Apples and Oranges: Comparison of a Fringe Festival to Government Subsidized Performance Art Event
It is unfair to compare the Toronto Fringe Festival and The Avignon Festival together in terms of the kind of experience they offer; the location as well as the conditions of production that allow theatregoers to participate in each festival provide limitations that affect the experience of each festival. While one is a charitable organization with a lottery process that promotes accessibility to artists of various levels of skill, experience, and ability, the other is a world-renowned festival with where each director must be approved by the festival’s board of directors and “formally approved by the Mayor of Avignon and the French Culture Ministry” with a budget of “13.3 million euros (for 2015)” (“Artistic Project”).
By hearing these two descriptions you just can begin to imagine what the quality of work and the target audience for both would be; “festivals therefore produce a temporal...display of commonly shared lifestyle experiences” (Bennett and Woodward 14). Because I’ve never lived in France, I can’t speak to what the lifestyle is like, only acknowledge what I see in all these heavily funded theatres; lively spaces filled to the brim with audiences. In comparison, I believe the Toronto Fringe is represents me- a liberal arts student living in the city with very little money interested in watching theatre- well enough. The key point in that description is ‘very little money’. $12 might sound cheap at first, but that adds up very quickly when you
We can view these two festivals through Knowles’ model of analyzing material theatre where he “understands meaning to be produced in the theatre as a negotiation at the intersection of three shifting and mutually constitutive poles:” performance, conditions of production and conditions of perception (3). In simple terms; when we compare the Toronto Fringe to the Avignon festival- or judge any aspect of it- we must consider their modes of production and how that affects what we experience. While Kevin Matthew Wong, Outreach Coordinator for the Toronto Fringe, uses the majority of the Fringe’s communication budget in online promotion on social media platforms and posters to spread around the city, The Avignon Festival can afford not to plaster every square inch of its small city in advertising. It can afford to build itself up with world wide prestige, its reputation alone flooding the city with creative performance that evokes enthusiasm from festival goers. The Toronto Fringe might not be able to achieve that level of performativity in the festival they offer at the same scale of Avignon, but when we criticize, we must think about why that is.
Works Cited
“Artistic Project”, Festival d’Avignon, http://www.festival-avignon.com/en/artistic-project.
Knowles, Richard Paul. "Theory: Towards a materialist semiotic." Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge University Press, 2004. 9-23. Web. 12 July 2017.
Wong, Kevin Matthew. DRM398 Seminar #2. University of Toronto, Toronto. 6 July 2017. Seminar.
Andy Bennett, and Ian Woodward. "Festival Spaces, Identity, Experience and Belonging ." The Festivalization of Culture . Farnham, Surrey, Burlington: 2, 2014. 11-25. Print.
