Editorial – An Introduction to Fringe of Colour Films
By Jess Brough - 01/08/20
The development of Fringe of Colour
This time last year, I was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival having a panic attack in a public toilet.
It was the second year of Fringe of Colour – an initiative that began as a simple publicly-available spreadsheet listing shows at the Fringe by Black and Brown Artists/Artists of Colour. By 2019, it had grown into a free ticket scheme for People of Colour to attend those shows. The project aimed to address issues these communities face at the Fringe, and the financial inaccessibility of the festival.
The night of the panic attack, I was overworked and under pressure. The ticket scheme had taken a lot out of me, emotionally and mentally, despite having support from the Fringe Society’s customer services team. The project was unfunded, so I could not pay anyone to help out and I felt uncomfortable asking anyone to work for free knowing exposure gained from the project would go to me alone. A brain can only hold so much tension before it starts to sweat, and the only available outlet for me at that point was a ferocious wave of tears and caught breath.
The issue with jumping into problems within institutions is that the “To Fix” list is vast and there aren’t many people within said institutions to wade through the stickiness with you. Fringe of Colour had become something that was much heavier than my arms alone could handle and it had revealed problems within arts festivals that I saw no substantial way of being solved, without throwing everything away and starting again.
The purpose of Fringe of Colour has never been to “transform” or “diversify” the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Prior to its inception, I’d learnt that the notion you can change an institution from within is a lie those at the top sell you, so that you put all your effort in something built to stay the same. That being said, arts festivals such as the Fringe are crucial moments in time for those in creative industries – a space to test out new work and methods, meet with others in your field, grow a fan base and maybe even win a prize that can help raise your profile or possibly cover some of your living costs for a short period. We need arts festivals, because we need to show work and we need to see work. Creating and connecting are some of the only tools we have to survive societies that fail us. There are, however, issues with how we have been doing this for a long time.
A pandemic and no Fringe
In March, that cloying feeling of panic crept back - this time it was sparked by relentless news of sickness and loss, an emboldened police state and police brutality, and, as always, new murdered Black people for reasons that extend far beyond the memory of the protected.
I did not tackle that panic on my own. During the early months of lockdown I joined support groups and called loved ones. Prize money from Dave’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards and donations allowed me to bring people in to help with Fringe of Colour. As individuals, we must be able to share these loads on shoulders that can wrap around us.
When the Fringe announced its cancellation due to COVID-19, I wondered if this might be the year I get to see what summer looks like without a cloud of pressure hanging over it. No Fringe, no Fringe of Colour, right?
Very quickly I realised that there was a problem in my thinking. The existence of an initiative that sought to support People of Colour in creative capacities really should not rely on a corporate, mostly-white organisation to do its own organising. There was still work to be done. Many people in my Fringe of Colour network and beyond were frightened for their futures and those of their loved ones – their health, their careers and their ability to pay their bills. Sitting in isolation in my Edinburgh flat, I reflected painfully on the possibility of experiencing an entirely new state of loneliness and disconnect. Fringe of Colour was dreamt up, in part, to tackle the very isolation I was already starting to feel in lockdown.
Fringe of Colour Films has therefore come from necessity. It was created to help – artistically and financially. We had a responsibility to support people who would soon be able to add another statistic to their name: most likely ethnic groups in the UK to contract or die from coronavirus.
In the shadow of death, artists have made work. They have found the ability within themselves to create, express and share inner thoughts with us, the audiences. They have joined writing groups and attended workshops, bought and borrowed equipment, learned entirely new skills, and translated their live performances onto film. These last few months have been a journey through anger, depressions, frustration and fear, revisiting each stop along the way but also finding the paths to inspiration, joy and collaboration.
What’s in store for Week 1 of the festival
We could not be prouder to present a programme for Fringe of Colour Films that showcases the movements of this journey. Each week, we will be releasing two films commissioned by Fringe of Colour – performances we have encouraged artists to continue working on or create from the beginning, and then film for our festival. In the first week, we have CLUB by Esme Allman – a reinterpretation of a live performance that presents the precious movements of queer Black people seeking themselves in a nightclub. In the UK, we do not know when we will be able to meet in these spaces again, but “family knows where to go”, and we have found that place in the online space.
Mara Menzies presents a journey through the forest and a lesson to take to heart with Consequence, demonstrating that the ancient art of oral storytelling is a gift that must be preserved.
