It’s Not About the F-ing Numbers: the 2013 Winnipeg Fringe Festival

By Chandra Mayor

Summer in Winnipeg is festival season—as we all hasten to assure winter visitors. And despite the much-touted twenty-first century twin perils of relentless funding cuts to the arts, and the death of community engagement and intellectual capacity via drone-like devotion to the tiny mobile screens of the Twitterverse, our festivals are ambitious and vigorous. From Folk Fest to Pride to Folklorama, our hooplas get bigger every year.

The Winnipeg Fringe Festival has just wrapped up The F Word, its twenty-sixth year of spectacle, crunched the numbers, and announced that the 2013 festival was the biggest Fringe ever. Ticketed attendance hit a record-breaking 101, 488, a record 187 shows were sell-outs, and a record $705, 553.75 in box office revenues were returned to the 169 companies performing in thirty-two venues.

A big F-ing deal, indeed.

Fringe Fest attendees bedazzled by choice; photo by Brett Howe

“The fact that we were able to not only maintain, but surpass the record we set at last year’s twenty-fifth anniversary Fringe shows that Manitobans have a real passion for the festival,” says executive director Chuck McEwen. “There’s a real appetite for independent theatre in our community that seems to grow every year, and that’s really encouraging for the future of the Fringe.”

Of course, about the only thing that Winnipeggers relish more than a good, frenetic, sprawling outdoor festival is the immensely satisfying group-work of shaking our collective heads and roundly criticizing our festivals for not being what they used to be. Sometimes these sites and conversations converge, in the most delicious concatenations of all.

One of my most satisfying Fringe conversations happened when I ran into a friend at the Old Market outdoor stage; we leaned against a handbill-plastered picnic table under the hot noon sun, surrounded by gaggles of daycare kids and the ubiquitous uber-emotive between-show performers, and spent a marvellous (and very Winnipeg) fifteen minutes pinpointing the exact moment when the Folk Festival began its irrevocable slide into “just not what it used to be.”  (The year they cancelled the early morning tarp run, in case you’re wondering).

McEwen is absolutely correct – the Fringe has not only grown over the years (including geographically, especially as BYOVs pop up all over the city – even in St. Boniface at the CCFM), but has genuinely been able to sustain that growth with ticket sales, actual bottoms in seats, and throngs of bodies in venue lineups, sidewalks, and beer tents and patios all over the Exchange.  Clearly, we love the Fringe Fest – not just theoretically, like that fat smart Czech novel on the shelf that we never quite get around to actually reading, but with an enthusiasm and love that we consummate with our time, bodies, and money.

The current de facto mantra among this city’s festival directors seems to dictate that bigger is necessarily better, that success is measured by growth, and that the best indicators of growth are numeric:  More events! More performers! More tickets sold! Step right up! (“How do we do it? Volume, volume!” shouts Tom Waits, while on the other side of the generational lines, Daft Punk pulses the “Harder faster better stronger!” beat).  By these standards, McEwen is a savvy director, and this year’s Fringe was an undisputed achievement.

Lining up for tickets at the Fringe; photo by Leif Norman

Like all good theatre pieces, however, there are complications in this narrative of success. For the average Fringer, a bigger festival means that just taking in the shows becomes an increasingly complicated and stressful experience. More choices mean more pre-planning, more active decision-making, and less spontaneity. More (and more spread-out) venues means more travelling, and more chances of ending up stranded (if you can’t get into the performance) in a part of the city significantly far away from other show options. More sold-out shows mean more hours spent standing in line (including pre-line ups for the official line ups, which sometimes begin a couple of hours before the door tickets go on sale), only to still not make it into your show of choice.

Certainly, dedicated Fringers will tell you that the real fun (and the thing that divides authentic Fringers from the dilettantes – always an emotionally-satisfying and badge-of-honour identity distinction in any discussion of long-standing Winnipeg festivals) involves poring over the program to plan out the ideal daily show schedule, madly dashing through the streets and short-cut alleys to the next line-up, and then using that line-up time to chat with other Fringers, thereby getting the scoop on the must-see and dear-god-please-miss shows.

But was this year’s festival F for Fabulously Fun, or F for Fatiguing and Frustrating?

Over the last few years, I’ve heard more and more people admit that it’s not really very much fun anymore. Instead, the word “stressful” comes up a lot.  One friend, a Fringe newbie eager to fully engage in the legendary Fringe madness, made seven different attempts over three days to see a couple of different shows – and in the end, only made it into one performance, despite the effort and hours of cycling to and from the Exchange, standing in line, etc.  She certainly feels frustrated and turned-off by the whole experience.

