If you placed all the flyers in Edinburgh during August end to end, they’d stretch from here to the moon and back. That’s not a fact but it could be true. It’s also not true that there are more flyers in Edinburgh during August than there are millimetres of rain. There are, however, a hell of a lot of flyers.

The life of a flyer is short as a mayfly. It is thrust into ambivalent hands, has momentary purpose as it is given a cursory glance, and then it is discarded. It’s a sad way to be.

We thought we’d give those unwanted flyers a new life. So we’ve created THE PAPER DISCO, a night of partying and good times based entirely around unwanted flyers. We’ll have origami lessons, an epic paper aeroplane tournament, Neil and Steve’s Flyerface, Flyer Blurb Bingo, Festival Roulette and a costume-making table to create a spectacular gown of flyers. Plus dancing. There will also be dancing.

Come down from 11pm on Wednesday 17 August and bring as many flyers as you can find. It will almost definitely be the most fun you could have with an unwanted Edinburgh flyer.

THE PAPER DISCO
Forest Fringe
17 August, 11pm
FREE

[A message from the good people at STK International]

To celebrate the passing of the Forest Café as home of the Forest Fringe, Stoke Newington International Airport return to the Forest Fringe, for one night only on Friday 26th August at 11pm, with Live Art Speed Date.
We are looking for artists and performers to take part in this micro festival of intimate performance and give the Forest Café and FF the farewell it deserves.

Live Art Speed Date is an exploration and celebration of intimate exchange between Artist and audience. A diverse selection of innovative performance artists, theatre makers, musicians and comedians are chosen to create and present a four minute one-on-one performance or “date”. The audience make their own journey through the dates, with opportunities to interact with each other and walkabout artists. This carefully curated event explores public and private behaviours creating a vibrant fairground of fragmented experiences, pushing the notion of interactive performance and audience/performer collaboration.

Live Art Speed Date presents a wonderful opportunity for you as an artist or performer to try out new ideas or put yourself in a new situation, reach new audiences and build new relationships with other artists and promoters. Participants from previous LASD have developed the ideas tested at the event in to full works.
Live Art Speed Date crystallizes a movement in contemporary British performance – a free-wheeling, wide ranging bashing down of boundaries between forms and practices, a celebration of us all as both artists and audience. Tim Crouch

How to take part

We are looking for artists to create a four minute performance for an audience of one.

This ‘date’ will be repeated 16 times over a 2 hour period. The date can take place in one of our booths, at a table or any other space at forest café that you are interested in inhabiting. If your not going to be at the festival you can propose to date remotely via mobile phone, printed text, instruction of some sort or any digital variant.

If you would like to take part in LASD please send us a description of your idea, no longer than 100 words. Please consider the four minute duration of the piece carefully, the mood you are hoping to create and how your audience member will enter and leave the space.

Detail whether you need a booth or a table and describe briefly how your space will look listing any technical requirements. Booths are typically 1.5mx1.2m and come with a chair, electrical supply and table lamp.

We are also interested in hearing from you if you have an idea for an auto-date or any other activity that audience can take part in while they aren’t dating.

Deadline for Submissions

Send your proposal and one image relating to it or of previous work to info@stkinternational.co.uk by Midnight August 15th 2011.

Once you have been selected to take part there will be the opportunity to workshop your idea with us at our base in Edinburgh or London in order to develop it fully to meet the needs of the event.

For information on past LASD please visit http://www.stkinternational.co.uk/STK/LASD.html

Thanks for supporting us, and if you know anyone who might like to contribute to Live Art Speed Dating please pass this on to them.

Nick ,Greg, Gary, & Zekan.
www.stkinternational.co.uk

This year at Forest Fringe Gemma and James from Action Hero are working with holistic massage therapist Blue Hesse at The Forest Café’s Sip n Snip Salon to bring Art Massages to the people of Edinburgh, as part of our Jerwood Curatorial Bursaries project.

There’s some information below from Gemma and James about how the project is going to work and, more importantly, how you can get involved.

The idea is that participants sit for a 10 minute oil massage whilst listening to a podcast of an artist talking about/on/around their art. A nice little refuge away from the crowds. Time to meditate on what we’re doing and why we do it.

