A group of local arts practitioners gathered at the Actors Studio Bangsar on October 9, 2003 for a two-hour workshop organised by Kakiseni in collaboration with Genting City of Entertainment, and conducted by Toby Gough, the man behind Lady Salsa as the artistic director, and a participant in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with his own venue, for many years. Lady Salsa producer, John Lee was on hand as well to give the participants some extra tips on taking shows abroad. These are the highlights from the workshop …
Part 1
I don’t often get a chance to sit down and talk about the things that we’re going to discuss. I normally end up doing practical theatre workshops. And obviously, when one has to talk, one talks from one’s own experience. Everything I’m saying now just comes through the experiences that I’ve had, putting work together, and the Edinburgh Festival is a place where I’ve been presenting work since 1990. So I have been involved in the evolution of that festival to what it is today fairly heavily.
The Edinburgh Festival was set up in 1947 after WWII to unite Europe through culture. As an international festival with specifically invited guests. There were six gatecrashers in that festival, two of which are friends of mine and four other companies. The Fringe Festival started then as a group of renegade cowboys who were basically trying to ride on the coattails of the largest festival in the world. And the Fringe, since then, grew and is now the largest festival of theatre in the world.
I think this year there were 840 theatre companies giving 26,000 different theatre performances. The Fringe Festival took £17 million in four weeks. The Edinburgh Festival is an umbrella term for other festivals within it, so you have the International Film Festival, the International TV Festival, the International Jazz and Blues Festival, the International Book Festival, the International Comedy Festival, and the International Theatre Festival all within those four weeks.
Edinburgh is a massive festival. The population goes up by 450,000 people in the month of August, those who are coming to see [the festival] and most people who live in Edinburgh. There are probably about a million people who come there for the festival. The festival starts at 9am, sometimes 8am when you get “Shakespeare for Breakfast’ where you go and eat your breakfast and listen to some dreadful Shakespeare production. And it finishes probably at about the same time. So, basically it’s a 24-hour mud-wrestling fight for four weeks. We have companies vying for the audiences that are there.
It is, I think, a very good place to see works from all around the world. The Edinburgh International Festival brings over some of the world’s greatest theatre, opera and ballet companies. And the Fringe Festival itself is an open festival. Anybody can register. Any group can say “I want to come”, pay the registration fee of £250, and you get 40 words to advertise your show in the brochure which has 450,000 copies distributed for free throughout Britain and Europe. The Fringe Society has no selection. There’s no vetting. Anybody’s free to come and take part in the festival. Which is a great thing.
Since the [Edinburgh Fringe] Festival sprung up, a lot of other festivals have started. There are many fringe festivals in Australia and New Zealand, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Wellington. These are festivals that you can just go to [without being invited]. If you’ve got a show that you’d like to take a risk on, and you can book a space and basically take a risk then you can put your show on. At the end of the festival, you get a chance of shooting into orbit or complete obscurity and anonymity. The average fringe audience [in Edinburgh] is five people. I’ve been to see some shows where I’ve definitely been the only one there.
This year there were performances in lifts, on a rope, up stepladders, in somebody’s car – there was a comedian who drove people around Edinburgh doing his show in his car-. Every venue is used in Edinburgh. Other strange venues have been in graveyards, telling ghost stories – Jekyll and Hyde stories in graveyards-. Some of the Scottish plays were performed in graveyards. Basically every venue in Edinburgh is turned into a theatre.
There are established theatres that you can present your work at like the Assembly Rooms and the Pleasance Theatre. Depending on the nature of your work, certain venues are more suitable than others. For international work, there’s a new venue called St. Stephen’s Church.
The trend tor outdoor theatre was principally started by myself and a chap called Angus Farquhar about 12 or 14 years ago. We resurrected an old Celtic ritual for the coming of May on a large mountain there. We had about400 performers, one day’s rehearsal and basically celebrated the coming of May with the meeting of The Green Man and the May Queen and the death of Old King of Winter. All the performers met the day before and talked about body paint, fire and what kind of pagan rituals would be involved. And that’s something that’s happened every year since.
We took that impetus into the festival itself and created an event on a large outdoor hilltop about 12 years ago. We did an adaptation of a play in old Scots dialect at 12 midnight in the freezing cold. In Edinburgh, if you’re working outdoors, you have a different audience. Most shows in the Edinburgh Festival are inside, so putting a show on outside is something different, something original. The location is as important in the audience’s experience of the show as the script, the actor and the music. I think that’s been something that has been a feature of the work that has done very well at Edinburgh. It’s shows that have been events rather than sitting in a theatre and watching something.
Strangely, people at Edinburgh look for the weird and the wonderful and the wacky and the international and the ethnic and the absurd. One thing that you will find at Edinburgh are shows that are completely absurd, completely bizarre and these are the shows that seem to do rather well.
There was a show on this year called Birds where you had a man with a stutter, a Cockney woman from London and a bloke with a huge nose on the stage for an hour doing nothing because they were all like birds in certain ways – one sounded like a bird, the other was like a bird from London as in London Cockney and the last one looked like a bird. And that was it!
Last year, there was a show called Tiny Ninja Theatre Presents Macbeth and this was performed by inch-high little plastic characters so we’d all sit around a box for an hour and a half and watch these guys [act out a play] with these plastic characters. The bizarre shows do very well there.
Shows that have started at Edinburgh Festival – things like Stomp!, Tap Dogs and Slava Polunin’s Clown Show shows like these, once they’re successful at Edinburgh, they tour the world for years and years and years. Tap Dogs is still going now. If you can make a hit at Edinburgh, it’s a good platform to get on the international touring circuit. And what those shows do, which I don’t do, is work with a small number of people because festivals are very expensive. These are shows that have something unique about them.
NEXT WEEK: Part 2, with more anecdotes, tips and information.
First Published: 06.11.2003 on Kakiseni