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The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Fringe funding fear raised over 'level playing field' demand
Peter Buckley Hill wants to ensure there is a 'level playing field' for participants rather than the Fringe Society 'discriminate' in favour of a number of shows in its programme. Read more: Mr Buckley Hill is urging members of the society to ensure funding is distribute 'equally and equitably' to acts and performers in the programme, which features more than 3900 shows this month, the highest tally in the event's history. The Fringe Society, which has overseen the running of the festival since 1958, has been responsible for the distribution of more than £1m in Scottish and UK government funding for artists and companies appearing in this year's event. Ruxandra Cantir's show Pickled Republic is part of the Scottish Government-funded Made in Scotland showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. (Image: Andy Catlin) Proposals to try to secure new investment for the next few years are expected to be put forward by Fringe Society chief executive Tony Lankester, who took over the role in the spring, before the end of the year. However the Fringe Society has warned it would be 'very unlikely' to secure investment from funders unless there is strict criteria in place. Singer-songwriter Karine Polwart's Fringe show Windblown was funded by the Scottish Government this month. (Image: MIHAELA BODLOVIC) It has insisted it has always been an 'arms-length administrator' of public funding and has put 'rigorous' measures in place to ensure the society is not making 'artistic or other subjective assessments' on funding applications, including bringing in independent assessors for review panels. The Fringe Society has suggested that Buckley Hill's proposals, which are expected to be voting on at the annual general meeting of the Fringe Society, would lead to 'greater inequality' the festival. It has told members of the society that affordability was 'widely agreed to be the biggest risk of Fringe's success and accessibility, and arguably the greatest issue facing artists and venues.' Buckley Hill is widely credited with coming up with the idea of the 'Free Fringe,' a strand of the festival which allows audience free access to shows but encourages them to make a donation to the performer on the way out the venue. The motion he has put forward for the Fringe Society AGM states that 'the principle of open access' remains at the heart of the Fringe' and argues that the charity has 'no power or mandate to 'distinguish between the artistic quality of shows, or the value of venues.' Posting on social media, Buckley Hill said the distribution of grants adjudicated by 'experts' brought in by the Fringe Society was a 'violation' of the open access principle. He added: 'The custom and rule of the Edinburgh Fringe was: if you can get a venue, you can perform at the Fringe. The Fringe Office had no role in the selection of who performed and who did not. That was the venue providers' job. 'The playing field was never level: money always talks. But the principle of a Fringe is to keep the field as level as possible. You can bring your show. Once you have a venue, you're equal. Only the public can judge you. 'The Fringe Office was not put in place to discriminate in favour of one show and against another. It doesn't have the mandate, and it doesn't have the expertise. 'We all, I hope, want to see the Fringe represent all groups and classes in Scotland, the UK and the world. And perhaps these grants might have been intended to help the poorest. But that's not how they're being used. How much better it would be to make it easier and cheaper for all, across the board.' In a response published ahead of the AGM, the Fringe Society states that disbursing funds for the wider benefit of the community was 'core' to its aims and objections. The Fringe Society added: 'The Fringe Society has, both historically and currently, found itself in a position where a funder or donor has made funds available for wider disbursement, and has attached certain conditions or criteria for such disbursement. Typically this is public sector investment. 'The Fringe Society acts, in all these instances, as an impartial, arms-length administrator of the available grants. In each case it puts in place rigorous principles, signed off by the relevant funder, to ensure that the society itself is not making artistic or other subjective assessments of requests for support. 'This objective process has enabled the society to pass significant support on to the broader Fringe community in a way that is, we believe, fair and defensible. 'The Fringe Society's aim is to ensure limited funding for culture is directed to the Fringe by any means possible, and for the Fringe Society to use it's fundraising skills and capacity to support all artists and venues who take part. 'Funders would be very unlikely to support investment without criteria, and if funding was secured directly by the venue or artist, those who have greater capacity and experience in securing public investment would likely benefit more, creating greater inequality. 'The Fringe Society recognises, however, that there is also more that can be done to ensure the artists and venues who make the Fringe happen are engaged and can inform the processes and criteria, and would welcome conversations and workshops on how we ensure any influence over funding or decision making is in the best interests of the widest range of artists.' The Herald has teamed up with to make the purchase of tickets for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe so much easier. To buy tickets, please click here.