We’re looking for 10 minute long audio of you talking about ideas you’re interested in at the moment, or things that are inspiring you. This is totally open to interpretation, but the masseuse has asked that we don’t present anything too emotional as it will affect the massage. Just a chat about your inspirations in a relaxed way, a personal account of why and what you do or what you’re thinking about at the moment. It could be a piece of work in itself or some more philosophical thoughts about your art. We’re most interested in participants just being able to hear something interesting, calm and soothing as an antidote to the festival rather than a pitch promoting your work! Your name or the name of your company will be listed on a menu for the participant to choose from so don’t feel like you need to say who you are but you can if you like! If you want us to include a website or something on the menu then just let us know.

Send your audio files (any format is fine, all recordings need to be as close to 10 mins as possible) to info[at]actionhero.org.uk by the 31st July. You can try and use http://www.senduit.com (or a similar thing) if the file is too big.

We’ll try to use as many of the podcasts as possible, and will let you know if we’re using yours or not.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Every year Forest Fringe is made possible by an incredible team of volunteers who work alongside Debbie, myself and the artists to make the festival happen. It’s always brilliant having so many interested and committed people round the building and the fact that so many have come back year on year is a testament to how much you can get out of it. This man, for example, claims volunteering at Forest Fringe changed his life, genuinely. Strange man.

Anyway, we are now looking for people who might be interested in becoming part of the community of artists and volunteers that will make Forest Fringe happen this year. You can find all the information you need by downloading the call out below. We’d love to have you involved and can hopefully guarantee it’ll be a fascinating experience – lots to see, lots to do, lots to inspire. We hope to see you there.

Download our call for volunteers

This is also the point when we have to admit that there’s a whole world of theatre out there that’s going to be happening. So we thought we’d perhaps try and help steer you through some of it by offering up a few of the things that we’re excited about.

Blast Theory – A Machine to See With
St George’s West
24 – 28 August

Blast Theory are a truly remarkable and brilliant company, creating a range of projects that wrap themselves around and through the way that we perceive the world in ways that are daring, innovative and beautifully realised. I’ve been looking forward to seeing this piece since they started working on it. Definitely not one to be missed.

The TEAM – Mission Drift
Traverse Theatre
3 – 14 August

The TEAM are one of my favourite theatre companies in the world. Their work is thick with ideas and humour and moments of agonising beauty. This project has been years in the making and one of the very, very first experiments in preparation for it happened at Forest Fringe back in 2008. It’s still one of my favourite things that we’ve ever done.

Dance Marathon – Bluemouth Inc.
Traverse @ Lyceum Rehearsal Room
3 – 14 August

I know nothing about this other than what I’ve read on the Traverse’s website but it sounds beguilingly strange and kind of brilliant – a durational, participatory dance project with a striking political resonance. Plus Forest Fringe loves Toronto so it’s definitely worth a look.

Greg McLaren – Doris Day Can Fuck Off
Zoo Southside
5 – 29 August

They made Greg asterix out the fuck in the fringe programme. We never made Greg asterix out his fuck. We did a couple of nights of work-in-progress of this piece last year and I absolutely love it. Utterly heartbreaking, intensely intelligent and totally baffling. It’s truly unlike anything you’ll ever see.

Thom Tuck – Thom Tuck Goes Straight to DVD
Pleasance Dome
3 – 29 August

So you’re in Edinburgh, it’s almost obligatory that you go and see some comedy. If you’re going to do so you should go and see this. It’s about a man with not a lot more to his name than a disconcertingly large collection of straight to DVD Disney Films and a series of shattered relationships. It will be funny.

So that’s probably enough for now. There will be more recommendations as the festival gets closer and OBVIOUSLY YOU’LL ALL ALREADY BE BLOCKING OUT LARGE CHUNKS OF EVERY DAY TO BE AT FOREST FRINGE. More information on what you’ll be able to see there coming very soon indeed. Follow us on twitter to keep as up-to-date as you can.

Though it seems almost too obvious to say, these are tumultuous times we’re living in. Certainly the most tumultuous that we at Forest Fringe have known in our short lifetimes. Events happening across the world and our government’s brutally utilitarian approach to the arts back home are challenging us to think about what we do and why we do it. Even closer to home, the Forest Café’s ongoing battle to save the building we share each August has also challenged us to think about the value and future of Forest Fringe as part of the Edinburgh Festival each summer.

