The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society announced today (Thu. 3rd June) the recipients of the first ever Fringe Artist and Venue Recovery Fund, with five venues and 15 shows awarded funds from a £75,000 pot to support return to the Fringe in 2021 and 2022.
The fifteen different productions have been awarded funds to bring work to the world-renowned festival, with shows taking place in both 2021 and 2022.
Funded projects include:
- A new physical theatre piece exploring the issue of identity in Hong Kong
- A new digital piece of theatre that follows the journey of two women on a mission to create the perfect fairytale for our time
- A new musical theatre show examining the complexity of interpersonal relationships
- An outdoor, site-responsive show about a man eschewing consumerism for nature
- A semi-autobiographical one-woman play – Tickbox – told in Scots-English and Urdu, which follows the stories of two Scottish-Pakistani women
- A new play about a washed-up television personality who lives his own Dickensian nightmare when he is visited by the ghost of his past
- A new work which tells the story of those who are forced to become nomads despite being desperate for a concrete place to call home
- An adaptation of a lesser-known Arthur Conan Doyle novel, The Poison Belt
- A digital presentation of a show which explores the lows of sex education amidst the highs of sexual awakening in a country under religious stronghold
- A live theatre piece following the life of Marigold Webb, a deaf insect collector living in the 1920s
- An all-female three-hander neo-noir crime story in which an executive manager must rob her own bank
- A digital production made up of a randomly generated series of monologues about death and mortality
- A show exploring the music and personal lives of the original jazz and blues divas.
A total of five grants have also been awarded to Fringe venues.
- Monkey Barrel Comedy has been awarded funding to assist with online development, digital streaming infrastructure and associated staff training and development, to help support their acts in the new Covid environment.
- Summerhall has been awarded funding for accessibility initiatives to be rolled out in 2022.
- C venues have been successful with a project which aims to enable creatives from under-represented, minority or disadvantaged backgrounds to bring artistic work to the Fringe.
- The Scottish Comedy Festival has won funding to help expand Fringe opportunities to locally based performers.
- The Pleasance Theatre Trust’s project is aimed at providing 16 to 17 year olds from the local community with training, early0stage work experience and a direct route into the Arts.
- The £75,000 fund was raised in 2020 through the Fringe Society’s FringeMakers platform in partnership with Crowdfunder. The sum came from ticket sales to our AJ Bell Fringe on a Friday live events, as well as through direct donation and support from AJ Bell.
We would like to thank all our supporters who donated to the fund or purchased a ticket to an AJ Bell Fringe on Friday event for making this fund possible.
The Fringe Society collected and administered applications using SmartyGrants. All applications that met the essential criteria were evaluated by an independent panel made up of expert advisors drawn from the Fringe’s stakeholder community. The grant-giving process was chaired by a representative from the Fringe Society Senior Management team as a non-voting participant.
More details on the fund, and information on eligibility, can be found at https://edfringe.smartygrants.com.au/recoveryfund.
