Online Reservations

We're delighted to be able to let you know that for the first time ever this year you can book reservations for Forest Fringe shows online, in advance of the festival, thanks to the lovely people at Brown Paper Tickets.

They've helped us to set up a special page where you can reserve a place for any of the shows taking place in our main hall and a number of the off-site projects we're running as well. To have a look around and make some bookings go here.

Hopefully this means that if you're the kind of person that likes to be able to plan everything out in advance you can now do so. If however you enjoy being able to roll up to Forest Fringe five minutes before a show is starting and just jump in, don't worry as we'll be making sure we still have plenty of space available on the door.

Also note that you don't need to book for anything happening in our Festival of Ideas between 12pm and 5pm every day or any of our late night performance events running after 11pm. For all those projects you're free to drop in and out whenever you like.

And, of course, all the shows and events you'll find with us are all still totally free.

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 2010 Part 3: A Festival of Adventures

(James Baker, 30 Days to Space)

We like the unlikely places in which live performance can make a home for itself. The strange encounters you might discover in tiny rooms or on park benches, in grand cinemas and cramped video stores. We like the ways we find to look at the things around us in a different way.

These are projects that will take you somewhere unusual. Some of them are scattered across Edinburgh, others are hidden in corners of our own building. Some happen only once or twice, others are repeated throughout the day, and others are available whenever you want or need them. Come down to Forest Fringe and you can guarantee there’ll always be some miniature experience to be unravelled.

Regardless of where you’ll end up, all these events will begin at Forest Fringe. You’ll then be guided by us to wherever you need to be.

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DETAILS

every minute, always - Melanie Wilson & Abigail Conway

Monday 9 – Saturday 14 August, 4pm

every minute, always is a headphones performance taking place in the main auditorium of the Filmhouse cinema on Lothian road, created for two people to encounter together. From the intimate, low-lit vantage of the cinema seat, the participant is guided by the voice of the narrator into a rich and sonically transporting world of cinematic perspective.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a performance for pairs. You must register for this performance with another person.

Away Into the Night – Sarah Hopfinger

Monday 9 & Tuesday 10 August, 6pm & 8pm

Away Into The Night is a new performance that investigates the question: How do we say goodbye? For a small audience at a time, this personal and participatory piece asks us to remember in order to move forwards into an unknown future with hope.

Like You Were Before – Deborah Pearson

Monday 9 – Saturday 21 August (not 14), 10pm

Debbie will take you on a journey through time but she can only access her own time and she can only access it through a video. The video never changes, but she does. An intimate performance in Alphabet Video in Marchmont, Debbie’s old place of work.

DEDOMEGAMIX – Richard Dedomenici

Monday 9 – Saturday 21 August, all day

To commemorate the looming tenth anniversary of his leaving art school, Richard DeDomenici forensically reexamines the first decade of his creative output and draws some damning conclusions. In what is described both as a groundbreaking challenge to the existing Fringe venue status quo, and a pragmatic austerity measure, DeDomenici intends to perform DEDOMEGAMIX in a small portable tent, which he stubbornly refers to as a ‘Pop-Up Nomadic/Boutique Autonomous Microvenue’.

Jarideh - Tania El Khoury

Monday 9 – Friday 13 August, all day

A secret encounter and a suspicious one on one performance. It is inspired by both crime films and real events such as the Metropolitan Police’s terrorism awareness and operations made in the past by women fighters in the Lebanese resistance.

The Bench – Ant Hampton (Rotozaza) and Glen Neath

Monday 9 – Saturday 21 August, all day

In the same vein as Rotozaza’s internationally successful ‘autoteatro’ work, 'Etiquette', TheBench invites two audience / participators to respond to instructions given via headphones, but with some significant differences...- they are outside, on a bench and, they don't know each other.

