Editorial: Reflecting on 7 years of Fringe of Colour
From starting The Database in 2018 to preserving its legacy today, Fringe of Colour founder and director Jess Brough looks back to where it all began and celebrates another beautiful summer with Artists of Colour at the Edinburgh festivals.
I saw a quote by Toni Morrison on Instagram last week: “Do not expect applause. Be prepared for silence. That is how real work happens.” Having just come out of several loving but laborious weeks of working to support my artistic community, I saw these words and felt them deeply. I knew the value of the time I had spent on this summer’s Fringe of Colour activities and I was content in the knowledge that I had done everything I set out to do, planning and organising in the pockets of silence carved out in the busy festival season.
“Sometimes, this feels like thankless work,” said a friend to me, who was also organising at the time to bring our community of Artists of Colour at the Edinburgh festivals together. Her words moved me, not because I agreed, but because I saw how hard my friend had been working and all I wanted to do was thank her.
Weighing Morrison’s quote against this interaction, I have come to realise how incongruent it is with my active beliefs. Hard work deserves recognition and applause, it deserves thanks and flowers, not the silent obscurity of a martyr. If I can see that clearly for my friend, why then did I so readily accept the sentence of silence for myself? Because a literary hero said so?
The Fringe of Colour logo, depicting two hands clapping, represents applauding those who are so often denied recognition.
After doing some belated due diligence, I have discovered that there is no credible source attributing Toni Morrison to those words at all. The internet is a sly and misleading place. A beautiful black and white portrait of Morrison overlaid with words about self-sacrifice drew me in, and for a few days I almost forgot a crucial truth: recognition is an essential part of knowledge production and labour. It is embedded in Black feminist praxis. It is not gauche or egotistical to say “I did this thing and I am proud of myself.” As the director of a Community Interest Company of one permanent worker (me), it can be difficult to find the balance between celebrating the work and celebrating myself, so I am going to try to use this Editorial to reshape that discomfort and claim some recognition.
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August 2025 marked seven years of Fringe of Colour. I have spoken in detail in the past about why I started this organisation, in the press, on podcasts, on the radio, and more, but it bears repeating. Fringe of Colour began in 2018 as a Twitter hashtag and as a publicly-accessible Google Sheet of Fringe shows that centre Artists of Colour. By “centre” I have always meant that at least 50% of the performers on stage are People of Colour. This is a deliberate criterion to avoid having producers messaging me to help promote their shows when there is, for example, a cast of 10 white performers and one Black girl holding it down among them.
I started Fringe of Colour and what became known as The Fringe of Colour Database because I thought it would be useful for me and for my friends. We were trying to wade through the extensive Fringe programme to find shows by People of Colour, which was proving difficult because of their tiny proportion. But I quickly realised the usefulness of my spreadsheet extended far beyond our small circle and so I made it public, sharing the list over social media and meeting numerous interesting and talented people along the way.
I am not the first person to make a Fringe spreadsheet dedicated to a particular group, nor will I be the last, but I do hope to continue doing this for many more years to come – something that will only be possible with adequate resources. Putting The Fringe of Colour Database together takes an enormous amount of time and effort. It involves scanning through every single show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to find productions that fit the 50% criterion, and copy-and-pasting key information into a Google Sheet. Sometimes this is as simple as looking at the show poster; other times it requires extensive digging, researching social media profiles or watching trailers to get a sense of the show and cast. It also involves physically being at the Fringe in August, inspecting posters to check if I have missed anyone, and talking to people about The Database to see if they ought to be on it. It is not just performers who deserve recognition and a supportive community, which is why I also create a “Behind the Scenes” section for Creatives of Colour at the Fringe who are not on the stage, but are making these shows happen with their extensive range of skills.
Putting The Database together involves responding to a mountain of emails, having delicate conversations with performers about race and identity, being sensitive to cultural differences, and always bearing in mind that race is a social construct that serves no one but must still be waded through for the purposes of solidarity.
Lastly, creating The Database involves communicating with other Edinburgh festivals. This year, I was able to list information about the Edinburgh Art Festival, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival, in addition to the Fringe, because these festivals supported The Database by supplying the information required. The sheer size of the Fringe means that it is not possible for the Fringe Society to provide a similar report, or at least one that I would be satisfied with. Instead, the Fringe Society partnered with Fringe of Colour and supported The Database with a grant, meaning I was able to pay myself to do this work.
