News
The first week of the Fringe saw several companies receive Herald Angel awards while the first Archangel of 2009 was awarded to UNIVERSAL ARTS:
"This week's Archangel winner is an organisation with a Fringe history that now stretches back over 20 years. Universal Arts is directed by Tomek Borkowy and managed by Laura Mackenzie Stuart, and has been a crucial part of the fabric of the Fringe, bringing performances of music and theatre, dance and work for children from all over the world to a succession of venues. They have included St Brides in Gorgie, the Gateway Theatre on Leith Walk and the tiny Hill Street Theatre, which was once run by Judith Docherty, founder and producer of Grid Iron. This year, as last, Universal Arts is operating from the Freemason's Hall in George Street (styled the New Town Theatre), St George's West and the Edinburgh International Conference Centre with another vibrant and colourful programme." (The Herald, Sat 15 August)
Daniella Tugues, principal dancer, co-choreographer and dance manager with Las Lizarraga who's Venezuela Viva is once again receiving standing ovations at the EICC, travels to London after the Fringe where she is appearing as the guest dancer in
Paco Peña – Flamenco sin Fronteras, at Sadler's Wells in London
Delving into an often overlooked period of flamenco history, Paco Peña explores the many dance styles that emerged through the migration of Spanish performers to Latin America in the early 1900s, and their significant impact on flamenco today
EVENT: What’s the Fringe worth?
The event is organised because there is a growing belief that that there is a serious lack of understanding about the Festival Fringe amongst the majority of stakeholders of the Edinburgh Festivals.
Whether you are a participant (performer or ticket buyer), a cultural authority (local government, national government, international governmental agency), a local business (shop, restaurant, hotel, technical supplies) or simply interested Edinburgh city life, this is your opportunity to debate what the Fringe is worth.
The debate will provide an opportunity to discuss the value of the Fringe, both in economic and prestige terms and what price, if any, should be placed on keeping it going and developing it for the future. The debate in the style of “Question Time” with a panel of speakers will put forward widely varying ideas for the Fringe in the 21st century.
The panel is:
Kath Mainland, CEO of the Festival Fringe Society
Christie Anthoney, Director of the Adelaide Fringe Festival
Julian Caddy, Director of SWEET venues
Donald Emslie, ex-CEO of SMG
Graham Birse, Deputy Chief Executive, Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce
Ailsa Falconer, Principal Officer, Destination Promotion Team, City of Edinburgh Council
It will be chaired by Lord Wilson, former Chairman of the National Museums of Scotland, and former Governor of Hong Kong
Free Event: 17 August, 11am
New Town Theatre, Freemasons' Hall, 96 George Street
Watch video extracts from artists featuring in the Universal Arts Festival programme on the UA You Tube channel: click here
Help daniel k make his Q & A in Edinburgh
In the "outrageously inventive" (The Straits Times) Q&A, daniel k asks his audience: what do you want to see? He then bravely attempts the ‘perfect’ dance formed by the fate of economics and quirks of democracy.
You can contribute to daniel k's performance in advance by completing a survey (about 15mins) – click HERE
(NOTE: This questionaire is ONLY for people residing in the UK)
For more show information about Q & A please click here
Sponsor News
ETC lights Universal Arts venues in Edinburgh
For the third year running, ETC is supplying lighting control systems to Universal Arts in three of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe's leading venues.
In previous years, Universal Arts has used ETC's Congo lighting control desks. However, at PLASA Focus in April, ETC launched Element. This new desk caught the attention of Universal Arts production manager, Anthony Newton, who approached ETC's Jeremy Roberts to explore the possibility of using Element to light all the shows in the Universal Arts Festival of international theatre.
Newton says: "Element seemed like the perfect desk for Fringe venue application. It has the software of the successful Eos and Ion range with simplified features to ease user control, making the basic functions easier to navigate with greater hands on fader control. It's a much friendlier looking desk to the inexperienced or unfamiliar operator.
"In an environment like the fringe you need a desk which is quick to programme, easy to operate and reliable. Element is all of these and I am really excited about getting to show them to our visiting companies from across the world."
The lighting systems are being installed at Universal Arts @ St George's West, EICC (Edinburgh's International Conference Centre) and at the New Town Theatre at Freemason's Hall on George Street.
ETC will train Universal Arts staff on Element. The Universal Arts technical team will then put their training into practice, helping designers and technicians from visiting international companies to plot and operate the lighting for their shows for the duration of the festival.