As we’ve said before, we believe that this is a time at which more than ever we should acknowledge that everything we do has a political dimension; the shows we choose to make, the way we choose to make them and indeed how the festival itself supports that work. For a while we’ve been thinking about ways in which Forest Fringe can better embody the collaborative ideals we believe in.

To that end this year we’re changing the way Forest Fringe is run. We’ve chosen a small group of artists whose work inspires us and excites us; work that we believe is doing difficult and important things. Each of those artists is being offered the chance not just to show their work at Forest but to collaborate with us to make the festival happen.

After an exhausting and difficult process we’ve finally settled on the group of artists we will be working with this year. We’ve spoken to a range of incredible companies almost all of whom would have been wonderful to collaborate with on this summer’s festival. In the end, however, these are the artists we’ll be working with this year:

• Bristol-based duo Action Hero
• Brilliant social gaming organisation Hide&Seek collaborating with performance poet Ross Sutherland
• Sharon Smith (Gob Squad) and Tom Parkinson
• Innovative young company non zero one
• Bristol/Cambridge-based dancer Dan Canham
• Glasgow’s award-winning writer/performer Gary McNair
• Performance artist Tania El Khoury
• Artist, performer and activist Lucy Ellinson

Some of these artists we’ve worked with a lot before, others are totally new to Forest Fringe. We hope they represent a fascinatingly diverse range of backgrounds and perspectives that can be brought to bear on putting this summer’s festival together.

Each will present one headline piece that will run across the the festival. This daring and imaginative range of work incorporates dance, theatre, poetry, a performance lecture, a daredevil stunt and a pervasive game played out on the streets of the city.

Alongside this, these artists will have the opportunity to create their own events at part of the Forest Fringe programme – to host workshops and residencies, curate performance nights and explore new ideas and new collaborations of their own. We will work with them over the next few months to help plan this range of possible work, all of which will be announced later in the spring. We hope they will provide audiences across the festival with an extraordinary range of projects to explore, and an unprecedented number of ways to engage with these exciting Forest Fringe artists.

Additionally, these artists will also be integral to the running of Forest Fringe. They will work with ourselves and the Forest café look after the venue and manage the festival. In every sense we hope that this year Forest Fringe will be a genuinely collective festival – created, curated and overseen by this incredibly exciting range of artists.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Forest Fringe did not apply to be part of the National Portfolio. This was in part because the majority of our work takes place in Scotland at Edinburgh Festival and despite many Microfestivals and other adventures in England, we’d like the Festival to remain our focus. It’s what we know and what people know us for. Equally significant, however, was the sense that Forest Fringe could fulfill a different role than those vital regularly funded organisations. We felt that by existing outside of the pressure and unpredictability of conventional subsidised models – by remaining an artist-led community sustained primarily by people’s belief in the value of that community and their commitment to it – we could achieve more, benefit more artists, reach larger audiences and speak more eloquently for the importance of art on our own terms; as an expression of political will, as a means of collective re-organisation and as a different way of encountering the world.

Forest Fringe has worked very well as a complement to more conventionally funded organisations and at this time more than ever we believe we will need to continue to do so. We’ll see you up in Edinburgh, where we can gather to talk and to think. Where we can collaborate, not out of resourceful economic expediency, but because working together is going to be one of the more powerful ways to resist the brutal utilitarianism and insidious social engineering of our present joke of a government.

UPDATE: As you can imagine, this response was written in a furious hurry earlier today. It’s now been edited to correct a few grammatical errors and to clarify a few significant points.

We wanted to create an event that gave everyone a voice as part of that conference, regardless of where you are or what you do. An opportunity to approach the whole idea of a conference from a different perspective and in the process help answer a set of what we think are timely and important questions about the state of the arts today.

Out of this was born what we’ve called a ‘Flash Conference’ – an imaginative new project designed to create brief but electrifying bursts of thinking and conversation amidst the main State of the Arts programme. Harnessing the spontaneity and collective energy of a flash mob, we hope to bring people together to create a flood of brief but provocative responses to the following questions.

How can art of all kinds play a more meaningful role in mass protest and popular resistance?

What makes a good home for art (and for artists), and how can we ensure there are more of them?

