Forest Fringe 2010 Part 4: A Festival of Experiences

(STK International, image by Briony Campbell)

The reason Forest Fringe is able to exist at all in Edinburgh is thanks to the people at the Forest Café. It was they who first invited Debbie to use their beautiful upstairs space to create a performance programme for Edinburgh and their involvement with Forest Fringe continues to be one of the main things that gives our place its character.

Every day during the festival when we finish at 10 the hall becomes home to a series of incredible music nights and parties hosted by The Forest café. This year they are going to be particularly spectacular as it’s the Forest’s 10 year anniversary – a pretty incredible lifespan in the face of an ever-changing and city.

After experimenting last year with hosting a couple of these parties ourselves as, including a legendary night of STK International’s Live Art Speed Dating, this year the Forest have given us the chance to programme a whole series of late night events across the festival. Come along on any of these nights for a delirious cocktail of performance, music, film, unusual encounters, strange experiences and general good times.

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DETAILS

LoveSong (a night of music and performance hosted by Forest Fringe)

Monday 9 August, from 11.30pm

Live performance and live music bleed into each other in unexpected ways. Hosted by Little Bulb Theatre, you’ll get a chance to experience music from Over the Wall and our house band The Suitcase Royale alongside hidden experiences with artists including Brian Lobel. There’s also an opportunity to play Forest Fringe’s very own William Shatner Karaoke, with live accompaniment from the lovely folk at Little Bulb.

MoveyHouse (a night of film and performance hosted by Forest Fringe)

Tuesday 10 August, from 11.30pm

A chance for artists to have a meddle with cinema and see what they come up with. Featuring an audio-visual set from Fiona Soe Paing, Andy Field’s participatory happening Moveyhouse and a secret video installation by Charlotte Jarvis, plus another set from our delightful house band The Suitcase Royale.

Cruising for Art (Brian Lobel and special guests)

Wednesday 11 August, from 11pm

A night of queer delectations. Grab a hankie, cruise the hall, and have an intimate encounter with a stranger. Your smile or wink will start a wild journey, a tender moment, or an intimate conversation. 'Cruising for Art' celebrates a history of cottaging and similar activities in public spaces and includes one-on-one performances with some of the UK's most exciting performers. Punctuated by cabaret acts and gently led by our delicious djs, 'Cruising for Art' will be a night to remember.

Ping Pong Quiz Show (STK International)

Monday 16 August, from 11pm

Following last year’s incredible Live Art Speed Dating, the boys from Stoke Newington return to Forest Fringe with another new project.

Hosted by a disgraced ex-primetime TV show host, an over the hill regional ping pong champion [U16] and held together by the adjudicator/lovely assistant, Ping Pong Quiz Show is a game show style quiz and tournament where teams pit their wits and ping pong skills against each other in a dazzling array of challenges. Part Satirical Show, part absurdist parlour game, the evening rounds off with a full on ping pong tournament and some dancing.

My Time (BAC Young Producers)

Saturday 21 August, from 11.30pm

To say goodbye to Forest Fringe for another year we’re giving the space over to BAC’s delightful and inspiring young producers, all aged between 16-20. There’ll be programming events and encounters across the building, along with music and partying to celebrate the end of another year in Edinburgh.

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.

Drowning in a sea of very tiny light bulbs

Ok. So picture this.

It’s five in the morning. You’ve been up for about 42 of the last 48 hours. In that time you’ve seen three spectacularly beautiful shows, one that passed you by in the moment but when you attempt to explain it to someone in two weeks time it will have become your favourite of the entire festival, an inadvisable comedy show with the soul destroying title ‘LOLacaust: The Musical’, a miniature encounter that made you cry in a good way, four pieces of paint-by-numbers devised theatre all of which involved a movement sequence to a Sufjan Stevens song and an outdoor show that would have been euphoric if it hadn’t been raining. You’re sitting in the corner of an overcrowded bar trying to hear the music over the raised voices around you. Big, exhausted thoughts chug lazily through your head, floating around aimlessly for a while before disappearing again. You are the fuzzy silence at the end of an old cassette tape.

