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.

This chapter focuses on the UK’s biggest and most influential festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (EFF), analyzing its benefits and risks. It considers some of the EFF’s advantages: the opportunities for artists to do a three-week run, to build relationships with other artists, and take part in an international hothouse for seeing work, learning, and developing. The chapter also considers the EFF’s pernicious effects: its unregulated labour conditions; environmental impact; lack of integration into Edinburgh’s year-round performance culture; economic and cultural exclusiveness; competitive individualization of success and failure; and pressures on mental health. It ends by proposing ways the EFF and its emulators could improve their social impact by investing in infrastructure, Edinburgh’s performance culture, and performance makers; actively supporting artists’ mental health; offering structural mentoring support; introducing regulations that protect workers; actively supporting more diverse makers, critics and audiences; and advocating for collaboration over competition. The chapter advocates for a vision of the fringe as, not a neo-liberal capitalist market, but a civic sphere.