The Big Artists of Colour Meet-Up 2025 | Aileen Lees Photography
People occasionally ask me why I don’t seek out other people to help with making the Fringe listings of The Database, considering how much time it takes me to get it done. As a freelancer, the practical answer is that I cannot give away aspects of my work that help provide me with an income. I tell them the issue is not that it is labour-intensive, it is that this work needs to be properly funded. Until this year, I was largely making The Database voluntarily, which was wildly unsustainable. I did receive a much-needed £1,000 grant in 2024 from the Grand Plan, which I partially put towards covering some of my early Database workload. The grant I received from the Fringe Society this year made a world of difference; with proper funding, the time it takes feels appreciated, rather than sacrificial.
I cannot possibly claim that I do not have help with this project, because in reality I have so many people letting me know that they support the work and that they support me. These are the friends who remind me of the magnitude of the last seven years, and what the Edinburgh festivals were like before I started Fringe of Colour. They show up for me in ways I am often too shy to ask for, and they keep me grounded in the importance of community work that is intentional and sustaining.
“Sustaining” is an important word to pause on here. I think about the ways in which radical organiser and writer Dr Melz Owusu wrote about burn-out and movement building before he passed away tragically this year, how he spoke about the risks of “being celebrated for the fruits of a chronically stressed lifestyle,” which is something that characterised much of the earlier years of Fringe of Colour. I burnt out every summer from 2019 to 2023, I have fantasised about hurting myself so that the work would have to stop for a moment. This year I can truly say that I found a healthy balance for doing this work, one that makes me feel like I am healing something, rather than breaking myself. In Melz’s words, “the means must justify the ends.”
The Big Artists of Colour Meet-Up 2025 | Aileen Lees Photography
This work is not something that can be done without sincere intentionality. It would not be safe in the hands of a large, commercial organisation, or one where its intentions are misunderstood by whiteness. It cannot be simplified as “just a spreadsheet” or quickened by Artificial Intelligence, and there is no short-cut method for putting it together. The work is the work.
Looking through and learning about all of these shows, reading their descriptions, seeing the countries that people are travelling from, the topics their productions are engaging, are all deeply rewarding aspects of this project because they remind me that every life is a story of value. And despite the hellfire politics of the 21st century, despite the protest suppression, the deportations, the defunding of the arts and the institutional censorship, the daily reminder that the world is in a state of constant crisis, the endless natural disasters caused by unnatural human greed, normalised persecution and the genocides in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Palestine, of the Uyghurs in China and the Rohingya in Myanmar, the artists are still making art. The perseverance of artists is a reminder to never stop feeling, like an anti-numbing agent we can apply to our hearts and our collective conscience. May we never forget all the ways in which art keeps us alive.
It is important that we remember the art that is being made in these times, to show people in future years that it is possible to keep living and to push back against despair and oppression. I am glad that The Fringe of Colour Database acts as an archive of resistance from Global Majority artists, while also providing a record of race and ethnicity at the Edinburgh festivals. This has practical implications: in making it each year, I notice subtle changes in details such as how long Artists of Colour are typically doing their shows – either for the full festival, perhaps for half the festival, or just a few days – which may indicate something about the feasibility of doing a run at the Fringe. I can see how many of these shows are being made by artists from Scotland. I am also able to statistically compare the percentage of shows at the Edinburgh festivals that centre Artists of Colour in the present year versus previous years. For instance, this year the data suggests that 7.8% of the shows at the Fringe centred Artists of Colour. Last year the figure was 7.9% and in 2019 it was 6.6%.
I do not do this to make any particular conclusion because I do not necessarily believe that more People of Colour at the Fringe automatically indicates some kind of progress. I think I believed that at one point, but I don’t anymore. The Fringe is a beast, fuelled by white male approval. It is one of the most obvious examples of how the capitalist fury of production and overproduction seeps its way into our artistic spaces. As an audience member, I am often overwhelmed by the sheer consumption of art that takes place at the Fringe, the notion that it is normal and perhaps even admirable to see several shows in one day. Sure, no one is putting a gun to anyone’s head to do this, but there is an undeniable culture of binging at the festival that, to me, seems at odds with the practice of engaging with art. I say this while recognising the artistic value in getting to perform a show over and over and over again without breaks, but I am also curious about this notion of perfecting a show, only to one day reach an end point and start from scratch with a new one a few months later.
