Fringe needs you more than ever

Winnipeg Free Press

4 days ago

Opinion
There's lots to love about the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival.
For one, it's not on your phone.
Fringe is a chance to be entertained by art that isn't being blasted into your retinas by a relentless, algorithmic feed on a small screen, often while you're watching something else on a big screen.
It's a chance to reconnect with your attention span and be moved to laughter or tears, in the dark, with other people — while your phone is blissfully turned off (I hope) and tucked away.
This is the magic of live theatre.
For another, it's a chance to be exposed to art and ideas you might not see anywhere else. The theme at this year's festival is Choose Your Own Adventure and, as most frequent fringers will tell you, this festival is always an adventure, for better or worse.
But a feature which might get overlooked sometimes, despite the fact a recording reminds us before each and every show, is that 100 per cent of ticket sales go back to the performing companies.
This has always been true of the fringe, but it feels extra important in an era in which being an artist — of any kind — feels particularly crushingly hard owing to a host of new existential threats such as the casual use of ChatGPT and generative AI that not only steals designs from graphic and visual artists but now threatens to steal their livelihoods.
Or the public's over-reliance on streaming giants such as Spotify that barely pay musicians.
Or even the Manitoba government's recent decision to ask local makers and artists for free product to be included in gift bags for — and I wish I were making this up — a 'Buy Local'-themed event (!) being hosted in the province in September. ('The province has received multiple positive responses from businesses and entrepreneurs that appreciated the opportunity to showcase their work to a potentially new market,' reads an unattributed emailed statement provided to CBC by the province.)
We all love art. We all love local art. It just seems like sometimes people have an awful lot of trouble putting money where their mouth is when it comes to 'supporting artists.'
Fringe's format, then, is a welcome corrective, an easy way to tangibly, directly support artists who, by the way, still might lose money or barely break even on this festival.
It's expensive and hard to be any type of touring artist, especially in the current economic climate, and a fringe performer is no exception. Many fringe artists sell merch at their shows; at a performance I caught yesterday, one said it's so she can buy coffee on the road.
So, you might ask, why are reviewers so harsh sometimes? I still maintain, as I have argued before, that it is not a reviewer's job to make sure a performer sells tickets to their fringe show — that is the artist's job. Our job is to be fair. We all understand that this festival is a uniquely pro-am event, but we can still expect a certain level of quality.
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Luckily for everyone involved, this is subjective: I have seen polished must-sees from amateur theatre companies and hot messes from professional ones. I have also loved shows my fellow reviewers have hated, and vice versa. Life's rich pageant.
(Plus it's not as if fringe reviewers don't also have to actively convince people to support our work. People tell me all the time, to my face, that they just get their news 'online.')
Art is a labour of love, to be sure — but it's still labour. It deserves to be recognized, supported and compensated as such, not through 'exposure' or the promise of opportunities that never come.
Otherwise, all our art will be fed to us via an algorithm on a screen and, without artists, won't look much like art at all.
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Jen ZorattiColumnist
Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.
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