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.

Peter Brook Empty Space Award

Some delightful news for the beginning of maybe the year's most depressing month (it's cold, it's not Christmas and the only thing to celebrate is the ineptitude of some 400 year old Catholics) - today Forest Fringe became the 20th winners of the Peter Brook Empty Space Award.

It was genuinely a total surprise considering the inspiring companies shortlisted - BAC, Soho, The Arches, the Bush and the Minerva. I also got to shake Peter Brook's old man hand. WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT FROM A DAY?

At the ceremony, Dominic Cavendish of the Telegraph had some lovely things to say about us so I thought I'd post them here for you all to have a read:

Who knows how this decade will come to be written about in the years ahead? It may well be viewed as a wretched one but perhaps it might be seen as positively halcyon compared to what will follow. One thing's for sure - it started with anxiety about a tech-driven financial bust that proved unfounded and ended with the real deal, the kind of recession that carves itself into people's lives for a long time. In the end, the big theme wasn't war or the clash of civilisations but the one that's never really been out of currency - money.

Money was the making of theatre this decade - there was a lot more of it to prop up the subsidised sector, and even if you couldn't exactly point to a golden time in the West End in terms of art, it was certainly a gilded one. Yet now that the whole house of cards has fallen down, it's probably time for theatre-makers further down the chain, who are most exposed to the vagaries of the economic climate, to say that if they're being forced to beg, borrow or even steal to survive, then 'twas ever thus - because so-called boom years had their downside, too, in keeping costs high, and curtailing unprofitable experimentation.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Edinburgh Fringe where spiralling rental charges have conspired to restrict the affordability of a festival that is supposed to be the greatest artistic free-for-all on earth. I've seen at first hand how deranged the economics of bringing up just a relatively straightforward monologue are, even during a downturn; the risks of working on a more ambitious scale seem to grow by the year.

Which is where one has to salute with all the force of a Tattoo gun at midnight the efforts of the team behind Forest Fringe, which has in the space of a few years become an essential fixture at Edinburgh without actually joining itself to the Fringe as such. In its adopted church hall venue at Bristo Place, it operates not merely, prosaically, as a festival within a festival - but as a sort of other world, a boundary-pushing playground where, thanks to multiple volunteer efforts it's not the money that counts at all, but the stuff that happens between performers and their makeshift surroundings and between performers and curious visitors. If I could have wished away the hundreds of other chores that descend on a journalist while covering the festival, I'd have happily hung out at Forest Fringe for the entirety of its duration.

It seems to me that in its back-to-basics approach, it is totally forward-thinking - and potentially revolutionary in scope. Whatever the next decade holds, the seeds of the next wave of theatre - and probably even of our recover itself, lie in the expansive, inexpensive miracle that is Forest Fringe.

Thanks to everyone, artists, audiences, supporters in all their various guises, who have been a part of Forest Fringe. All of you have been totally integral to getting us to the point when such flattering things can be said about us and where we can win such long-standing and well-regarded awards.

The £2000 that is the prize for this award will go a long way to realising some of the plans we have for next year - audio libraries, microfestivals rearing up across the country and of course once again looking to re-imagine and remake our place within the Edinburgh Festival season. But more on all of that very soon...!