The Big Artists of Colour Meet-Up 2025 | Aileen Lees Photography
Every year there is always more. More rent on short-term lets, more money spent on higher ticket prices, more controversy, more disruption, more heat. Would more Artists of Colour at the Fringe be a sign of progress, or a sign that we are still beholden to this machine that is branded as the marketplace of creative talent, with flyerers hawking a good time and money falling out of the holes in our pockets. Signs of successful growth should look like more opportunities for artists, more funding for Artists of Colour in Scotland to make work, more access to the arts for those who are economically excluded (which would automatically benefit everyone else), more grassroots organisations led and supported by People of Colour who dare to imagine other ways of doing things, more time to sit with and think about what we are engaging with, and space to discuss those experiences with one another.
The purpose of The Database and the rest of the work I do with Fringe of Colour in the summer is not to encourage more Artists of Colour to perform at the Fringe. Instead, it is to support those who continue to do so because they feel like they must, or because they still find it useful and joyful to be there. To them, the Fringe of Colour meet-ups and parties are a place where they can feel acknowledged and wanted, where they can seek out others in the community and make the active decision to support one another.
First Nations performance collective Hot Brown Honey paved the way for these gatherings when they hosted a party for People of Colour at the normally exclusive Assembly Artists Bar in 2018. In many ways, I feel like I am helping to carry the torch that they lit all those years ago; I hosted the party in 2019 in the same location, before moving to other venues and hosting in differing formats. Others have also kept the fire burning – for the last two years, comedian Sophie Duker has thrown a mid-Fringe party for Artists of Colour at the Assembly bar and has also built and facilitated an extensive group chat to keep us connected during the festival period. Playwright Sanjay Lago hosted a Chai morning this Fringe as a relaxed alcohol-free event for Artists of Colour, and comedian Thanyia Moore threw a spontaneous and joyful goodbye party. These combined efforts (and more) mean our community is getting increasingly better connected every year.
The Hot Brown Honey party at the Assembly Bar in 2018
The Fringe of Colour party at the Assembly Bar in 2019
Fringe of Colour’s own events kicked off with the Welcome Link-Up for Artists of Colour, held at the start of the Fringe at Lighthouse: Edinburgh’s Radical bookshop – a longtime supporter of Fringe of Colour. Every year, Lighthouse provides space on their doors specifically for posters of shows by Artists of Colour. They look after this work and they look after me, all while putting together their long-running free festival, Book Fringe, along with fellow indie Edinburgh bookshops Typewronger and Argonaut.
The following week, we got together at Fringe Central for a sharing circle and Ticket Swap, where performers, producers, writers, directors, and all makers of Fringe shows took part in a lucky dip. Attendees exchanged a free ticket for their show for a free ticket to someone else’s as a physical commitment to support another production and to enable someone to support them in return. In the past, I have helped facilitate the sharing of large amounts of comps (complimentary tickets) between groups and individuals through the Fringe of Colour network, but I am not convinced that this is a sustainable approach to helping Audiences of Colour find shows by Artists of Colour, because of how much artists rely on ticket sales to help them break even. A single comp per show was an attempt at a compromise – word-of-mouth is such a powerful tool at the Edinburgh festivals, and I hope this event was useful to those who attended.
The Big Artists of Colour Meet-Up 2025 | Aileen Lees Photography
The Big Artists of Colour Meet-Up took place over the halfway mark on the 14th August, made possible thanks to partnerships with the Edinburgh International Festival who provided the venue and staffing free of charge, the Edinburgh Art Festival, the Fringe Society, and Lighthouse. If you weren’t there, I’m sorry to say you missed out! We partied it up at the Festival Theatre with over 150 Artists of Colour, with sponsored catering from Uwagboe’s Kitchen and Grill arranged by performer Lula Mebrahtu, and a raucous DJ set from Gemma Cairney who had us breakdancing and doing the electric slide on carpeted flooring. Local writers Katucha Bento, Clementine E. Burnley, and Titilayo Farukuoye donated the performance of a poem in memory of Dr Fortune Gomo, a Black woman from Zimbabwe who was murdered in Dundee in July by a white man in broad daylight. Writer Leilani J. Taneus-Miller borrowed the mic to remind us all that the 14th August marked 234 years since the secret meeting between enslaved Africans and maroons in Haiti, a gathering in the forest of Bwa Kayiman that sparked the Haitian Revolution.