Jeremy Roberts, ETC's associate regional manager for the UK & Ireland, says: "As the Element is new for us this year, the Fringe seemed like the perfect launch pad for the product and a great way to allow more people from across the UK and indeed, internationally, to get some practical experience with the desk. The idea behind the desk is that it's a great introduction desk for operators who can graduate with relative ease to the Ion and then Eos as their careers progress or their shows get bigger."
ETC is supplying three Element consoles and one Ion console. In addition, Universal Arts is hiring a Congo console from Stage Electrics for the hit show Venezuela Viva at the EICC. Some 23 shows from across the world will benefit from use of the desks across the three Universal Arts venues.
Maja Ardal wins Dora Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female in the Independent Theatre Division for the 2008-09 Toronto Theatre season, for You Fancy Yourself.
For more show information about You Fancy Yourself please click here.
View and download a virtual copy of the 2009 Universal Arts Festival Programme from issu.com, the online publishers or simply click on shows and tickets to read about all the shows and companies featured in the Universal Arts Festival Programme.
An open letter to the Board of Directors of The Edinburgh Fringe Society
From Tomek Borkowy, Artistic Director, Universal Arts Ltd., Edinburgh
First of all I would like to start by saying thank you to all past and present staff of the Fringe Office including the new Chief Executive, Kath Mainland, who returns to the Fringe Office after 13 years. All of them have been doing their best to help Venue Producers to carry out their difficult and financially risky work. My special thanks go to Eileen O’Reilly who has done a fantastic job as Promoters’ Liaison connecting a number of our clients to significant international producers.
Secondly, I would like to remind members of the Board of Directors of the position that the Fringe Society has had in the past and its present responsibilities. Circumstances over the past years have given many of us cause for concern – in particular, a lack of leadership in providing guidance to Fringe Office staff, a lack of openness and sincerity in dealing with other Fringe Festival stakeholders and total misjudgement of the time frame needed to introduce a new box office system and the mismanagement of its implementation, culminating in last year’s Box Office disaster. This has led to a significant drop of confidence in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe amongst participants and the ticket buying public, especially after an independent review held the Board of Directors responsible. This has resulted in enormous hardship and fear of losing business among many professional Independent Venue Producers. It has also revealed a total lack of accountability by the Board and, following last year’s crisis and subsequent damning report in which the Board of Directors of Edinburgh Fringe Society’s were criticised for the poor response to public concerns and the failure to attempt to boost falling confidence in the Festival. Bad press exacerbated this. I believe it is time to instigate a wide public discussion of the role of the Society and of all other stakeholders in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Historical Perspective
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has undergone a number of changes from its spontaneous formation in 1947. One of the first major steps was the creation of The Festival Fringe Society formally constituted in 1958. Its core aims were giving information, publishing a brochure of all Fringe shows and selling tickets centrally. In other words it served performing artists, who needed support as they not only performed but also created and ran their own venues and sold their own tickets. For this purpose the Fringe Society created the Fringe Office and for nearly 20 years it was the perfect solution for the type of arts festival that the Edinburgh Fringe then was. However with the creation of Assembly Theatre, the first managed multi-stage venue in 1981, this status quo began to change.
Since this date, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has been undergoing constant change. Beginning 28 years ago, participating artists gained support from managed venues. This support has grown with the professional development of Venue Producers and has become the performing artists’ most important relationship. Obviously not all venues are on the same level of development and not all participants of the festival are in need of professional support but generally Venues are the main service and support providers to the participating artists.
Like it or not, managed multi-stage venues started the commercial concept of the Fringe and led to a great expansion of the programme. This is when it became known as the greatest performing arts event on Earth. But, at the same time, the Fringe started changing its character. From a spontaneous celebration of the arts, it has evolved into a largely market-led presentation of the performing arts. Venue Producers had to embrace this change or get out of the festival. At the same time many other stakeholders welcomed a more market-orientated Fringe, as it started to generate more money for the economy of the City and the region. Landlords of spaces hired by Venue Producers, owners of accommodation rented during the Festival to participants and visitors, restaurateurs, hoteliers, shopkeepers and The Fringe Society itself started to benefit from an increasingly commercialised Fringe. In my twenty years of service in the Festival, the Fringe Office’s permanent staff has tripled, while most Venue Producers struggle to afford enough staff to cover their workload. The Fringe Society has also built a successful commercial company as its subsidiary. All of this is relies on the work and financial risks taken by Independent Venue Producers. I stress that without us the Festival would not be able to exist.