30 Days to Space - James Baker

Monday 9 - Saturday 21, all day

I want to become an astronaut. I want to get to Space. Space (as defined by NASA) is 50 miles up from the Earth’s surface. That sounds doable. By climbing a 6ft ladder 1467 times each day for 30 continuous days I will eventually reach a height of 50 miles; space. Each climb of the 6ft ladder will be marked by drawing a chalk star onto the wall.

As if it were the last time: A subtlemob – Duncan Speakman

Friday 13 August, 7pm

'as if it were the last time' invites you to take part in a secret event this August.
You've seen the people freeze in train stations and the mass pillow fights, well this will be a more invisible experience, like walking through a film.

To take part in this event register in advance at http://subtlemob.com and you'll be invited to download an MP3 and turn up at a secret location to listen to the soundtrack at a specified time.

When We Meet Again (introduced as friends) - Me & The Machine

Monday 16 – Friday 20 August, all day (till 8pm)

When We Meet Again is a wearable film and a one to one sensorial performance featuring you, your invisible friend, a 3D soundtrack and an old forgotten dance, an ocean, a flavour and me. Video filmed from a first person perspective and played on video goggles replaces your point of view by that one of a film character.

This is just to Say – Hannah Walker

Monday 16 – Friday 20 August, 5pm & 9pm

This is just to say is… a conversation with poems in it. It’s about manipulation, Britishness, love and winning. This is just to say… is smudging its make-up, buying you bouquets and screening your calls. This is just to say… is an intimate audience piece set around a table. Pull up a chair and drink some wine.

It’s Like He’s Knocking – Leo Kay

Tuesday 17 & Wednesday 18 August, 6pm and Thursday 19 August, 4pm

A stripped back performance incorporating storytelling, dance theatre and afro Brazillian percussion, set in the intimacy of a bedsit. A collage of moments taken from the lives of three generations of men. Drink a toast to loved ones, bet on some cards and close your eyes to remember your past.

Audience capacity 12.

Forest Fringe 2010 Part 2: A Festival of Ideas

(Search Party Growing Old With You. Image by Finlay Robertson)

From 5pm every afternoon Forest Fringe will once again have the kind of brilliantly diverse line-up of works-in-progress and unusual performances that people have come to know over the last few years. We’re delighted with this year’s group of artists – some who we’ve worked with before but many others we haven’t, but all of whom make things in a brilliantly unique and fascinating way.

If there’s any theme running through all of this work it is perhaps, like the whole festival, one of reflection. Whether it’s Polarbear reflecting on where he’s from, or Dylan Tighe and Kieran Hurley reflecting on where they’re going, Search Party thinking about growing old together, or Tinned Fingers thinking about falling in love, everyone seems to be looking again at our everyday experience of the world.

Maybe at a time of irresistible globalisation, of epic international crises broadcast on 24 hour news, we need to begin here – by thinking about the politics and the meaning embedded in how we live our own lives day by day; in how we understand our relationship to each other and to the world around us.

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DETAILS

Chip – Glas(s) Performance

Monday 9 & Tuesday 10 August

This is a show about fathers and daughters that stems from the real life experience of Jess Thorpe and Tim Thorpe. ‘Fabulously life-affirming and beautifully-structured’ **** The Scotsman

Journey to the End of the Night – Dylan Tighe

Tuesday 10 – Friday 13 August (with a special show on Sunday 15)

A solo performance based on Dylan Tighe’s personal diary written on the Trans-Mongolian Express from Beijing to Moscow, spanning five time zones and two continents.

Hitch – Kieran Hurley

Monday 9 – Friday 13 August

Kieran Hurley recounts his journey across Europe to the G8 summit protests in this intimate and uplifting one-man show, with live music from Over The Wall.

Two Trillion – Fish & Game

Monday 9 & Tuesday 10 August

There are many creatures in this world, and I am one trillion of them.

Glasgow’s Fish & Game take it right back for this new performance – back to basics, back to nature, and all the way back down to the trillions of cells that make up their bodies – real old skool.

