How to Perform at the Vancouver Fringe Festival

The Vancouver International Fringe Festival is an alternative theater festival held every fall in Vancouver, British Columbia. For about ten days, dozens of different theater troupes, comedians and other performers stage a carnival of unique shows at venues around Vancouver. Performing at the festival is an amazing experience and a great way to meet truly fascinating people from around the world.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Develop a show. Obviously you need something to perform. Fortunately, you can do pretty much anything as part of the Vancouver Fringe Festival. Successful shows have included everything from one act plays to cabaret to carnival sideshow material and more. The ethos of fringe theater is that there are no auditions or juried selections. Anyone can participate and can do anything they want. The only question is whether you can get an audience to come and watch.This doesn't mean anything you slap together will do though. The level of creativity and artistry on display at the festival is remarkable.
2. Enter the lottery. If you can scrape together the entry fee, you can enter the festival lottery for a slot. Because the Vancouver Fringe Festival's organizers don't select shows based on any particular judge's standards of merit, the lottery is used to distribute slots and determine the order of the waiting list. There are actually three separate lotteries: Provincial for acts from British Columbia, National for Canadian acts from outside British Columbia, and International for acts from outside Canada. If you have people from different categories in your group, you may be able to game this system a little by choosing which person will be your "primary contact," since that determines which lottery you go into. But you can still only go into one. Each lottery generates its own winners and its own waiting list.
3. Don't give up. If you end up on the waiting list, don't despair. The festival is in September and the lottery is held the preceding January. Since the festival is booked so far in advance, it's not unusual for groups to pull out. Schedules change or even, given the fluid nature of theater, entire troupes cease to exist. If you can maintain some flexibility of scheduling, you may well be able to grab a slot after all.
4. Consider the BYOV option. BYOV stands for "Bring Your Own Venue." It refers to shows that don't go through the official lottery for the existing venues. To do a BYOV show you have to do all the work of arranging a performance location yourself. There's still an advantage to joining the festival if you do this, because the festival will include you in the official schedule and promotional materials, and audiences will be able to pre-purchase tickets to your show through the festival box office. Previous BYOV venues have included a tree and an apartment bathroom so, depending on the needs of your show, you may be able to find a place and put it on without going through the lottery at all.

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