In an environment in which success is too often only measured by perpetual growth, how do we ensure that small remains beautiful?

(How) Can art make more people’s lives better?

From now until the conference begins on Thursday morning we want to gather as many responses to these questions as possible, from people across the country and beyond. These responses can take the form of a blog, or a tweet, a video or an audio file, or even just a link to something appropriate. You can follow and contribute to this gathering of ideas, either on twitter by using the hashtag #SOTAflash or by going to our website (www.flashconference.co.uk) where you can easily upload your own material or look through what’s already been posted.

During the conference delegates will be able to look through all these responses, to see what people are saying beyond the conference walls. We’ll also have a series of moments during the day when we present these thoughts live in the room, alongside a number of brief, pre-prepared speeches by a range of interesting invited speakers. These bursts will be filmed and uploaded on the day so people can continue to follow the Flash Conference as it develops, from wherever they are.

The hope is that through encouraging this dynamic gathering of ideas, blogs, tweets, statements, dreams, manifestos, miniature speeches and provocations, collectively we can spark a diverse range of thoughts and conversations, both in within the conference and beyond it.

We’d love any and all of you to get involved in whatever way you can. I look forward to hearing what you have to say!

All the best,

Andy

The Flash Conference was conceived by Andy Field, Hannah Nicklin and Laura McDermott in association with Arts Council England and the RSA.

Devoted & Disgruntled is an annual event for people who are in angry love with theatre. As I write this, dozens of theatre’s pissed off lovers are gathered together in Bethnal Green, employing Open Space Technology to discuss the past, present and future of theatre, now in the context of the UK government’s huge and terrifying cuts — cuts not just to the arts, but scissor-slices through the fabric of our welfare state. As Phelim McDermott, the event’s facilitator, has it: “There has never seemed a more urgent & pressing need for this invitation to go out.”

II

For people at the Open Space, ForestFringe, the free, experimental and radical performance space at the August Edinburgh Festivals, has questions:

ForestFringe: Questions for people at #DandD6 – 1) (how) should we politicise the Edinburgh festival, beyond simply putting on limply ‘political’ shows?

HarryGiles: @forestfringe Politicise Edfringe? Expose the way it runs on armies of exploited volunteer labour, undermining local venues and jobmarket.

ForestFringe: Questions for people at #DandD6 – 2) How can a festival not just imagine but start to enact new models for how we live our lives?

HarryGiles: @forestfringe Reimagining life, art & festival begins with seizing means of artistic production, now exploited by major venues for profit.

ForestFringe:@HarryGiles Thanks Harry. Really mighty stuff. Do you want to put those thoughts into a blog and we’ll post it on the Forest Fringe website?

HarryGiles: @forestfringe I’d love to, thanks! Good excuse to get something longer and concrete down. Could send you something early next week?

III

The Edinburgh Festival — which is more than a dozen different festivals sprawling across the city and out of August — is the biggest cultural event in the world. This stuff bears recapping. The Fringe alone, as the event most people most commonly identify with the festivals, brings out a new series of ever-more staggering statistics each year. Across the performing arts, the Festival performs a huge range of functions: a showcase of your best, a bid to get spotted, a celebration of what we make and love, a laboratory of ideas, a party. It defines something about what the performing arts are, and who performers are. How we continue to create and experience the Festival is terribly important.

For many young theatre-makers, performing at the Fringe is a regular ritual: we build shows to take there, we bring past successes there, we go there to see the best of what others are making. For many this whole experience is exhilarating, but for many it’s utterly demoralising. If you’re lucky, your show might make a bit of money, you might see some good theatre and meet some interesting people, and all your dedication might pay off artistically. If you’re unlucky, you might sink a huge amount of time and money into a piece that very few people see, that goes unnoticed by most reviewers, and which leaves you feeling drained and depressed. I write this — not for the first time, nor am I of course the first to talk about this — just to give a sense of what the Fringe feels like to performers.

Then there’s what the Fringe feels like to people who live in Edinburgh: like the world is having a party in your house. Some folk feel lucky to have such an exciting party in their home; many feel resentful that they weren’t asked if they wanted to play host, and have to be the people who serve the guests and clean up the mess afterwards, despite not being able to afford (or just not being interested) in the entertainment on offer. Again, there’s nothing new in what I’m saying here, but it’s important to get a sense of where these thoughts begin, of where I’m standing when I speak.