It was an auspicious and beautiful occasion to let off steam and revel in each other’s achievements, and a reminder that coming together in celebration is a powerful act of devotion and solidarity. The photos throughout this Editorial, taken by Aileen Lees, are from that memorable night.
Throughout the years, Fringe of Colour has taken on many forms. It has been a free ticket scheme for People of Colour to attend shows by Performers of Colour, with the bill footed by venues rather than the artists themselves. It has been its own arts festival, Fringe of Colour Films, organised by a big team of creative practitioners, and it has been a podcast (I hope to bring Before the Applause back one day).
It remains an organiser of community events and a publishing platform, Fringe of Colour Responses, where Writers of Colour respond to art and performance happening in Scotland by Artists of Colour. For funding reasons, we could not publish as many Responses as intended this summer. However, the ones we have published – with thanks to Disability Arts Online, who partnered with Responses as part of their Diverse Critics initiative – are bold and brilliant essays that remind us arts writing does not need to be quantitative or written in the pretence of objectivity. That it is okay to look through the lens of your own lived experience to try to understand what an artist is making. Editing this writing and working alongside Tyler Lea, who sub-edits, feels like an amazing privilege and I genuinely believe our writing team is building something deeply needed in Scotland.
And at the heart of all of this is The Database.
A performer I met one night in August asked me why I do all of this, if I have never had a show at the Fringe myself. I find this an interesting question, because it implies that this kind of community work can only be done if it is self-serving a performer’s own interests. The reality is that all of this takes a humungous amount of time and energy, so much so that I am not actually able to focus on my own writing practice in the summer, let alone consider bringing a show to the Fringe. This is something I made peace with a long time ago, instead knowing that I am storing up ideas and places for my writing to go when I am finally able to get back to it. It would be impossible for a performer to do a full run at the Fringe and to also put all the pieces of this work together themselves at the same time, whereas it is manageable for one person with the right support network and collaborators.
The Big Artists of Colour Meet-Up 2025 | Aileen Lees Photography
So why bother, if I’m not a performer? After working on a project for so long, and falling in love with the artistry and determination of so many people I have met during that time, love is the only honest answer to that question. Fringe of Colour brings the people I love some comfort and some assistance; it brings the people I love together for celebration and mutual support. A friend who is based in Glasgow told me she hadn’t been to Edinburgh during the Fringe for fifteen years but made sure to break that long absence to attend the Big Meet-Up. For creatives based in Scotland, the Fringe does not always feel like a welcoming place due to its focus on transience, the crowds and traffic, and the prices that skyrocket during festival season. The honour of my friend’s presence at the event is still dancing in my mind.
I intend for this work to be helpful to both artists and audiences. It is extremely hard to get your voice heard over the roughly 4,500 shows and events happening across the Edinburgh festivals in August. If you are looking for work by Artists of Colour at the Fringe, it is routinely difficult to find it because this work often makes up less than 8% of what is on offer. I do not wish to ask artists to do more labour than they are already doing and I provide The Database not as an obligation for audiences to use it, but as a tool that is ready to be used. I do this work because I enjoy it and so that others do not need to.
The Big Artists of Colour Meet-Up 2025 | Aileen Lees Photography
It might seem strange to some people that I have stuck with the same format for The Database all these years, especially in this age of new technologies and digital platforms. But there is much to love about the low-fi, portable, shifting workspace that the Google Sheet provides. I like that it is compatible with a screen-reader, making it accessible for visually-impaired and blind users. I like that it is updatable on the fly, meaning I can always add artists who are missing from the list of eligible shows because they registered late for the Fringe, or because I missed them in my initial scan. I like that it’s relatively environmentally-friendly and accessible from anywhere in the world, and in perpetuity. I like the silly little anonymous animals that pop up when someone is using the Google Sheet.
