A Fringe Model

One of the most challenging tasks facing new fringe festivals is determining how the festival’s participants are selected.

In the spirit of the original Fringe, most Fringe Festivals opt for an “open” or “unjuried” approach to artist selection. This method excludes the central Fringe organization from picking which applicants are accepted.

Some Fringes opt for a “lottery” system: Participants are chosen at random from an annual pool of applicants. Others operate on a “first-come, first-served” basis: When all festival venues are taken, applicants find their own venue. Still others – Edinburgh most notably – take a very hands-off approach to the whole thing: If you can find a venue, you are in the festival.

We adopted a hybrid of the many techniques employed worldwide and added a few of our own innovations.

THE APPLICATION PROCESS

This Summer, applications will open for the 2010 Hollywood Fringe Festival.

Applicants will:

• Create a fringe website account with details on themselves and (if applicable) their organization
• Pay a (very small) application fee to create a publicly-viewable project on the fringe website.
• Add videos, text, tags, images and more to articulate the vision of the project
• Solicit community support for the project – this will help it’s visibility
• Engage with venues to find a home for the project
• Continue to use the fringe site to promote the show and sell tickets

We will post a list of “secured venues” that have signed-up to participate in the festival. These theatres, clubs, and galleries select artistic projects from the pool of applicants on the website – some venues might specialize in a certain genre of programming such as comedy or new plays.

For those performers not chosen by a secured venue – no problem. You just need to find your own venue (we will help).

Our goal is to lower the bar for artists seeking a space to present their work. We hope this will lead to a vast, deep, and rich experience for our participants and our audience.

Fringe Festival should represent a snapshot of emerging art – the model we are developing is built to support that.