Today was our final day of media visits. Our first visit was at the French Embassy where we met Oliver Davies, who was the head of marketing and development at the Fringe Festival Society. Edinburgh’s festival fringe is the world’s largest arts festival. It dates all the way back to 1947. It was started with the hope to bring color and life back to a war-ravaged Europe through art and performance.
During the 1947 International Festival of Music and Drama, people showed up uninvited and when they found that they couldn’t perform, they decided to create their own festival on the fringe of the current one (Tanacon, anyone?). That’s how the Edinburgh Fringe Festival began. It takes place every summer and has only grown bigger and richer over the past seventy-two years. The Fringe is founded on the idea that anyone and everyone is welcome, so basically, everything goes (within reason, of course). If you have a story and a venue to host you, the fringe stage is yours. The festival is a huge marketplace and has inspired more than 250 fringe festivals around other parts of the world. The Fringe offers freedom of expression. People often attend to see something they’ve never seen before.
The Fringe Society, where Oliver works, is a charity established in the 1950s by artists and for artists in order to support artists, assist audiences, and promote the fringe. One of the biggest jobs that the fringe society has is making sure that the festival is inclusive of everybody to the best of their abilities. They want to hold on to the festival’s roots and ensure that everyone has a voice here.
Over the course of the past few years, the fringe society made practical changes and has worked extremely hard to make the festival accessible for everyone, including those with physical or mental handicaps. I find all of this extremely interesting and heartwarming, especially that they accommodate to those with special needs to the best of their ability. I think their mission is really beautiful and I hope that I can attend in the coming years.