All The World’s A Stage At The 2020 Fundy Fringe Festival
SAINT JOHN— “All the world’s a stage” William Shakespeare once wrote in his play As You Like It — and that’s the approach organizers of the Fundy Fringe Festival is taking for this year’s event, taking place August 17-22.
Due to the restrictions on gatherings of large groups because of Covid-19, this year’s festival will be virtual, with some shows also taking place in outdoor spaces where physical distancing can be ensured.
Festival director Sarah Rankin says the decision to bring the festival online this year came from seeing arts festivals and events across Canada and the world cancelled due to the virus.
“It broke my heart and I thought, you know what? We live in such a world now where we are revolving around how we interact with each other virtually,” says Rankin.”There’s got to be a way that we can leverage this new world to continue to get the messages out and to get our artists still working, and think outside the literal box.”
For Rankin, a mostly virtual festival was an opportunity to challenge the way many people think about theatre,
“When we think about theatres we tend to think about the physical space and the theatre is the four walls and there’s an audience. We’re kind of stuck in the very traditional, colonialist view of what a theatre is and how people access the arts, and that just drives me nuts personally, because we do need to reconstruct that,” she says.
“I think we’re in a perfect position right now how to explore how we deconstruct our antiquated thoughts on what theatre is, what the arts are, and how people can connect to that.”
This year’s festival will not have as many artists as previous years due to provincial border restrictions. But that means most of this year’s performers are from New Brunswick and Rankin says they are ready to adapt.
“The artists that did join up with us this year are all very passionate about how we can create art that is for this so-called ‘new age’ or ‘next-normal’ and we’re trying to give them as much free reign on their creativity as to how they wish to present their work,” she says.
The majority of the artists plan to have their performances live-streamed and recorded, which will be done at the Saint John Theatre Company’s BMO Studio Theatre in uptown Saint John. But some have chosen to go off in other directions too.
“We have artists that are looking to engage work inside places like King Square and in public green areas,” says Rankin. “We have some that are looking for non-traditional venues.”
In previous years, Fundy Fringe brought around 3,500 people to the uptown area. It often coincided around the same time as Third Shift, another arts festival. Though this year’s festival may not bring as many people physically to the city’s uptown core, Rankin’s excited about the potential to reach even more people with the new format.
” I think it allows us to reach an audience that we never could have reached before, an audience that perhaps is not within Saint John, but also those individuals that are unable to be in larger crowds with us. Not necessarily because of the pandemic, but because of accessibility reasons,” says Rankin.
“We live in a world that a lot of our buildings are not accessible to everybody and there are people out there that have sensitivities that don’t allow them to be out amongst other people. I think this is a really amazing opportunity where we’ll be able to put something out there that everybody will be able to access, in one way or another.”
This year’s festival lineup will be announced by the end of the month. People can follow the Fundy Fringe Facebook page for updates.