Fringe Theatre

Fringe theatre is theatre that is experimental in style or subject matter. The term comes from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In London, the Fringe is the term given to small scale theatres, many of them located above pubs, and the equivalent to New York's Off-Off-Broadway theatres and Europe's "free theater" groups.

In unjuried theatre festivals, all submissions are accepted, and sometimes the participating acts may be chosen by lottery, in contrast to juried festivals in which acts are selected based on their artistic qualities. Unjuried festivals (e.g., Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Adelaide Fringe Festival, and Fringe World) permit artists to perform a wide variety of works.

The term was founded in the 1940s, when eight theatre companies showed up at the Edinburgh International Festival, hoping to gain recognition from the mass gathering at the festival. Robert Kemp, a Scottish journalist and playwright, described the situation, "Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise than before ... I am afraid some of us are not going to be at home during the evenings!".Edinburgh Festival Fringe was founded in 1947. The first movement in Britain started in the 1960s, and is considered similar to the United States' Off-Off-Broadway theatres and Europe's "free theater" groups. The term came into use in the late 1950s, and the show Beyond the Fringe premiered in Edinburgh in 1960, before transferring to Broadway and West End. Some of the early innovators in fringe theatre were an American bookseller, James Haynes, who in 1963, created the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Also noted in this period is the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Jerzy Grotowski's Theatre of 13 Rows, and Józef Szajna's Studio Theatre in Warsaw.

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