I like that the search function allows users to find shows about specific topics that intersect with race, such as disability, class, or gender and sexuality (for instance, if you are looking for shows by Artists of Colour that address neurodiversity, you can use Ctrl+F on a PC or Cmd + Alt + Space on a Mac to search by keyword, e.g. “ADHD”). I also like that there is room for multiple festivals which I have placed in their own tabs, including the Fringe, the Edinburgh Art Festival, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. I like that no one event is visibly prioritised, because regardless of whether you’re looking at it on a phone or a desktop, multiple spreadsheet cells of different events are viewable at any one time, making it somewhat digitally democratic. I like The Database, and I haven’t found a good reason to change it yet. As artists living in a technology-focused world, I think we can get carried away with the idea that something must be cutting-edge in order for it to have value.
A screenshot of The Fringe of Colour Database, while it was being used by “Anonymous Loris,” “Anonymous Moose” and “Anonymous Nyan Cat”
As they do, new ideas spring from those that have come before. This is an important thing in the life cycle of creative work. This summer, multidisciplinary artist LULA.XYZ created a printed brochure from The Fringe of Colour Database, putting the 300+ shows I’d listed onto the physical page. For a lot of performers, seeing their work in a tangible booklet, no longer drowning in the 3,893 shows in the official Fringe brochure as part of the 7.8%, has brought considerable joy.
In the weeks leading up to its printing, before I’d had the chance to see it, I felt compelled to support the project (branded as “Edinburgh Fringe With Spice”) because I wanted to use the Fringe of Colour platform to help promote something that was being built for the community. But soon after I picked up a copy, I realised that I had not been named as the collector of the key information that was used to make it.
Regrettably, my name and references to my labour have been left out of the brochure, which also contains wording that suggests no other notable platform exists to spotlight Fringe shows that centre Artists of Colour (in particular, “The one central place where you can find shows by performances [sic] of colour with ease” which appears on the back cover and on promotional posters). The result has been public confusion about recognition and credit, and I have had to watch myself disappear from this work on semantic technicalities. The fake Toni Morrison quote almost led me to accept the erasure as an inevitable result of doing “the real work,” but I now see I was adopting the mentality of self-pity.
As I teach my students in my capacity as a lecturer, it is essential to develop a robust practice of appropriately crediting our sources. This allows people to find other ways into the work, to see the journey of that work and to seek out more information, and it makes a project expansive and honest. With the greatest sincerity, I really wish that this had been done for the brochure, to build on the work of The Fringe of Colour Database rather than invisibilise it.
A spreadsheet is not just a spreadsheet. A party is not just a party. These are acts of defiance in a society that wants us to sink into despair and to be invisible in our grief at the actions of the wealthy elite who already see this world as beyond saving. I think of another (real) Toni Morrison quote, one in which she is reflecting on a conversation she had with an artist friend who implored her not to fall into a pit of despair after the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush, and instead to get to work. “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” To all the performers, writers, technicians, directors, producers, dramaturgs, designers, speakers, and limitless creatives I had the pleasure of interacting with this summer and over the years, you are making room for hope in a dark world and in a festival system where competition and consumption drains the life out of art. It is a powerful thing to be in the belly of the beast and to still find purpose.
I wanted to write about the seventh year of Fringe of Colour because I am accepting that I must celebrate the work myself, before I can expect anyone else to do it for me. That is the best way to beat silence, erasure, and self-pity. In September, I will return to my own art, joined by all the stories and conversations that have kept me inspired throughout the summer. I will continue to see the value in this work and demand that it is properly funded, and I will be back next year with my scanning and my copy-and-pasting, for this labour of love.
Jess at The Big Artists of Colour Meet-Up 2025 | Aileen Lees Photography
Thank you for reading this far and for supporting Fringe of Colour. This summer was a tough time for me and the organisation, because of an important funding application that was rejected in July. If you feel at all compelled, please consider donating £5 or more to help cover some of the organisational costs of running FoC (website subscriptions, domain ownership, accounting). It would mean so much and would help considerably.
In solidarity,
Jess
