Forest Fringe began in 2007 as a totally independent, not-for-profit space in the midst of the Edinburgh Festival. We sought to build a community around this space in which experimentation and adventure were cherished and supported. A space that offered artists and audiences alike a different kind of opportunity – the chance to come together collectively, contributing their time and energy to make exciting, improbable, spectacular things happen. The kind of things that none of us could have achieved individually.
In the breathless, unpredictable years since then we’ve tried to embed these values in everything we’ve done. We’ve continued to return to Edinburgh every year, each time looking to experiment with different ways of doing things and new contexts to accommodate even the most unusual experiences. Meanwhile we’ve also started exploring beyond the festival, creating new collaborative projects up and down the country and year-round events such as our Travelling Sounds Library.
In all this we try and serve as a bridge, finding imaginative ways to connect the country’s most innovative performance artists and theatremakers with new audiences, new supporters and new contexts for their work. For us Forest Fringe remains an experiment, a creative project that we hope is defined by the same kind of adventurousness and unpredictability that we so love in the artists we work with.
Andy Field and Deborah Pearson – Co-Directors
Associate Producers: Ellie Dubois, Ira Brand and Rosalie White
Forest Fringe is a member of Live Art UK, the national network of Live Art promoters.