

1. To create a different context and a new kind of space for artists to try out new ideas and show unusual work – one-on-one encounters, audio walks, video installations, interventions, happenings. In other words, hopefully almost anything that someone might come up with.
   
   
2. To visit different parts of the country and meet new audiences and artists who couldn’t or wouldn’t come to Edinburgh. To have the opportunity to introduce those people to the kind of work that we love and invite them to become a part of the Forest Fringe community.
   
   
3. To explore new spaces. Or to find new ways of using old spaces. To repurpose and reimagine them for what we want to do.
   
   
4. To create an event that can act as a gathering point for artists, audiences and producers in different parts of the country. A chance to come together – so that we can learn from them and they can learn from us. To create a spark from which new ideas and new projects can spring.

Which is all lovely obviously but wouldn’t mean anything unless we could actually figure out how we were going to do this. How to invite an audience to experience all these events in a space that didn’t feel crowded or confusing but similarly didn’t leave you queuing constantly outside closed doors or just wondering numbly from piece to piece. How to create a Minifestival that, like our home in Edinburgh, is built around artists coming together to create an event that has value for them beyond a commission or a fee; where artists dictate how and when and why they want to be involved. And how to find new spaces to work in new parts of the country – figuring out where the right place to go is and why.

So that’s where we’ve been and what we’ve been doing. And now comes the part where we actually do it, which is undoubtedly the most exciting part. In the next post we’ll explain in more detail exactly where we’ll be and when and a few of the people who’ll be there with us, but if you have any thoughts about any of the above please do put them in the comments – it’s all always massively useful.