Chapter 4 - Fringe Festivals and Other Alternatives

Summary

Chapter 4 considers the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Adelaide Fringe Festival as examples of the global proliferation of 'open-access' fringe festivals, and considers these festivals as exemplary models of the neoliberal free market with all of the inequities, precarities, and exclusions such markets inevitably encompass, constituting their artists as entrepreneurs and their audiences as experience collectors. It then considers the Toronto Fringe Festival as an example of fringe festivals that have emerged with no mainstage to be alternative to that have taken on broad representational mandates that have led to modifications to the open-access model that allow them to privilege certain types of difference. In addition to the official fringe circuit this chapter also looks at fringes of fringes, counterfestivals, 'alternativos', and 'manifestivals' that have emerged with more explicitly political, intersectional, identity-politic, and social-action mandates that include privileging underrepresented populations. These have often staged generative dialogues and contestations across various kinds of difference.