- Organization Name:
- Vancouver International Fringe Festival
- Describe your creative piece – what is it and what has it been used for, and why is it innovative?
- The Vancouver Fringe Festival Program Guide was used as our primary marketing piece. It showcased the artists performing in the Festival as well as other Festival events. It was available for free at libraries, community centres and other locations, as well as online. The guide is innovative because the design reflects the “do it yourself” nature of many Fringe shows. For over 25 years, the Fringe has been promoting “Theatre for Everyone.” We bring audiences and artists together by making theatre accessible. Artist accessibility is encouraged because we’ve adopted a lottery process to choose shows rather than a curatorial system. This encourages emerging artists, who are producing every aspect of their show, hence the "do it yourself" nature. For audiences, the Fringe ensures that tickets are affordable. In addition, the guide was innovative because of the centre pull-out section where all the information was compacted into four pages to ease our patrons’ Fringe experience!
- What issue or problem were you working to address with this piece?
- Making theatre accessible to both audiences and artists is the Fringe Festival's primary goal. The program guide needed to reflect this goal. The design of the guide made searching for shows extrememly easy. Shows were organized by venue, however, shows could also be searched using the index. Or if the patron preferred, they could use the master schedule located in the centre to organize a day of "Fring-ing." Artists were given equal space in which to promote their show, which added to the democratic nature of the Festival.
- How has your submission successfully impacted your organization’s ability to solve this issue/problem?
- In 2009 the Fringe Festival attendance increaced by six per cent over the 2008 attendance rate. We feel that this is due in part to the Program Guide, which also helped in increase audience awareness of the Fringe and our mandate.
