Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Fringe’s origins and my experience
I have spent a whole week without even opening Medium. It’s the longest I have been this year without reading or writing articles on this platform. Why? Because I made the ten-hour pilgrimage to take part in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival of 2024.
For those of you who don’t know what it is, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is (according to its website) ‘one of the greatest celebrations of arts and culture on the planet’.
Essentially, for three weeks of the year artists and performers swarm the city. When they are not performing at one of the (literally) hundreds of performance venues, they are handing out flyers and posters for their next show or watching someone else. Venues vary from traditional stages, concert halls and lecture theatres to outdoor stages, bars, parks, basements, churches, shipping containers, yurts and more.
The reason for this variety is two-fold: first, it is the only practical way to stage so many artists, and second, it links back to the origins of the Fringe. In 1947 eight theatre groups came to the Edinburgh International Festival to perform. Only, these groups had not been invited and did not have venues. Instead, they set up their shows on the fringes of the Edinburgh International Festival, hence the name ‘Fringe’ for the resulting festival. Not…