Suddenly though, smuggled in amidst all the floatsam, is something different. An idea. A really, really good one. Though initially tiny it quickly expands, filling the inside of your head, bleeding out into everything you see around you. Now you're no longer gazing vacantly off into space, you're frantic - scrambling to find a pen and a piece of paper and somehow anchor it down before it disappears.

So there it is. An a fragile, wonderful idea caught in a series of frantic scribbles on the back of somebody else's programme. Brilliant. And then what?

Well, traditionally not a lot in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a place for showing not for making. For all that it is crammed to the point of delirium with spaces for putting on shows, there’s virtually nowhere to actually create something, to try anything out – in public or in private.

To me that just feels like such a crushing waste. Here is a city overflowing with potential collaborators, with supportive, generous producers and critics and audiences, with unusual spaces. With brilliant people doing nothing all day other than handing out flyers and sitting in their flats watching episodes of the Wire to try and avoid spending any more money. This bizarre month of excitement and inertia could (should) be the perfect environment for not only having a good idea but for pinning it down, for allowing it to take its first steps.

When BAC first created the One o clock Scratch back in 2005 it was a revelation. An opportunity for artists at the festival to try out a new project in front of an audience. The TEAM, Third Angel, Rabbit and dozens more created work there that blossomed into a whole family of brilliantly diverse, successful pieces. When it returned to the festival last year at Forest Fringe you could again feel the giddy excitement of the artists given this space and the audience who would have the opportunity to see what came out of it.

For us at Forest Fringe, that model (and the collective excitement generated from it) continues to be an inspiration. We want to provide more space and more time than ever before for new ideas to prosper.

We’re devoting a whole day at the end of the August to things dreamt up in bars and on walks and in conversations over the course of the festival. But more than that, we’ve tried to encourage a whole host of diverse opportunities for artists at Forest Fringe to explore a new idea – whatever form that idea might take. And so we have platforms in which a new idea can become an interactive experience, or a brief one-on-one encounter or piece of new writing. Hopefully almost anything, no matter how strange, will find the right space in which to happen. Because its often not just about providing a space and a platform, but ensuring that its the right way for an idea to be realised.

We're hoping that some, many even, of these small sparks will end up growing into full projects that come back to Forest Fringe next year. Or maybe they will have found their perfect incarnation first time around. Either way I'm excited to be able to say that I have no idea what what's going to happen.

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Places for new ideas at Fores Fringe this summer:

The Miniaturists

24 & 25 August

Stephen Sharkey and Glynn Cannon programme a series of brilliantly diverse pieces of new writing, all of which have to be less than 20 minutes long. A celebration of the fact that even the smallest piece of written can deserve realising with all the effort and creativity of a full play.

Hide&Seek Sandpit

26 August

The brilliant people behind the Hide&Seek festival will be bringing their unique brand of social games & playful experiences to Forest Fringe. Strange interactive experiences scattered across the building and disappearing out into the streets around it.

BAC One o Clock Scratch

22 & 29 August

BAC’s legendary fringe forum for new ideas. See up to five different artists trying out 10-minute skits of brand new ideas. The birthplace of work by The TEAM, Third Angel and Rabbit amongst many others.

Stoke Newington International Airport’s Live Art Speed Dating

26 August

The boys from STK International, East London’s newest and bestest venue, are going to be filling the building with brand new 4 minute one-on-one encounters by some of the most exciting artists at the festival. See as many as you can.

BAC Nuit Blanche

24 August (Scratch Sharing the next morning)

BAC will be offering artists a chance to take part in a unique all-night residency at Forest Fringe, hoping that the peace, quiet and delirious creativity of the middle of the night will mean that there will be something memorable to see by morning. Artists interested can send ideas and pitches to lauram[at]bac.org.uk, using the subject line Nuit Blanche and anyone can come for breakfast and a sunrise Scratch sharing, followed by a group walk up Arthur's Seat.

Forest Fringe’s Great Unknown

29 August

Following BAC’s One o Clock Scratch the rest of the day has been left totally empty – to be programmed according to whatever absurd and brilliant ideas people come up with over the course of the festival. Just drop into the Forest at any point and tell us your ideas.