Thirty seasons ago, the first Vancouver Fringe Fest kicked off with a chicken barbecue and an appearance by Acting Mayor Harry Rankin in the parking lot of the Main Street IGA. By all accounts it was a great party.
Modelled after the Edmonton Fringe, which was attracting 60,000 theatre fans in 1985, the time was right for an alternative theatre outlet in Vancouver. But that’s not where this story begins.
Two years previous, the newly-created First Vancouver Theatre Space was hot on a mission to produce “theatre for everyone” in the city. Surrounded by such driving forces as directors Larry Lillo and Morris Panych, an actively hiring local film industry, and progressive theatre companies such as Pink Ink, FVTS found itself at the centre of the city’s burgeoning independent theatre scene.
“In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, there was a lot of independent work being done in visual art and theatre,” explains FVTS founder Joanna Maratta. “People wanted to work, but the work that was available, if you were an actor, was auditioning for the Arts Club or the Playhouse. And the local film industry was starting to kick in and people were getting auditions for this movie or that movie, or that series. So I got excited and started Theatre Space, and called people asking if they wanted to be part of a quasi-collective.”
She was overwhelmed by the response, and FVTS started staging productions with a group of about 40 theatre professionals in 1984.
Something was still needed to tie it all together, however.
“Shows with no theatre would go up in little alternative spaces, and then they would close again,” recalls Maratta. “So small groups of people were getting to see really exciting stuff, but it wasn’t lasting.”
Up until that point, Maratta had never even heard the word Fringe. Then an application for the Edmonton festival landed on the desk of her Water Street office and she knew she had found her answer.
Next was finding a location.
Maratta had worked on Main Street and was part of the Western Front/Grunt Gallery scene. She contacted Edmonton Fringe founder Brian Paisley and they walked Main together, discussing the possibilities, and then he handed her the keys to his festival.
“He said here’s how we do it, here’s the application process – it’s first-come first-served. All of those things that remain today.”
From its base in Mt. Pleasant, the Fringe festival strengthened Vancouver’s theatre community. Venues across the city hosted 220 performances and 4,000 attendees that first year.
Maratta, who eventually left the Fringe to move to Nelson with her family in 1998, says they ran that first Fringe on a budget of $15,000.
The Fringe festival’s first office space was Maratta’s VW Bug, which expanded to a table at Bert’s diner on Main, and eventually the flatiron building at Main and Kingsway, which they stocked with office furniture purchased from the auction of Expo ‘86 supplies.
Eventually, a growing festival and local-area pressures necessitated a move, so, in 1995, the Fringe relocated to Commercial Drive, setting up home base above where Havana is located today.
“Artists tend to go to places before they’re gentrified,” explains Maratta. “When I started Theatre Space in Gastown at 310 Water Street, that building was just artist studios. And then we moved to Homer Street. Same thing, big warehouse spaces. And then Expo came… It’s very interesting to me to look at all the different places that we’ve had offices or neighbourhoods we’ve worked in. The neighbourhoods, in my mind, were always very much a part of the fabric and feel for the festival.”
By 2000, the festival that was “born in Mt. Pleasant and raised on The Drive” was ready to face the rest of the city. It relocated to False Creek and ticket sales jumped 25 per cent that first year.
From its base on Granville Island, the Fringe has grown to 35,000 attendees, and – with 600 volunteers, 91 artist groups, and an annual operating budget of approximately $1 million – is now BC’s largest theatre festival and the second oldest Fringe festival in North America.
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Back in 1985, Vancouver had its pick of the calendar when it came to scheduling. Edmonton was first, in August, and Vancouver chose to run every September. Now, Fringes have sprung up in every major city in Canada, leaving Vancouver somewhat arbitrarily at the end of the line.
But according to David Jordan, Fringe’s executive director and president of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals since 2010, that has some huge advantages.
“A lot of the time the artists’ work is a bit more honed by the time it gets to us,” he explains. “They sometimes open in June or as early as May, and the work is really rough or raw. By the time they get to us, it has developed over the course of the few months in front of audiences. We’re the beneficiaries of that natural process.”
But not all work is developed that way.
Jordan was instrumental in fostering the Vancouver Fringe’s unique OnSite program, which turns unusual, often outdoor, locations across Vancouver into temporary theatre venues.
The Fringe’s courtship of this form of non-traditional theatre unofficially began in 1997 with Louis and Dave, a two-man road trip that took place inside a Plymouth Voltare in the parking lot of The Cultch. The audience sat in the back seat. As demand for Fringe opportunities increased and the number of venues stayed locked in at ‘not enough’, Jordan saw OnSite as an exciting solution.