Each week, we will also be showcasing two filmed poems, as part of Sorry I Was On Mute, a series directed by Hannah Lavery. These poems come from a writing group that has stood firm in its existence throughout lockdown, continuing to meet on Friday mornings to workshop new writing with the generous leadership of Lavery. Eight poets from the Scottish BAME Writers Network have taken part in this series, embracing the new medium of poetry readings like actors – staring straight down the barrel of the camera and releasing their words. In our first week, we have On Luing by Clementine Burnley, who leads us into a kitchen and fruit bowl with hidden sweetness, and Mother Rests by Andrés N. Ordorica, who shows that thousands of miles cannot separate you from a loved one who occupies permanence in your thinking.
Andrés will be joining us for our first live talk of the Fringe of Colour Films programme – part of a series called This Sh*t Is For Us which will take place each Saturday in August. A nod to Solange’s album A Seat at the Table, which, since its release in 2016, has encouraged us to think about designing our own tables and putting our chairs by those instead, rather than the tables in rooms with historically restricted access. This Sh*t Is For Us will feature round-table conversations with people who have created, nurtured or been a part of spaces specifically intended to support their own communities. Joining Andrés on the 1st August will be Adebusola Ramsay, an artist and member of Yon Afro – a collective for Scotland-based Black women and non-binary people to meet, collaborate and celebrate our many ways of existing in the country. Alongside them will be Jherane Patmore, founder of the ever-inspiring queer, feminist and Jamaican literary space Rebel Women Lit.
Conversations and reflections on art and performance are a huge part of this project, which is why we have also created a brand new writing platform, Fringe of Colour Responses. We have an amazing team of writers and editors bringing you thoughtful essays on topics such as the move of theatres to the digital space and suggestions for how best to engage with online work. We will also be publishing written responses to some of the work at the festival throughout August - not to review it, but to engage with the content further and bring in the wider contexts the films are situated in. We hope you enjoy reading them.
Our weekly collections of films will also include submissions from independent artists and film-makers. Some of these films have been created in the last few months and others were released before Fringe of Colour Films was created, but have all found a home in our festival. In Week 1, Toussaint Douglass presents a new comedy sketch show using greenscreen skills he has developed under lockdown and sean wai keung transforms a live theatrical production into an imitation of a YouTube Vlog with FORTUNE online. The performance, which interrogates racism directed towards East Asian people, comes at a time when prominent politicians continue to refer to coronavirus as ‘The Chinese Disease’.
Nicky Chue falls into nature for plant portals: breath, emulating the actions of those of us who have looked to the safety and reassurance of the outside during lockdown, by visiting parks, forests and open spaces. Comedy groups Piñata and Objectively Funny responded to our call to collaborate with us and co-commission work for the festival, resulting in the first chapter of a new comedy series, Legal Regal by Shem Pennant, which exemplifies how animation allows writers to create and collaborate through a quarantine.
We are privileged to be able to show four previously-screened films at our festival: End Austerity by Haneefah Muhammad and Sophie Gresswell, Denial by Courtney Stoddart and Vanessa Kanbi, Somebody’s Child by Tim Lo and MASS by Nadeem Din-Gabisi. End Austerity lights a candle for one of the most vulnerable groups of people in our society – the older generation of Black women who have given several decades to caring for others and yet were not afforded the same care by the state during the pandemic. As historian Jade Bentil writes, “their own health and wellbeing was forfeit to the demands of caring for a nation that would never care for them.”
Denial, a spoken word piece filmed on locations across Edinburgh, demands accountability from those who refuse to acknowledge and dismantle the white supremacy that guides their lives – those who “deny that pain came from the bruise.” Lo restlessly throws questions to the listener in Somebody’s Child, a film that merges poetic storytelling and dance, in a way anyone might when willing to reach a sick or lost loved one, while MASS urges us to congregate – to amass strength in connectivity, to seek out communion.
And this, after all, is what Fringe of Colour has always hoped to do. Our team has grown significantly this year and Fringe of Colour Films brings together the contributions of over 60 people, as team members, writers and creators. We need places to be together, to see each other and to imagine then manifest new ways, and if the safest space for that to be is online then that is where we’ll go. We cannot change those that are already fixed in place, but we can offer up novel methods of bonding and we can meet you there.
Jess Brough is the founder of Fringe of Colour and is a writer, producer and psycholinguistics PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Jess has written for gal-dem and The Skinny, and has been published with an essay in The Bi-Bible: New Testimonials and a short story in Scottish literary magazine Extra Teeth and The Best of British Fantasy 2019 anthology.
Twitter: @Jessica_Brough | Instagram: @jessbrough