Never Park Your Body in a Wadi (Working Title) – Tom, John & Len Frankland

Wednesday 11, Thursday 12, Monday 16 & Tuesday 17 August

A show created by three generations of the same family about being a man, the twentieth century, fathers and sons and cowboys and indians...

Return – Polarbear

Wedesnday 11 – Friday 13 August

Return tells the story of Noah, a man trying to figure out where he fits. Convinced he had to leave home in order to make his mark, Noah returns to find a world where a lot of things seem the same but nothing actually is.

Doris Day can Fuck Off – Greg McLaren

Monday 16 & Tuesday 17 August

Greg McLaren has been singing in the street. Where he would talk, he has sang. This has resulted in many hilarious encounters. But it has also resulted in a feeling of isolation and rejection. The problem with singing is that it is too heady a means of communication when buying stamps or a bun, or trying to change details with the gas man.

The Last Romance Club (ever) – Tinned Fingers

Monday 16 – Friday 20 August

We are hopeful. We are looking for love. We want to get lucky. We want to serenade you outside your window at night. We want to give you our last rolo. We can't sing but, for you, we'll try.

“I Belong to this Band!” (work-in-progress) – Kings of England and others

Wednesday 18 & Thursday 19 August

“I Belong to This Band!” uses live/performance art to explore folk traditions. We are doing R&D residencies and Scratch showings, making songs and dances, before a Rural Tour of Great Britain 2011/12.

Growing Old With You (work-in-progress) - Search Party

Wednesday 18 – Friday 20 August

Growing Old With You is a life long performance project which attempts to document lived experience in real time. Starting in 2010 and for every 5 (or so) years for the rest of their lives Search Party will create a performance exploring ideas of age, duality and accumulation.

Senior Moments – Kristin Fredricksson (Beady Eye) & Robert Vesty (Box Social)

Friday 20 August

Kristin Fredricksson (Beady Eye) & Rob Vesty (Box Social) spend a week in the run-up to each Senior Moments performance during which they meet & recruit older people. They go to bingo halls, housing estates, community groups, shopping centres and Bridge clubs to enlist up to 40 participants aged 65 and over.

Introducing Forest Fringe 2010: A Year of Reflection

Image from the Forest Fringe Microfestival, by James Baster

So yes, we’re probably repeating ourselves, but it’s really been a breathless few years. The way that people have believed in and helped supported us has been incredible and propelled us to places that we never could have imagined being. Now we want to make sure we make the most of that without losing the messy, resourceful, collaborative spirit that got us all here in the first place.

We’ve met some impressively inspiring people, listened to a deal of good advice and enjoyed experimenting with some new projects, such as the Microfestivals and the Forest Fringe Travelling Sounds Library. We’ve discovered things that work and things that don’t.

We've learnt that maybe the best way of summing up what Forest Fringe does well is to say that we bring people together in ways that make the sum greater than its parts. Opportunities for co-operation and collectivity that mean that out of very little we can create the spectacular and the implausible, benefiting everyone involved. Maybe its flash-mob curating, providing exciting invitations and leaving it up to artists to decide if and when they want to be involved. Maybe it’s just about being a moveable home that people can keep coming back to.

As we’ve been doing all this talking and thinking and sharing we’ve been thinking about our home in Edinburgh and realising it’s a shame there isn’t more space for these conversations and collaborations to happen there. Edinburgh is an arts festival that has a bigger and more dizzying array of people involved than any other. Yet every possible cupboard and dungeon and bar is transformed into a venue, meaning anything other than putting on shows is crowded out. And that can be an exhausting experience, especially when all the bars and cafes are overcrowded and overpriced and your flat is a crampt bolthole 40 minutes walk away.

The thing we’ve always liked about Edinburgh is that whatever you may think its failings may be, the best possible response is to offer your own alternative. If you build it they will come, as sad-eyed baseball-loving movie star Kevin Costner once said. So we've decided to try and create our own space for reflecting and catching our breath. We wanted to see how we might build something more than just a venue for putting on shows. After all, people have often said that Forest Fringe felt more like a refuge or a home – we felt we wanted to live up to that.