The festival is determined by these cultural dynamics, but it is also determined by economics: the means by which performance is produced. That’s what these early ideas are focussing on: I stand in this cultural system of desires and expectations, and I’m talking about the political economy of the Festival.

IV

Here’s the core idea in the Forest Fringe’s question: if the Festival should be politicised, then that politicisation requires not reform (a part played here by shows with political themes but without politicised means of production), but revolution, which is to say, by overturning, by radically changing the means of artistic production. That in this crucial political-artistic moment (“crucial” comes from “crux”, as in “cross”, as in “crossroads”), a political Festival would be a Festival which reimagines not just what theatre we make, but how we make it, which overturns not just what we’re talking about, but what our intentions are in speaking.

V

Here’s the crudest nutshell of Marx on how capital works: if you own the means of production (as in, the physical way something is produced, like a factory, or a press, or a theatre), then you can rig it so that the cost of the labour you put into that means of production is less than the value of the goods you get out of it, making a profit. Those who don’t own means of production are required to sell their labour cheaply to those who do: if you have capital, you are able to exploit those who don’t (as in, pay in less than they’re worth) — indeed, the logic of capitalism requires that you do so. At the same time, those who labour are alienated from their labour: they have sold it as best they can, have been separated from its function and value by their cut-price wage.

Much of the Festival works on these principles. Some people own the means of production — access to venues, equipment, marketing sources, &c. Other people rent those means of production in order to produce a show — and of course the owners of the means of production charge more for that rent than the cost of running the means. And still others sell their labour to the owners. This is a relatively uncontroversial description of the business of the Festival.

The more capital you have, the more capital you can and must make. The bigger your venue empire, the more efficiently you can wring money out of the people using your venues and the bigger still your empire can become. Moreover, you start benefiting from economies of scale — the way buying lots of a thing makes the cost of the thing cheaper than buying only a little of a thing — so that you have easier access to better marketing, better equipment. That means more audiences come to your venues, and more of the renters — the people putting on shows — want to use your venues. The short story: the big venues at the Festival, the ones whose logos you see everywhere, are expanding every year.

VI

What about market economics? The crudest nutshell of Adam Smith: in a free market system, where prices are not controlled by an authority, the fluctuations in what people are willing to buy and sell for will naturally drive more efficient and innovative production. And we get laws like supply and demand: if there’s lots of a thing and not many people want it, it’ll be cheap, but if a thing is rare and lots of people want it, it’ll be expensive.

Lots of people want a venue at the Festival, so venues get more and more expensive to rent. The more people running shows pay in rent, the more money they need to make to break even, so ticket prices start going up and up. Loads of people want to work at the Festival, because it’s good experience for people wanting to work in the arts, but there aren’t that many jobs, so the value of those jobs goes way, way down. That means that in many of the big venues, people are selling their labour for the lowest of low costs: “experience”, a bed, and free tickets. When there is a wage, it’ll be the minimum. This is so grossly like 19th century factory economics that it hurts: such a venue is a performance-factory where the bosses own the labourers’ houses and pay them in tokens only redeemable at the bosses’ own shops. I would not be surprised if in coming years the big venues started charging for their employees’ accommodation.

Say you want to try doing this a different way: you’re going to run a small, independent venue at the Festival, and you want to charge decent prices to the people using it, with affordable ticket prices for greater accessibility, and you want to pay your workers a living wage. Fairly admirable, but the problem is, the markets for your running costs have been fixed by the big venues: the costs of marketing, equipment, accommodation, Fringe membership and so on have all gone up. So you’re going to find it pretty hard to do.

Say you’re a locally-owned venue that’s part of Edinburgh’s year-round arts scene. The Festival ought to be your milking station — so many golden geese audiences! But again those costs impinge, and all that cheap labour floating around starts to look tempting. (In a national labour market, immigrants are often the cheapest workers, because they need that work more and are willing to sell their labour for less; the same is true of the Festival labour market, except that the immigrants are more often University-educated middle-class white young people who want a job in the arts. They may not look like it, but they’re as much seasonal labour migrants as Mexican cotton-pickers.) What are you going to do to compete with the big venues who arrive in town just before the Festival begins and leave right after it’s over?

