Above: Between shows. Undebelly, Cowgate, Edinburgh (2019)
Through COVID lockdowns and restrictions, the 2020 Edinburgh Fringe braved on. Fringe and its satellite events hedged their futures on a virtual program of on-line shows, listings and links to virtual events. With them, Fringe sought to provide “calling card” and limited-income opportunities to performers from last year’s Fringe, and those booked initially for this year.
Above: Princess St, Edinburgh's main shopping street, (2019)
For thousands of performers from around the world, there was no Edinburgh Fringe in 2020. The largest, most productively-innovative festival of performing arts on earth had, like everything else, folded to the inevitable. COVID19 beat Fringe in an unfair fight. Yet during the Festival month of August, embers from the COVID fractured Fringe flickered intermittently through the cracks of Edinburgh’s boardered-up performance spaces. Devoid of live performers and real-life audiences, variously cobbled together virtual-presentations of uneven quality and uncertain productions values, hesitantly broadcast to a lockdown world.
Fringe's faint light still sparked off its unique recipe. It’s one that's had an outsized impact on the broader culture. Fringe is an open-access festival. It is precisely about giving a decent go to all who can get something up. No one at the centre curates the overall offering—which often shows! It means throwing everything up against the wall and seeing what sticks.
During the pandemic, in the city of Adam Smith, the invisible hand of creative evolution has been busy at work. Its sustaining solutions are already emerging, ahead of any tardy grants and subsidy programs. 2020 was the year where a speeding train completely flattened long-established business and creative models.
Promotional puffery can't rewind or paste over that reality. However, "in the absence of one route to creativity, effort and ambition will open up another," noted Fringe commentator David Pollock in The Stage (UK).
What appeared rough and uneven this year, suggests the development of a genuine on-line component for future Fringes.
The Fringe festivals of Edinburgh and Adelaide are also the world's leading wholesale trade shows for every genre of performance. They are about way more than bums on seats. It's about determining what live audiences around the world will see in the time that follows—be that New York, London or Taree. By the end of its COVID decimated season, Fringe in Edinburgh had already confirmed the long-term viability of its provisional on-line marketplace platform established to get beyond COVID. The platform introduces on-line, ready-to-tour shows to bookers, producers and festival directors around the world. This year they were stranded in distant parts. It looks like in the future, more of the business of Fringe will go on-line.
BBC Garden, Heriot's School, Edinburgh, 2019
Posters, Assembly, George Square, Edinburgh, 2019