Far from expanding ever outwards in some ever-accelerating tidal wave of growth, this year we’d try and take the chance to reflect on what we do and how we do it. To experiment with what else we might do. To find space in Edinburgh for things that should happen but at present don’t really seem to, all the while continuing to support artists and put on weird and brilliant shows and experiments in the way we’ve always done.

All of which is a kind of long, quite heartfelt but potentially over-earnest way of trying to explain what you’ll get to experience at Forest Fringe this year. And the way we’ve figured out of organising all of this is to give you four miniature festivals in one:

Forest Fringe 2010: Monday August 9 – Saturday August 21

A festival of thoughts, from 12pm-5pm, offering a whole range of new and exciting ways for people to gather at Forest Fringe and talk and collaborate and generally be inspired.

A festival of ideas, from 5pm till 11pm, showcasing a lovely collection of work by some great artists in the way we’ve always done in the past.

A festival of experiences, from 11pm till late, where we’ll transform our space into a series of massive late night parties full of music and art and good times.

And a festival of adventures, all over the shop, inviting you to head out into the city and explore a range of hidden off-site projects.

Lordy.

So that’s what we’re up to. In the following few days we’re going to post some more details on exactly what you’ll be able to experience and be a part of in each of these joyous fandangos. But for now we hope you appreciate us trying to explain what it is we’re up to and we definitely appreciate you taking the time to read down to the last but one sentence – good job.

These are frightening times and exciting times – let’s see what we can make of them.

Forest Opportunities

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.

Stepping over the threshold

Image via

I’m on the train, gently gliding past the back gardens of red brick houses somewhere on the outskirts of Leeds. The sun is smudge of white light in a pale evening sky. Everything outside feels very far away, an exact 1:1 scale model of the world bathed in perfect sinking sunlight.

My mistake, its York not Leeds.

We’re on our way back from the first trip to Edinburgh in preparation for the summer, now a little bit over two months away. This was a spectacularly brief 5 hour visit; a swift walk and a few sit downs in a very familiar city in unfamiliar sunshine, then back on the train again to head to Bristol. It’s left me feeling a strange mix of nostalgic and excited. Forest Fringe smells the same, it feels the same; if it had been raining it could have been last summer.

Yet it also feels pleasantly different. Not just the double-take acknowledgement of little tweaks and changes (a beautiful new bar nestled in the corner, a familiar face under a new haircut) but a different feeling. Just a little of the armour of almost defensive pluckiness seems to have dropped away. I walked into the hall and it seemed to have opened up its shoulders a bit, it was breathing a little deeper and a little slower.

I stood in the centre of the room, the light cascading in from the enormous uncurtained windows, and for possibly the first time Debbie and myself did our best to explain the full extent of the things we hope will happen in there in two months time. Epic pillow fights, furniture torn to pieces and remade as a house, audiences led singing down into the street, ketchup fuelled Westerns, all night performances, forty one-on-on shows squeezed into every corner of the room, a man dancing across the stage on his 75th birthday, funny things, achingly sad things and some things we don’t know yet and won’t know until the festival has already started. Shapes moved across the empty room, impossibly exciting, spectacularly intimidating. I imagined what I hoped to see, and wondered what I would see.

We actually are in Leeds now.

Forest Fringe will be different this year. Last year we were a dot, a single isolated point. A refuge maybe, from the rain or from the overpriced bars or the militia of purple-clad, Smirnoff-branded, flyerers or just from the unsustainably breathless busyness of, well, everything. And it was nice being a refuge; seeing familiar faces, standing at the door of the venue staring out at the damp street beyond like another country.

This year though we want to step over the threshold. To not simply ignore or avoid the rest of the city but ask how it might be different; how we might look at it differently, how we might remake the way the festival engulfs it. Because it no longer feels like we’re a dot; it feels like we’re part of something that’s growing; points connecting across the city; a new network or shared ideas and shared hopes based on something other than a joint marketing strategy.