In the “not what it used to be” file, the other element to consider is the effects of the Internet in this bigger, better Fringe world. Half of the tickets for each show are available as pre-sales. This was always true, but it used to be that those who were organized enough to order tickets in advance — or those who didn’t have the interest or capability to brave the long line-ups and in-person rushing — had to actually go down in person, or tediously phone in (possibly on a rotary phone).  But online pre-sales are much simpler and quicker, and end up favouring those theatre-goers with credit cards and the financial means to pay $4 more per ticket. Many of the shows that my friend wanted to see were half sold out, online, even before the line-ups formed.

Reviews are now available with the simple click of a mouse, and the Winnipeg Free Press and CBC send out their legions of eager reviewers, competing with each other to see which outfit will be the first to file and post reviews of every single show; both websites even helpfully sort the reviews by their star ratings, so that audiences don’t even have to scroll around, hunting for the “top” shows. It used to be that theatre-goers had to actually be down at the Fringe site, talking to other people about which shows to see, or waiting for the print newspapers or paper Jenny Reviews to make an appearance.

It seemed more reasonable to take a chance on a show you knew nothing about, something that just looked interesting or weird or fun, because it was that much less convenient to find out which shows were decreed “the best” by authorized sources. And while all performers long for stellar reviews, and some shows always eventually came out on top, many performers now complain more acutely of the instant death of the three-star (or less) review.

In an ever-increasing array of possible shows to see, many performers agonize about an Oprah’s Book Club scenario – the (almost instantly-available) judgements of official reviewers dictate which shows are sell-outs, and which shows are only seen by charitable family and friends. It’s especially ominous when half your potential nightly audience can sit at home, enjoying a leisurely dinner and perusing the Internet for all the five-star picks, instead of factoring in the time and uncertainty of getting down to the site in time to get a ticket, and while they’re there, pick up handbills (and listen to the pitches of wandering performers), check out the posters, and actually engage with the in-person buzz and experience.

Ask anyone wandering around in a vintage Fringe Fest volunteer T-shirt from the early 90s, and they’ll probably shake their heads and offer up a similar dire analysis.

Then again, that’s what we do in Winnipeg. We pontificate and analyze, and it’s all a way for each of us to perform the social cachet of belonging, of being in the know, of having enough of a personal stake in the festival to have a personal opinion about the way it’s changing. And what it means, really, is that these festivals – including the boisterous Fringe Fest – matter to us. Being a long-time Fringer, with long-term memories and strong opinions, carries a real significance in this city – significant enough for audiences to continue to grow, for new audiences to want to be able to take part, so that they too can join discussions with the appropriate measure of gall or gravitas. It’s like being the person at the family reunion who knows all the generational secrets and scandals, who can sort out the complicated blood and marriage ties, who knows all the stories. This is powerful social and familial currency.

And in the final analysis, the Fringe Fest, like so many Winnipeg festivals, is a kind of family event because of the sheer number of people involved in making it happen. The festival couldn’t exist without legions of weird, wonderful, and dedicated volunteers – selling tickets, setting up, cleaning up, serving beer, and even hosting out-of-town performers in their own homes. Additionally, each and every local performer – and there are impressive numbers of local actors, stage managers, and technicians involved in the Fringe – has their own small army of family, neighbours, work or school friends who also all feel some kind of stake in that show, and in the festival as a whole. (As do the vendors – of food, books, jewelry, henna tattoos, and hipster hats made from vintage T-shirts – the wandering buskers and unofficial street performers). The daytime stages are a favourite outing for daycares and day camps throughout the city (indoctrinating the children early into Winnipeg festival culture), and at night, Old Market Square is one of the best places to consistently run into friends you hardly ever see otherwise.

Kid and clowns at the Fringe; photo by Leif Norman

The Fringe Festival is a massive group effort.  It’s not put on by ‘them’… one way or another, most of us feel that it’s put on by us, even if only in a small way. We each have a stake, a share. Only people inside the family get to criticize it; we show how much we love the Fringe by the very act of enthusiastically debating and dismantling everything about it.

The real measure of Fringe success isn’t, in the end, determined by numbers, by a bigger or smaller festival, by the insidious effects of Internet ticketing systems, nor any other delicious and absorbing point or counterpoint. It’s that we keep showing up to be blown away or disappointed by the performances, to eat, and drink beer; we bring our little kids and convince our friends and neighbours to go see our older kids’ shows; we hit the review websites in record numbers, and write in to argue with the reviewers. When we see something great (and we always do, even my frustrated friend), we feel a deep and satisfying sense of personal achievement. We keep showing up to grouse, and when we grouse, it’s only because that’s an integral part of the entertainment value. Because that’s what (F for) Families do.