VII

Revolutionary political economy tries to think of other ways society could function than this untrammelled libertarian marketplace. I’m not going to get into the huge debates here, but I am going to sketch out some of the possibilities and how they relate to the Festival, using theatre as an example. There’s state socialism, where a government, democratically controlled or otherwise, runs all the theatres for the benefit of employees and audiences. There’s anarcho-syndicalism, where freely organising voluntary associations, strongly encouraged by social pressures, build and run free theatres and shows for the benefit of all, with or without a monetary system. There’s benevolent feudalism or philanthro-capitalism, where individual beneficient dictators own and run the theatres out of their own pockets and to their own principles. There’s liberal charity, where those with time and privilege to give organise theatre for those without. And there’s liberal democracy, where we all pretend that our rare rituals of voting have any influence whatsoever over the behaviour of the elected “representatives” who make pragmatic decisions about how theatre is run determined by whichever way the political and financial wind is blowing.

Forest Fringe asked, in brackets, whether the Festival should be politicised. Of course, it already is: the decisions we make when putting on shows, buying tickets and working for venues tacitly and vocally support the economic and political structures of those venues and that Festival. To imagine that there is no other alternative is to be dull-minded; to imagine there is no better alternative is to fail utterly.

At the moment, Forest Fringe itself represents one of those radical alternatives: it’s somewhere between anarcho-syndicalism and liberal charity, with a mission of providing a free, experimental space. But that means it also relies on volunteer labour, audience donations and occasional sponsorship (state or otherwise) to do what it does, and it doesn’t currently appear to be run on any democratic principles. Other alternatives like the PBH and Laughing Horse Free Fringes are even more basic LCD alternatives: everything is voluntary, including whether audiences pay you anything. Then there’s less radical (but also less tentative/exploitative) alternatives, like the work done at professional theatres, such as the Traverse, where we at least know that some folk might be getting paid, or the Five Pound Fringe, which is working for audience accessibility.

My point is not to slam any of these models — I admire the work of many of these organisations — but to point out that all of these models of Festival work have a political economy, and the decisions we make here matter profoundly for life, work and art. My point is that we’ve got to start thinking seriously about this.

VIII

How much should artists be paid? Should audiences have a say over what art gets produced, at what cost, and for what wages? Should performers own their company equally and have democratic control over it? Is the theatre co-operative a radical and appropriate business model? Is any of this economically viable? Should we legislate over wages and costs? Should we unionise? Should we encourage audience boycotts? Should we hand out flyers saying what workers get paid? Should we make a show out of what people are paying and getting paid? Should we be making a performance out of things?

Let’s talk demographics, or rather, let’s look at them and listen to them. What colour are the skins in the Festivals’ audiences? What accents and languages do they speak with? What proportion of their income are they spending to be here? What time is your show on? Who is coming to your show? Who do you want to come, and why, and how do you get them there? Who are you speaking to, for and about? Have you given them a say in what you’re doing and how you’re doing it? Do you know any of the answers to these questions? Does anyone?

The answers to these questions matter so much to the Festival because it is a celebration of who we are and what we do, and if we cannot model what we want to be then, then we never can.

IX

Edinburgh is a city, not a month; it is a home, not a hotel. If you do not live here, and you are at the Festival, then you are a guest here. Behave accordingly.

What I mean is, you’re bringing a show to Edinburgh, not just to the Festival. There is a year-round arts scene here which you might want to find out about, engage with, and give something back to. There are people living here who might want to be involved in the Festival somehow, but you’re too busy marketing to tourists: you don’t think about how to find them, let alone make your show accessible and affordable to them, let along encourage them

What I mean is, you’ve come here to be in Edinburgh, not just to see the Festival. You’re churning up the lawns you walk on, you’re keeping the neighbours awake, you’re making folk’s journey to work pretty unbearable, you’re making it so they don’t have space in their local, you’re clogging the streets, you’re trashing the place. Sure, we’re milking you for every penny you’ve got, but that’s just to make sure this whole affair is worth it.

We do have an obligation to be good hosts as much as you have an obligation to be good guests. Our relationship to you is pretty dysfunctional, and I’m not sure either of us is doing our job properly. Let’s make a new start.

