Fringe Strategy Plan 2015 - Annotation
This post discusses a print document:
"Fringe Strategy Plan 2015." Toronto Fringe Festival. 2015. Web. 12 July 2017.
This brochure sets out five main “goals” as a strategic blueprint for Toronto Fringe from 2015-2018, in an attempt to reflect the ever-changing arts world. Through leadership, sustainability, visibility, and diversity, Toronto Fringe organizers argue these qualities will lead to innovation and “community exploration”. The two page brochure is highlighted by pops of colour from a woman in a multi-coloured hijab and a chalk-written message asking, ‘what does Fringe mean to you?’ This sentiment depicts the festival’s “for the people” (“Fringe 2017”) mantra that Fringe has been advertising, allowing independent artists and the surrounding community to have a say in this collective event. The overall message Fringe organizers are portraying through the visuals is inclusivity and also universality, trying to depict a ‘festival-for-all’ mentality that underlines much of their advertisements.
This picture brochure is a great starting point in my research pertaining to factors that influence the structures and institutions of Toronto Fringe. It acts as an overarching “superobjective” if put in Stanislavsky terms, which represents the organization’s strategic methods. It will be a great asset when paired with Temple Hauptfleisch’s model, in considering how executives’ and board members’ aims are heavily swayed by factors outside their control in eventified festivals (Hauptfleisch 43-45). When put into a discourse with Hauptfleisch’s model, it may also reveal significant solutions to repairing the current institution of Fringe as a festival “for the people” (“Fringe 2017”). Viewing this brochure and the Fringe festival as a “performance” (Hauptfleisch 39) will aid my analysis of the different methods festival executives use in attracting audiences to the Fringe. This especially true when considering the visual aspects that underlay the text. The way the organizers brand themselves through photography, specifically in the use of the woman wearing the hijab, should be compared to their artist-focused branding that permeated year’s campaign, in which a handful of people were highlighted and made into Fringe’s main posters.
Much of this source’s faults are in its vagueness, both textually and visually. The “Strategic Plan” contains only two pages of vague buzzwords such as “diversity,” “community,” and “network,” without relaying specificities to how these changes will be achieved and what they will look like. The pictures while depicting a sense of inclusion and diversity are only surface level ideas and are not congruent to most of the overlaying text. More research into the plan’s direct implementation must be done, either by contacting staff like Outreach Coordinator, Kevin Matthew Wong, or by analyzing recent initiatives such as Teen Fringe and the Culturally Diverse Artist Program (CDAP), applied to strengthen Fringe’s “core” values of sustainability and diversity.
Works Cited
"Fringe 2017." Toronto Fringe Festival. 20 July 2017. Web. 25 July 2017. https:// fringetoronto.com/festivals/fringe
Hauptfleisch, Temple. "Festivals as Eventifying Systems." Festivalising! : theatrical events, politics and culture. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2007. 39-45. Web. 12 July 2017.
“Teen Fringe.” Toronto Fringe Festival. 2017. Web. 25 July 2017. https://fringetoronto.com/get- involved/youth/teen-fringe