Scotsman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Festivals diary: Baby Reindeer producer on why performers should put on shows in the smallest venue possible
Industry figures gathered at Shedinburgh to hear from a panel of veteran producers Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... A panel event at Shedinburgh this week offered a raw and honest insight into producing a show at the Fringe from four of the festival's top practitioners. Chaired by Baby Reindeer and Fleabag producer Francesca Moody, the panel also included Raw Materials co-founder Gillian Garrity, Australian producer Linda Catalano and James Seabright of Seabright Live. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It was one of those industry events not specifically aimed at media (don't worry, they knew I was there, I wasn't in disguise) and it almost felt intrusive, listening to the veterans share a brutally honest account of their early experiences with the room of mainly young performers and producers. Ms Catalano admitted she had had to take out a mortgage on her house to pay for certain Fringe shows which had not performed as well as she had hoped, while Ms Moody also said she had borrowed cash from her siblings in the early days, which she had had to pay back over two years. Billed as 'How to Make a Fringe Hit', the panellists discussed pros and cons of marketing, flyering and the 'gut feeling' when choosing a new show to bring to the Fringe. One tip stood out: 'Put your show on in the smallest venue you can afford to put it on in,' said Mr Seabright, with Ms Moody stepping in to explain that a 'sell-out show', no matter how small the venue, attracts attention. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Selling out your show is probably the best way of making people come to your show,' she said. 'People are obsessed with coming to see anything that is on the sell-out board'. Modestly, Ms Catalano did not comment on this one, having, perhaps inevitably, experienced a sell-out for one of her shows, on at the Traverse, called I'm Ready to Talk Now - which has only one audience member in each performance. Perhaps the sweetest thing to come out of the event, however, was Ms Catalano's admission that the entire cast and crew of another of her shows, Little Squirt, get together for a Sunday roast together every week on their day off. 'We choose a different pub each week,' she explained. 'Each team needs something different. Some teams need there to be a day in the week where they don't see each other at all. This one needs a Sunday roast.' Pickled Republic Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Moldovan-born-now-based-in-Glasgow theatre maker Ruxy Cantir's show, Pickled Republic, has also been a sell out in her first ever run at the Fringe. I managed to scrounge a last minute ticket, pleading my love for anything Romanian and Moldovan - they essentially speak the same language, I could elaborate further if anyone was interested - and pickles. The show, part of the Made in Scotland showcase, saw Ruxy play a cabaret singing potato, a mime artist gherkin, a socially anxious onion who wanted to be a performance poet and a loving mother breastfeeding her carrot son. 'You've been fully Fringed,' said a friend when I described what I'd been to see. Autopsy Award winner Ruxy Cantir brings 'Pickled Republic' to Summerhall this August But my favourite bit was when Ruxy addressed the audience at the end, pointing to the dozen or so tomatoes she had squashed onto a table cloth in one of the final segments. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Look at our TikTok to see what we do with the tomatoes after the show,' she told everyone. 'We make them into soup!' The most wonderfully Moldovan thing I have ever heard. Other festivals are available The Fringe is so all-encompassing, it is sometimes easy to forget that there are other festivals going on around the city. The Edinburgh International Film Festival kicks off on Thursday, while the Edinburgh International Book Festival is now in full swing, with queues out the door of the signing tent for Chinese writer Liu Zhenyun when I popped by on Tuesday afternoon.
Scotsman
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
How Summerhall Arts are supporting artists like never before this festival
This year, Summerhall continues to support exceptional artists' stage work at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with the provision of five festival awards: the Autopsy Award, Meadows Award, Guimarães Rosa Institute Award, Melbourne Touring Award, and the PANNZ Award . Each award winner achieves a variety of help to undertake a run at the festival, including enhanced ticket splits, cash bursaries and removal of venue fees, as well as enhanced PR, marketing, and technical support depending on the needs of each company. The Autopsy Award, made possible by Allan Wilson, helps an artist making boundary-pushing performance work in Scotland undertake an Edinburgh Fringe run. Summerhall is proud to award this year's Autopsy Award to Glasgow-based performance maker Ruxy Cantir. She presents Pickled Republic, a surreal one-woman theatre cabaret set in a pickle jar, which uses exceptional clowning, puppetry, mask theatre, and movement to portray a plethora of characters, asking deep existential questions and offering ridiculous answers. Bathed in a brine of confident absurdity, pitch-black humour, and pulpy carnage, Pickled Republic explores the tragi-comic journeys of vegetable characters including a pickled tomato and a potato-headed lounge singer. Part of the Made in Scotland Showcase, the show