“Radical” comes from “root”; “political” comes from “city”. It is a bad pun, but if your Festival is going to be radically political, then it better be rooted in this city, and there’s no use making a show on political themes if you’re ignoring the loaded political question of why you’re doing it here in the first place.

X

Here’s another unregulated libertarian marketplace: the Royal Mile, where throughout August everyone with a show to hawk will gather to sell their wares. This is the most medieval place I’ve ever visited, complete with jesters, fire-eaters, pickpockets and charlatans. If you haven’t ever seen it, imagine a crowd as tight as a mosh-pit shuffling and stumbling past hundreds of hopeful young things handing out flyers, twofers, freebies — wearing bright costumes, or gothic make-up, or camply statuing, or doing something that’s supposed to be shocking, or swishing kilts — and sometimes a well-funded parade might pass — and street performers make their stages and point guilt-trippingly at the cash-hat — and it’s wonderful and awful.

This is the best part of the dispiriting rammy that is advertising at the Edinburgh Festival. You’re expected to be here every daylight hour that you’re not performing. Every vertical surface in EH1, inside and out, is plastered with posters; sponsored recycling bins are liberally distributed to cope with the piles and piles of flyers. You’ve got to shell out a bundle to get in the Fringe programme, and then there’s the programmes of your venues and mini-fests. There’s the promotions at the sheds of Princess Street. There’s the stages where you can perform snippets. There’s all the reviewers from papers and news-sheets and blogs and websites. Everyone at the Festival is trying to do something different to everybody else (the market breeds innovation), trying to do the best advertising for the least money (the market breeds efficiently). Most of them with fail.

But this is not a level playing field. Again the big venues distort the market: they’re able to put up more posters and bigger posters in more places, and pay folk a pittance (or nothing) to go out every day to stick up new posters on top of all the others that have cropped up that day. The more money you have behind you, the bigger an advert you can buy in the Fringe programme, the more pay-only poster boards you can get yourself on. The more money you have, the easier it is to get reviewers into your show. It’s obvious: if you’ve got money, it’s easier to bring audiences in to give you more; if you haven’t got money, it’s hard to get on that ladder.

The mechanisms of the marketplace are supposed to be driven by the decisions consumers make, but in the marketplace of advertising it’s easy to win a semiotic monopoly — to dominate the world of signs that potential audiences are negotiating, to gain greater control over the choices audiences make, to own the means of meaning production. There’s no such thing as a free judgement in the Festival marketplace.

Festival advertising is a barely regulated market, and the result is possibly the least effective method of matchmaking between audiences and shows. You have to be very savvy to find what you’re looking for, and you have to be very lucky to find something surprising. Most of us just follow big name reviewers, or directors/writers/venues/companies/performers we trust, or go to whatever’s free, or stick with plays and comedians we already know. Maybe we’ll risk one or two chancers, and then go home disappointed. This is terrible for art, for politics, and for life. We have to be able to do better.

XI

The only surfaces from which posters and flyers are assiduously removed are the surfaces with a Royal Bank of Scotland logo on.

XII

So far I’ve talked mainly about the economics of the Festival, and how that impacts on its cultural space, but I’ve said little about what this means artistically. But if half of what I’m suggesting about the Festival’s current political economy

– that artists are underpaid for their work, that it’s hard to succeed with experimental work, that the whole business is too exhausting to be particularly fulfilling, that the Festival has the thinnest of connections with the local community and arts scene, that it’s difficult for audiences to find surprising work –

if half of this is true, or a quarter, maybe, then the Festival can only be a gross parody or simplification of what is great and important about contemporary arts, more pseudo-science rather than laboratory, more beauty pageant than talent show, more piss-up than party, more tired rehearsal rather than celebration.

XIII

The Festival is an industrial powerhouse: performance is a factory, and a show is the product of a lengthy production chain. As such, it is already a deeply political artistic space. I am saying that we — performers, audiences, workers — need to take control of that political space. We need to start making conscious decisions about what we want that space to be, and start acting them out. Better still, let’s think about the best way of making those decisions together.

I am asking not “What art do we want to make?” but “How do we want to make art?”

Seize the means of artistic production!

James has now finished a lovely little video that gives a nice summation of the project for those who weren’t able to encounter it and a good reminder for those who were. Enjoy.