The current safety and employment regulations, together with the cost of creating and running venues, prevent the Fringe from going back to a time when participating companies could run their own temporary theatres. We are faced with rising rents for spaces used by venues, higher costs of equipping venues and constant demands from the public and participating companies for better and more comfortable theatres as well as a raft of new safety regulations from Edinburgh City Council including the demand for costly professional reports and a rise of 650% (yes, six hundred and fifty percent) over three years in the cost of temporary theatre licenses. It has all contributed to steadily growing financial risk and administrative responsibilities to create temporary venues. Undoubtedly, and especially in the current economic climate, the danger of a spectacular financial collapse by one of us is just around the corner.
Financial make-up and the structure of the Fringe
One of the main problems that has led to a lot of misunderstanding is that not many people know how the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has evolved in the last quarter of the century and how it really works at the moment. What is significant is that the Board of Directors of the Fringe Society did not try to understand or disregarded this knowledge for years.
There are number of stakeholders in the Fringe. I have recognised seven distinct groups: Participating Companies, Independent Venue Producers, Ticket Buying Public, Fringe Society, Edinburgh Businesses, Edinburgh Landlords, City Authorities and the Scottish Government.
The first three are investors in the Festival Fringe, thanks to them it exists while the remaining four are beneficiaries. The first group of investors are Participating Companies, who bring their art to Edinburgh and pay for the privilege. The second are Venue Producers, who create theatres used by performers, help them with technical (and often artistic matters) and generally look after performers’ well-being during the festival. Venue Producers provide the main Festival infrastructure and are often also involved in producing shows. The largest group of investors is the public, who buy tickets and allow all of this machinery to move forward. I stress this once again with emphasis: these first three groups are the only reason the Edinburgh Festival Fringe exists. Thanks to them the City and the region’s economy is injected with about £80m every year and as a result of this investment the Fringe Society continues to exist.
It is worth highlighting that this large injection to the economy is delivered without meaningful support from governmental or civic authorities but with ever-greater risks undertaken annually by the first two investors. Other beneficiaries (including certain City Council members and civil servants) would do well to remember this every time they make a decision without thinking through the consequences of decisions that threaten to damage the venues’ operations for example: the threat to allow fencing to run the length of Princes Street dividing the City in two, making pedestrian flow between the New Town and the Old Town extremely difficult.
Professional Venue Producers provide a service to the performing companies and the public. We create and invest in businesses that should generate returns. The Universal Arts (Festival) Ltd operation is typical of a small professional Independent Venue Producers. Like most, we are a self-financing organisation and, because of our size, we have difficulty attracting sponsors. As a result, the risk of running two venues with four stages and a total capacity of 732 seats is about £250K per year (generally the cost per seat is between £290 and £350 for venues with between 500 and 1000 seats.) This is the actual cost of 10 months of work – programming, running and closing operations, theatre rental, equipment hire, publicity and administrative, technical and front of house staff. In order to break even (and thus to remain a viable business) we need a proper infrastructure and a well organised business environment in which to operate. Venue Producers are left to take risks without any economic or infrastructure support from local and national authorities. I would like to make absolutely clear, that although financial support would be welcome, Independent Venue Producers are actually seeking promotional, regulatory and infrastructural support across the entire Festival, which would allow us to carry on and to ensure that the Edinburgh Festival Fringe continues to be seen as the premier Fringe festival in the world.
Independent Venue Producers, the Fringe Society and Authorities
We all have to keep in mind that the contemporary Edinburgh Festival Fringe has changed from a spontaneous celebration of the arts to a largely market-led, performing arts trade fair and has to be treated as such. The time has come to change the way in which the Edinburgh Fringe is perceived and run, not only because of its ever-evolving nature but also because of the global economic environment in which we operate.
However I am afraid that the enormous complacency shown by the City and national authorities combined with inept Board management of the Fringe Society has put the whole Fringe in grave danger of mirroring the thinking of the creators and governors of the banking system, whose idiocy has led to the collapse of the global economy.
It is symptomatic that Independent Venue Producers were not included in the creation of ‘Festivals Edinburgh’. If the Fringe Society, City authorities and Scottish Government don’t take Venue Producers more seriously, if they continue to deny our indispensable role, we are in great danger of losing this magnificent Festival and its significant financial injection to the economy.
Having put together what I feel to be a very strong programme this year, it is clear to me that there has been a loss of confidence in the Fringe from a lot of theatre companies in the UK and abroad. The lack of decisive and positive action from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society and the City, combined with the global recession has made many small and medium companies think twice about performing in Edinburgh.
Where do we go from here?