In 2010, the Fringe featured five site site-specific shows, including performances on a fire escape, on the back of a bicycle, and even in an artist’s apartment. By 2012 there were 19 site-specific shows, 14 of which came through the OnSite program.
In the program, the artists work with mentor Kendra Fanconi, artistic director of The Only Animal, over the course of six months to bring Vancouver’s unseen spaces to life come September.
“Kendra [Fanconi] was part of that generation of site-specific artists that were really honing their craft in the ‘90s,” explains Jordan. “Now we’re looking at a new generation of site-specific artists.”
This year, Seaside Stories of Terrible Things (pictured on this week’s cover) is one of 10 site-specific shows. The play takes place on the stone steps leading into the dark waters off Granville Island, and reveals the folk legends, historical events, and horrors lurking in oceanic literature.
“You can’t just take whatever play and put it outside,” says Jordan. “You really have to build it specifically to be an outdoor performance. The space becomes a character in your show, because the audience is not in that sensory depravation tank that they’re in when they’re in the theatre. When there’s a show that does it well, the audience gets really excited because it is unique.”
And when it doesn’t… Well, the Fringe is as famous for its successes as its flops.
Originally a first-come first-served system, the artist selection process has evolved to be even more open. And Jordan is a big believer in keeping it that way.
“The artistic director at the Writers’ Festival, Hal Wake, [is] always making fun of me. He labours for months and months over selecting his artists and who’s available, and I just pick them out of a hat.”
Selection by lottery is now one of the sacred tenets of Fringe culture. It means everyone, from untested novices to Fringe favourites, has a chance to participate each year. This is true for all associated Fringe festivals in Canada, and part of what has kept the Fringe spirit alive for the last 30 years.
“I think it provides a more diverse program than one person could consciously do,” says Jordan. “Things come up in the lottery that you wouldn’t know to go look for. Most importantly it provides opportunity to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one. Even the people who now we look at as mainstay Fringe legends, they all say, ‘Before I came to the Fringe I had no reputation to go on, and the Fringe allowed me to do this.’
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TJ Dawe is one of those Fringe legends.
In his 14th one-man show as writer and performer, and 12th Vancouver Fringe appearance, Dawe led the Fringe Festival’s opening night on Sept. 2 with his latest work, Marathon – a personal tale of running in a track and field meet against Satan, which he ultimately ties back to psychology, and his current state of being.
But Dawe wasn’t always the festival’s biggest fan.
“Fringe began in Mount Pleasant, which was not only where I lived but where I went to school. Some of the primary venues,” he recalls, “or maybe even the hub of the festival was on the exact same block as the little, underfunded co-ed Catholic high school that I attended.”
Dawe says, despite having his own acting aspirations, he was oblivious that entire time of what Fringe was about.
“I didn’t even know that it was a theatre festival. The word ‘Fringe’ didn’t mean anything to me at the time, so I had disdain for these weird people who would come into our neighbourhood, putting up posters for their weird whatever it was – boasting that they were big in Saskatoon or Edmonton. I never saw a single show.”
It wasn’t until the summer of ‘94 that he would step onto a Fringe stage in one of the first acting gigs he was ever cast for. He was instantly hooked.
“The kind of theatre that I was learning in theatre school was established theatre, proven theatre, classics, prize winners, or hits on Broadway. Fringe theatre is almost never that. It’s almost never a published play at all. It’s usually created by the people performing it. And people are open to it! There were audiences at these festivals for new work. That was a real eye opener and that really turned me on to this whole style of theatre I hardly knew existed. I’ve been working in it ever since.”
For a young performer, though, the road was hard both financially and physically. In 1998 he applied for a cross-country tour of his own material which would prove emotionally disastrous. It wasn’t until he finally got to Vancouver, appearing at that festival for the very first time, that things started to look up.
“I was struggling the entire time to find an audience – the show was good but I had no idea how to market it and I had no reputation. And then I got sick with mononucleosis. I was still playing to small audiences and literally starving in some cities. But in Vancouver, I played to full houses in a big venue.”
A local reviewer had seen him perform at the Victoria Fringe, and gave him a rave review. There were lineups around the block.
“Suddenly I was given a hero’s welcome,” he says with a laugh. “It was absolutely what I needed at the time.”
Five years would pass, then another Vancouver Fringe performance would prove equally fateful.
His play Toothpaste and Cigars, cowritten with Mike Rinaldi, was spotted at the festival and shopped around to the film industry. Eleven years later, it is now adapted and playing on big screens around the world as The F Word, directed by Michael Dowse, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan. The film opened on Aug. 22 – Dawe’s 40th birthday.
