The Fringe mostly creates a center of attention events from the performing arts, particularly drama and comedy, although dance and music also figure notably. The Edinburgh Fringe is the world’s leading art festival. Theatre events can vary from the classics of ancient Greece, Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, through to new works. However, there is no selection committee to approve the entries, so any type of event is possible in the Fringe festival. The organizers are for this Edinburgh Fringe is “The Festival Fringe Society” they publish the program, sell tickets and offer advice to performers from the Fringe office on the Royal Mile. This festival was established in 1947 as an unconventional to the Edinburgh International Festival, it takes place in Scotland's capital during th ree weeks every August in combination with a number of other arts and intellectual festivals, collectively known as the Edinburgh Fringe .

The Fringe started life when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to the inaugural Edinburgh International Festival in 1947. They aimed to take advantage of the large theatre crowds and showcase their own, more alternative, theatre. It got its name in the following year (1948) after Robert Kemp, a Scottish playwright and journalist, wrote during the second Edinburgh International Festival: ‘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!’.

There was no organisation initially until students of the University of Edinburgh set up a drop-in centre in 1951 where cheap food and a bed for the night were made available to participating groups. It was 1955 before the first (not wholly successful) attempt was made to provide a central booking service.

In 1959 there came the first signs of organisation with the formation of the "Festival Fringe Society". A constitution was drawn up in which the policy of not vetting or censoring shows was set out and the Society produced the first guide to all Fringe shows. 19 companies attended the Fringe in that year. In following years problems began to arise as the Fringe became too big for students and volunteers to deal with. Eventually in 1969 the Society became a limited company, and in 1971 it employed its first administrator.

Much of the history of the Fringe has become obscure in popular terms but there is general agreement that the artistic credentials of the Fringe were established by the creators of the Traverse Theatre, John Calder, Jim Haynes and Richard Demarco in 1963. While their original objective was to maintain something of the Festival atmosphere in Edinburgh all year round, the Traverse Theatre quickly and regularly presented cutting edge drama to an international audience on both the Edinburgh International Festival and on the Fringe during August. It set a standard to which other companies on the Fringe aspired. The Traverse is occasionally referred to as 'The Fringe venue that got away', reflecting its current status as a permanent and integral part of the Edinburgh Arts scene. However, it continues to form the bedrock of drama on the Fringe at festival time.

No history of the Fringe would be complete without a mention of the venues. According to the Fringe Society there were 261 in 2006, although over 80 of them housed event(s) or exhibition(s) which are not part of the main performing art genres that the Fringe is generally known for. Over the first 20 years each performing group had its own hall. However, by around 1970 the concept of sharing a hall became popular, principally as a means of cutting costs. It could be possible to host up to 6 or 7 different shows per day in a hall. The obvious next step was to partition a venue into two or more performing spaces; the majority of today's venues fit into this category. This approach was taken a stage further by the early 1980s with the arrival of the super-venue - a location that contains many performing spaces. The Circuit was one of the early super-venues; it was in fact a tented “village”, including one space with room for an audience of 400, that was situated on a piece of empty ground, popularly known as “The Hole in The Ground” where the Saltire complex, which now houses the Traverse, was subsequently built in the early 1990s.

Nowadays, venues come in all shapes and sizes, with use being made of every conceivable space from proper theatres (e.g. Traverse or Bedlam Theatre), custom-made theatres (e.g. Music Hall in the Assembly Rooms), historic castles (C venues), to lecture theatres (Pleasance, George Square and Sweet ECA), conference centres, other university rooms and spaces, temporary structures (The Famous Spiegeltent and the Udderbelly ), churches and church halls, schools, a public toilet, the back of a taxi, and even in your own home/place of rest.

Over the years this approach has led to adverse criticisms about the quality of the arts on the Fringe. Much of this criticism comes from individual arts critics in national newspapers, hard-line aficionados of the Edinburgh International Festival, and occasionally from the Edinburgh International Festival itself. It is inevitable that with 2000+ shows there will be wide variations in quality, from the top 50 shows that can readily compete with items on the International programme in terms of professional rigour and artistic content (in their own fields), to those inevitably dire shows at the bottom. In between, there are a range of shows that will have varying appeal to festival-goers.

The Fringe has grown dramatically over the 60 years of its existence. Statistics for the 2007 festival which are published on the official website concluded that it was the largest festival on record: there were 31,000 performances of 2,050 different shows in 250 venues. Ticket sales amount to around £1.5 million.

Source: www.wikipedia.org

Some stuff you might not know about the 61st Edinburgh Fringe

Fringe 2007 featured 31,000 performances of 2,050 shows in 250 venues

An estimated 18,626 performers were on stage at the Fringe in 2007.

Theatre made up 31% of the programme followed closely by Comedy with 30.5% Music was next with 17%, Children’s 5.5% Musicals & Opera totals, 5%. Dance & Physical Theatre weighed in at 4.5% Exhibitions is 3.5% and finally Events 3%.

40% (815) of the shows were World Premiers and from the remaining 60% of the programme 236 of the shows were European premieres and 93 are UK premieres.

304 shows at the Fringe were absolutely free .

In 2007 there were 6 new awards available to performers. This is in addition to the 15 that were up for grabs in 2006.

At the Fringe in 2007 53,284 tickets were bought in its first week of ticket sales.

1.6 Million tickets (1,697,293) were sold during the 2007 Fringe smashing all arts festival records.

The Fringe sells 118% more tickets than it did only 10 years ago (776,560 in 1997, 1,531,606 in 2006).

The Fringe has a 75% market share of all attendance at Edinburgh’s year-round festivals and annually generates around £75 million for the Edinburgh and Scottish economy.

Source: www.edfringe.com