Today we walked through the sunshine between Forest Fringe and St Stephen’s Church, the gentle stone giant of a building that until 2008 was occupied by the much-loved Aurora Nova. After a year where it sat sulky and unoccupied it is becoming the festival home of The Arches, Glasgow’s most consistently daring and exciting theatre. They have almost-impossible, stupidly brilliant plans for the festival, including staging the whole of Nic Green’s three-hour-long Trilogy every night; the festival hasn’t seen anything so daring, ambitious and genuinely radical for years.

On the meandering journey between our home and theirs we were also joined by a bunch of folk from BAC, who will once again be supporting and collaborating with Forest Fringe in a whole myriad of ways, without them there’s no way we would have been able to construct the kind of delirious, make-believe programme that we have. Together, we walked the space between these two places. We imagined what we might do in that space; the journeys, stories, adventures that might be constructed around it. We imagined other people walking it; artists, visitors, local people, together looking for something, or just collectively wandering. Already it felt like here was a fragile connection stretching across the city, one to be nurtured and enjoyed. One that can strengthen and grow with every person who walks that gap.

I felt like no one in that conversation was satisfied with a refuge. Everyone knew what they loved about the festival and what they found almost beyond parody; everyone had ideas for what else might happen there. It felt to me like this was the beginning of an attempt to try and make some of that happen, one which more and more people will hopefully become a part of.

With people like BAC and the Arches around in force, collaborating with us, sharing their thoughts and tips and ideas, I’m sure its going to be a good festival. And it’s going to be sunny. I’m sure of it. Gloriously sunny.

Vantastic

A lot of stuff arrives in Edinburgh in August. A lot.

Thousands of performers, a rainforest of flyers, all the bad weather that Scotland has been holding back in reserve especially for this occasion.

Mainly though it’s just vanload after vanload of kit. Enough garishly painted wood and plastic to make you weep. Poorly-built low budget sets, workmanlike soon-to-be-going-on-tour sets, breathtakingly complex European theatre sets, tables and chairs (like they don’t have tables and chairs in Edinburgh…), doors, microwaves, bookshelves, books, toy guns, fake guns, real guns, small glow in the dark statues of the virgin Mary – EVERYTHING has made the journey to Edinburgh.

Now generally there are about 3 options for this awkward voyage:

1)    Try and fit everything in your car. Last year at Forest we had one company turn up with a metre square piece of turf wedged in the back of their tiny hatchback, along with four performers, as many umbrellas, a projector, a watering can, a colander and a Cyndi Lauper CD.

2)    Rent a van. OH GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO MY BUDGET… DO YOU THINK WE CAN ALL SLEEP IN THIS VAN.

3)    Find someone else who has a van.

Unsurprisingly option 3 generally tends to be a favourite, but that really requires that you know enough people with the resources to have a van that you can be squeezed into.

So we were thinking. Surely there has to be another way?

All those disparate groups desperately trying haul as much as possible into the back of their dirty grey Vauxhall corsas. All those folk optimistically posting on gumtree and facebook for fellow travelers. Maybe we can help.

As part of Forest Fringe this year we’re planning on programming an entire weekend of Bristol based work. Part of the joy behind such a thing would be that hopefully all the companies coming up together for that weekend could figure out a way to share the load and hopefully save themselves some money.

So why not try and do that on some larger scale?

Here is our plan. If we can get as many people as possible to say where they are from, what they need to get to Edinburgh and when they need it there for – maybe we can all start to organise ourselves into car and van shares. Maybe we’ll even find some brilliantly benevolent people who have vans or trucks or ferries they don’t need for the summer. WE CAN BUT DREAM. And of course if there are considerably less half laden vans winding their way up the A1 towards Edinburgh then everyone benefits, really.

Forest Fringe will certainly be looking for some friends to share a van up to Edinburgh with and I’m sure many of our companies will be too. So don’t be shy – let us know.