toured Scotland in 2023 before selling out at Manipulate Festival 2024, Pickled Republic ferments somewhere between Eugène Ionesco absurdism and the smoky mystery of David Lynch. Pickled Republic's creator and performer Ruxy Cantir said "I'm delighted to welcome Fringe goers to the critically-acclaimed, award-winning Pickled Republic. I promise 50 minutes of vegetable insanity and real feather boas. Though it's important to say the show's not for anyone who is afraid of tomatoes." This year's Meadows Award - created to support Artists of Colour bringing work to the Fringe - goes to Edinburgh Fringe debutants :DELIRIUM: and their groundbreaking new production, live jazz and :DELIRIUM:'s signature theatrical style, MILES. Transports audiences into the creative chaos behind the making of Kind of Blue - the best-selling jazz album of all time. The UK's foremost jazz trumpet player, Jay Phelps, will play alongside actor Benjamin Akintuyosi - making his professional debut - representing Miles, together leading the audience through the creation of a masterpiece. Written and directed by :DELIRIUM: artistic director Oliver Kaderbhai and co-produced with Lauren Reed Productions, MILES. uses Davis' own autobiography as inspiration, exploring addiction, reinvention, and the cost of being black in pre-civil rights America. Making its world premiere at Summerhall this August, MILES. is a visceral journey into the soul of an artist who redefined modern music. :DELIRIUM: artist director and MILES. writer and director Oliver Kaderbhai said: "As a mixed-race theatre maker of Anglo-Indian descent, I am curious about identity - what drives people to do the things they do. We're interested in humanity under pressure. Miles was a complex man and we're going to explore how he became considered the genius we know today - how did his race, his circumstances, his upbringing impact his choices and would he have had the same success if he was a contemporary musician today?' For the first year, Summerhall Arts presents the Guimarães Rosa Institute Award, awarded to an artist from Brazil. The inaugural winner, Gaël Le Cornec, brings Amazons - a stirring one-woman exploration of Amazonian culture, colonialism and the fight for climate justice. Transporting audiences into the heart of the tropical rainforest, the real stories of generations of Amazonians are uncovered in this compelling, dark and humorous solo performance which blends live film and projections with storytelling and a capella Amazonian song extracts. Amazons follows a Brazilian woman, Gayara, as she unearths the untold history of her Amazonian ancestors, from those who watched the first Europeans lay claim to their land to the women fighting to defend the forest today. Amazons writer and performer Gaël Le Cornec said: ''Amazons' started as an investigation into my mixed identity and my mom and nana's heritage, then it branched out into the history of the Amazon, not the version I learned at school, but the one remembered by the women in my family and lived by my indigenous and black ancestors. After three Edinburgh Fringe shows looking at the stories of women and girls overlooked in history (Frida Kahlo: Viva La Vida!, Camille Claudel and The Other) I'm back almost a decade later, with my first semi-biographical show. Looking into myself (which is scary!) and the Amazonian women who lived before me.' This year's Melbourne Touring Award goes to another Edinburgh Festival Fringe debutant: Hayley Edwards, who brings her multi-award winning solo show, Shitbag, to Summerhall this August. A darkly comedic one-person play about Crohn's Disease, mania, and queer sexual exploration, Shitbag was a smash-hit at the Melbourne Fringe last year, where it sold out an extended run and won multiple accolades. Delightfully self-aware, Shitbag is a deeply funny autobiographical show exploring chronic illness, invisible disability, mental ill-health, queer sex, and self-advocacy. Acclaimed genderqueer theatremaker Hayley Edwards is passionate about raising awareness for Inflammatory Bowel Disease, its associated cancers, and other invisible lifelong conditions - particularly in young 'seemingly healthy' people - and can't wait to bring her much-praised work full of shit-puns and intimate details of sex to Edinburgh this August. Shitbag creator and performer Hayley Edwards commented: 'Creating and performing Shitbag and watching its success back home has been an overwhelming and genuinely life-changing experience. I wrote this piece (my first ever play!) about one of the most turbulent periods of my life and I hope that it can continue to entertain, empower and educate audiences about chronic illness (specifically bowel diseases) and its mental health ramifications at this year's Fringe. It's queer, it's sexy, it's painful and ultimately very very real.' Summerhall Arts' PANNZ Award - awarded to support New Zealand-based artists bringing work to Edinburgh - goes to another show making its UK premiere: relentless dance celebration of rave culture, The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave. Created by award-winning queer, Māori choreographer and dancer Oli Mathiesen, and co-choreographed by Lucy Lynch and Sharvon Mortimer, The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave is a high-energy dance celebration that condolences the spirit of a three-day party into a relentless and seamless sixty minutes. Creator, choreographer and performer Oli Mathiesen said: 'The Butterfly Who Flew Into the Rave is the come up and the come down all in one and highlights the beauty of feeling alive but all the consequences that come with