In my 20 years at the Fringe I have seen, heard and experienced a great deal of antagonism from members of the Board of Directors and some Fringe Office management towards Venue Producers. There has been a common view that we are all more or less dodgy business operators who make vast amounts of money. All too frequently this notion has been communicated to participating companies and the general public. This is the first issue that needs to be addressed. The second is to determine the real purpose of the Fringe Society in the 21st century and what kind of relationship should exist between the Society and Venue Producers. Failure to resolve this could drive the Associated Independent Venue Producers CIC whose membership accounts for all Edinburgh’s professional Venue Producers, to investigate the possibility and value in creating a separate organisation to provide essential services required by Participating Companies and audiences. This could either lead to the demise of the Fringe Society or to the creation of two separate festivals – one run by professional Venue Producers and a second by the Fringe Society.
Nevertheless I strongly believe in the value of refashioning the Fringe Society in order to preserve and develop the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It is only by working together that we can ensure Edinburgh continues to be seen internationally as the premier UK arts festival. To do so, we need to find a new formula in which the Venue Producers, Fringe Society, the City authorities and Scottish Government can work more effectively together and fulfil their different duties.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a significant business creating jobs and injecting £80m a year to the economy. It has to be treated by the City and national authorities as any other significant industry. The Made in Scotland Fund is a very small but positive step in the right direction.
The Society has to identify its contemporary role. In the last 15 years or so, the Fringe Society’s main objective has been its own growth. Its sponsorship deals and grants have benefited mainly the Society’s own structure with very little passed on to key stakeholders. Saying that, I have to admit that the Fringe Office staff did fantastic work, which was vital to the Festival on a number of issues including the fight to retain its ‘Work Permit-free status’ and visa conditions for companies from outwith the EU and the relationship with the Performing Rights Society.
By publishing a combined festival programme, the Fringe Society has a contractual relationship with performing companies, but does not have any equivalent relationship with Venue Producers. Given that substantial sums of money are trusted to the Fringe Box Office by Venue Producers, this situation is wrong. There is an absolute and urgent need for a formalised relationship between Venue Producers and the Fringe Society to prevent bad practice and misunderstandings. For example the Fringe Society runs a ‘Friends of the Fringe’ scheme. It collects funds from subscribers to whom it provides benefits including discounted tickets, yet this discount is effectively loss of revenue to performers and venues. Also, for many years, venues have been asked to display boards with their venue number (not their name) and a Fringe Society sponsor’s logo. None of that sponsorship income is passed on to participating companies or Venue Producers and yet the sponsorship would have little or no value without their collaboration.
The Fringe Society has to go back to its origins and become again a charitable organisation providing services to investors in Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Fringe Society also needs to stop behaving like a secret society, hiding its ideas and working practices behind closed boardroom doors. In order to survive and develop in a positive way the Society has to work in close collaboration with Venue Producers and its representative body Associated Independent Venue Producers CIC (AIVP). The Society cannot behave as business chasing growth and profit. Nor should the Fringe Office allow itself to be a cheap way for the City Council to fulfil its community aims by providing a questionable quick ‘fringe experience’ for citizens via events such as Fringe Sunday.
To achieve a new, vibrant and forward thinking organisation, a number of changes have to be made in the structure and working practice of the Society:
- Obtaining membership of the Society should be simplified and encouraged
- Society’s work has to be made public
- The Board of Directors should be reduced to a maximum of 12 members including the chairperson
- Members of the Board should not have more than two consecutive periods on the Board
- All existing Board members with more than 4 years on the Board should resign at the next AGM and, if they wish to, stand for re-election
- A minimum of 30% of the board should be recruited from Venue Producers
- The Chair of AIVP should be an ex-officio membership of the board
- The Board of Directors should adopt an American volunteer arts board style of ‘give or get’ structure where members undertake to either provide a professional (or significant) service or raise finance for the organisation.
Other changes need to be made with regard to the Fringe Office, its work and employees. I hope that with the new management including Tim Hawkins, and especially with Kath Mainland at the helm, both of whom have long-term experience of the Fringe from both a Fringe Office and venue perspective, there will be an improvement to the quality of staff knowledge and services. An emphasis should be put on the development of marketing the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the UK and around the world to a standard and level that the biggest theatre event on earth deserves. There is also an urgent need to improve the website.
In conclusion and to stress the importance of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the City and for Scotland, I declare that Universal Arts will organise an open discussion about the future of Edinburgh Festival Fringe with an invited panel comprising of a member of the Board of Directors of the Fringe Society, Independent Venue Producers, an MSP and representatives of Edinburgh City Council responsible for culture (see below).
I also declare that at the next AGM of the Fringe Society I will put myself up for election to the Board of Directors. I hope that all Society members who agree with all or parts of my comments will vote for me. We need change!
Tomek Borkowy
Artistic Director
Universal Arts Ltd.
Universal Arts Festival Ltd.