By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The continent’s biggest and oldest Fringe festival turns 43 this summer — with shows (216 of them) and artists (1,600-plus from 11 countries). And now the upcoming edition Aug. 15 to 25 has a theme.

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Find Your Fringe, announced Thursday at the annual May Fringe Revue, is named in honour of a venerable Edmonton tradition: in the end you have to curate your own Fringe experience from the dizzying array of theatrical possibilities at the annual summer extravaganza, with accoutrements like the outdoor music series on the ATB Stage (curated by Lindsey Walker), street performance, food trucks, beer tent hangs with friends, and more.

And the poster designed by the Fringe’s resident designer Yu-Chen (Tseng) Beliveau, an artistic capture of the Fringe site in Old Strathcona, is designed with “hidden references to every theme” in the Fringe’s 42-year history. Yes, Fringees, your homework is cut out for you.     

The 216-show local/ cross-country/ international lineup from which you’ll Find Your Fringe come August represents a steady and palpable growth from the 185 shows of The Answer Is Fringe in 2023 and 160 the year before that. Of the 38 venues where you’ll be seeing shows, 10 of them are official Fringe theatres programmed by lottery, and 28 are BYOVs acquired and outfitted by Fringe artists themselves.

At Thursday’s Fringe Revue, bookended by jazz from the trombone-accordion duo (what could be more Fringe?) of Audrey Ochoa and Tiff Hall, co-hosts Fringe director Murray Utas and Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart noted that “everyone fringes differently…. Find your Fringe; do it your way….”

Dart’s own “favourite thing to find at the Fringe”? “I live for the ‘laugh so hard you cry’ moment,” she says, “and the way the Fringe celebrates community.” For Utas, it’s often “going to a show you know nothing about,” and the attendant sense of discovery.

As Utas points out, the lineup’s 11-show international contingent, including offerings from Nigeria, Sweden Australia, includes several “big touring shows,” for the first time since COVID.

Find Your Fringe includes the return of pêhonân, the Fringe’s Indigenous performance series which happens in a variety of venues, curated by the festival’s Indigenous director MJ Belcourt Moses. As well you’ll find the free KidsFringe back (which attracted 13,000 visits last year) in Lighthouse Park, for young fringees and their grown-up companions, curated by the indefatigable Alyson Dicey.

New this year is the re-location of the Fringe’s always sold-out Late-Night Cabaret — which for 13 summers has invariably turned away hopeful audience insomniacs from the Backstage Theatre — to a larger venue: the Granite Curling Club. It’s been a Fringe venue before now, in summer’s past (I remember seeing a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on ice there).

Festival guides are available starting July 31, with Fringe tickets on sale Aug. 7, at fringetheatre.ca.

Dart updated the Sustain Fringe “support what you love” campaign, designed to bolster the festival in these times when expenses have rocketed and funding has dwindled. Midway through the campaign, which began in March, 34 monthly donors have become 290, with $100,000 in donations, towards a $300,000 goal. Have a peek at 12thnight’s interview with Dart in March. “If every Fringe fan donated $5 a month,” Dart notes, “the Fringe would become instantly sustainable…. You are part of this show.” Contribute at fringetheatre.ca/sustain/. Additionally, the Fringe has added a 50/50 raffle, with tickets on sale through May 26.

At the Revue Utas also announced the upcoming post-festival Fringe Theatre season. It opens Nov. 29 and 30 with Erik Richards’ new punk rock play with music Brother Rat, adapted from the song Brother Rat/ What Slayde Says by Canadian punk band NoMeansNo. Richards, an eight-year Fringe veteran who started performing and producing at the Fringe as an 18-year-old just out of high school, calls it “the most wild, outrageous piece of music!” And it led to his first full play.

The season curated by Utas includes the return in March of ᐋᒋᒧᐃᐧᐣ âcimowin, the Fringe’s winter storytelling series from Treaty 6 Indigenous artists, curated by MJ Belcourt Moses. And the finale, April 25 to May 3 at the Westbury Theatre, is Alphabet Line, a new play by (and produced by) AJ Hrooshkin, the winner of this year’s Westbury Family Theatre Award. Inspired by the playwright’s own rural roots as a kid whose dad lost the family farm — and their love of trains — it’s set in Yonker, Saskatchewan in the late 1940s, with a queer protagonist who’s a farm kid reaching out from that isolation. And as the playwright describes, it’s all about “what it means to be a gay hick out in Western Canada.”

Season passes for this trio of shows are now available at fringetheatre.ca.