This is just a beginning. If you think this sounds like a good idea we'll definitely find a better way of organising it.

Testing, testing... ummm... hello, is this thing on?

So, it's been a little while.

What's happened in our absence?

Bits and pieces, you know, like, THE WHOLE WORLD COLLAPSING INTO UTTER FINANCIAL DESPAIR. Probably whilst I'm writing it there's already bankers in the last tattered fragments of unwashed Armani suits forming ad-hoc gangs to scrap for tinned food on the streets of the City of London. Whole offices abandoned lying abandoned, strip lighting flickering on and off as the bulbs slowly die while a half-made pot of coffee congeals in an unwashed kitchenette. High streets of nothing but row upon row of the same closed shops, with the last Starbucks employees forming a sandbagged lookout to guard the remaining three paninis against marauding banker gangs, giddy on hunger and old tubes of Staples super glue.

It's a Brave New World, non?

I feel like I'm caught in that moment in a cartoon when Wylie E. Coyote has run straight of the edge of a cliff, his legs still cartwheeling suspended in midair, unaware still that any second now he's about to drop. People around me constantly reassure themselves that their general state of theatre-enforced pseudo-poverty mean things can't actually get that worse, I mean, surely everyone else will just come down to our level? Ha. I've read about Wiemar Germany - we'll see if things can get any worse or not.

And what of Theatre? Suddenly all that bickering over a more than generous pot of Arts Council money feels faintly flippant as I sit in a pub and watch the ebbing and flowing of amusement, camaraderie, shock and despair of a group of people who's turned up for work only to find the gates locked, with no time even to collect any important files left sitting on their computer desktops.

Of course we can tell people (rightly so) that theatre and the arts generate more money than they take in government funding, and that entertainment and enlightenment are never needed more than during the personal and social soul-searching of a recession. But that's not going to convince people who wander by a dust-collecting multi-million pound white elephant of a regional theatre on their way to try and find where the nearest Lidl is.

If anything this crisis has made me crushingly aware of how much our society is based on theatre. On a kind of glorious Munchausean dream that the performance of prosperity is enough to sustain it indefinitely. And so we instigate regeneration by building designer shops and expensive public monuments and cultural centres in old warehouses, and bankers take on ever larger loans and on top of it all Gordon Brown (as Chancellor, reaping what he would later sow without the charm of his grinning Cheshire Cat of a partner) assures us that the days of boom and bust are gone.

Whether this demonstrates that we can, like Claes Oldenburg, transform a landscape and a country with ideas alone, or whether this demonstrates that that is always doomed to failure, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe both.

Either way, it's a different Edinburgh that the festivals will land on this year and it will be interesting to see how we respond to that. Especially considering the official festival's major headline sponsor is currently setting records for the biggest ever corporate loss in UK financial history, with its former chief executive attempting to seemingly attempting to remodel himself in retirement as Scrooge McDuck, diving gleefully into a swimming pool full of gold.

The Fringe, like so much, has been carried in its ever more grotesque expansion on the shoulders of the banks that over-inflated our economy until their lungs collapsed. Like Formula 1 teams and High Street shops and Iceland, they too will suffer. It will be no surprise then if theatre turns round like a scorned lover and looks to slap these uber-banks, all the harder for trying to conceal their complicity in the excesses of the boom years.

Nothing represented the logic of the city like the Edinburgh Festival. Bigger is always better. More can always be sustained. All the while crowing about democracy for all (who can afford it).

Perhaps now that the root of that logic has imploded, sending jobs and savings splattering down glass walled offices from London's Docklands to Lothian Road, the Festival and it's new director will have to do a bit of soul searching.

Perhaps.

As for us, well, everything's early days at the moment. But the most important thing is we're trying to figure out how to do things better, without the now potentially redundant assumption that that necessarily also means bigger. So any thoughts, ideas, glorious daydreams you have do please post them in the comments or email them to us via our website.

Potentially there's no better time to demonstrate how much meaning and importance can be found in small things and cheap things.