it. I wanted to make something as an ode to the past 5-year marathon of losing societal morals and political structure. Our communal loss of work, time, love, sex, eating, fighting, cleaning, holidaying, sleeping, pashing, drinking, throwing up, everything, physicalised as an artifact of what we as a people have endured. And just like listening to a love song that sings to that one breakup you had, it's an acid house remix that screams f**k you to the pandemic." Also part of Summerhall Arts' renewed commitment to artist support and development, Emma Howlett - recipient of Summerhall Arts' creative residency and artistic director of acclaimed theatre company TheatreGoose - returns with her third original play at Summerhall in three years. Aethēr is a brand new show about the unknown and humanity's insatiable desire to define it. Part-science lab on the cusp of discovery, part-Victorian séance, part-unauthorised Nobel Prize ceremony, Aethēr explores faith, physics, and magic in a rich theatrical spectacle. Written by Emma Howlett in consultation with world-leading academics at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Stanford, Aethēr is a new work about the intersection of science and belief, and women who have been unrecognised for their scientific contributions. Aethēr writer and director Emma Howlett says: 'This show is our most complex, expansive, and ambitious yet, and it has been one of my most thrilling experiences to research and write. Armed with my Particle Physics textbook, many Carlo Rovelli books, and a search history bursting at the seams, AETHER attempts to plumb humanity's most elusive scientific questions for their meaning in our lives, and to crack open the mysterious and wonderful world of Physics for even the most maths-averse.' Summerhall Arts also presents its first ever co-production - SKYE: A Thriller, the playwriting debut from acclaimed producer and Sunday Times Bestselling author Ellie Keel, directed by Matthew Iliffe. Set on the Scottish island, the showexplores ghostly apparitions and family dynamics after loss, through a group of four siblings who see their father standing on a beach, five years after his death. Summerhall Arts' year-round commitment to artist support, development and wellbeing will be paramount at this year's festival. Previous Summerhall Festival Fringe initiatives will continue including; Summerhall Surgeries - a paid opportunity for artists to showcase their unfinished work to industry experts and peers; the Support the Artists Ticket Scheme which allows audiences to add a £2 levy onto their ticket purchase going directly to artists; an opt-in option for a 100% box office ticket split in favour of the artists; subsidised Lanyard Drinks for Edinburgh Festival Fringe performers and staff; and free shows for Scotland-based creatives and arts workers. Summerhall Arts has organised a 25% ticket discount - checkout code: NEWWRITING - for working class audiences to attend the proudly working class work in this year's programme: Anthem for Dissatisfaction, Chat Sh*t, Get Hit, Colours Run, Get Off, and Scott Turnbull presents… Surreally Good. Summerhall Arts Fringe Producer and Programmer, Tom Forster, commented: 'Since the inaugural Autopsy Award set up in 2012, it's remarkable to see how the diversity and number of our award strands has grown in the years since. While it does concern me that we as a venue must do so much by ourselves to address a vast array of imbalances across the Fringe landscape, to make it more accessible, I'm immensely proud of what these award strands have achieved over the years, and I hope they continue to grow. From forging new touring pathways with leading international festivals on the other side of the world; to working class theatre; to ensuring that unheard Scottish voices are platformed within the world's largest arts festival who wouldn't be able to otherwise: Summerhall Arts will always continue the work it set out within this building over a decade ago.' Summerhall Arts Chief Executive, Sam Gough, said: 'SHA' drive to support emerging artists and new writing will be at the forefront of this year's festival, with many initiatives designed to support our fragile sector. Since the incredibly successful Summerhall Surgeries launched in 2023, 70 artists have taken advantage of this paid opportunity to showcase their ideas and of the 22 companies who have taken part, 17 have seen onward national and international touring, commissions or Fringe and festival runs. 2025 will also see new initiatives aiming to support the physical and mental health of our artists and staff. SHA will be providing free morning yoga and mindfulness sessions for staff and artists, as well as access to life coaching and mentorship. The Summerhall Arts team remain dedicated to providing a safe space chock full of experimental and brilliant work. We can't wait to see you here in August.' The Summerhall Arts festival programme begins on Thursday 31st July with shows running daily until Monday 25th August. Tickets are available from 1 . Contributed Inaugural winner of the Guimarães Rosa Institute Award, Gaël Le Cornec, brings 'Amazons' to Summerhall Photo: Submitted Photo Sales 2 . Contributed Summerhall Arts PANNZ Award winning show: The Butterfly Who Flew Into A Rave Photo: Submitted Photo Sales 3 . Contributed Melbourne Touring Award winner Hayley Edwards makes her Edinburgh debut with multi-award winning solo show 'Shitbag' Photo: Submitted Photo Sales 4 . Contributed Autopsy Award winner Ruxy Cantir brings 'Pickled Republic' to Summerhall this August Photo: Submitted Photo Sales Related topics: Summerhall
