Microfestival

The Forest Fringe won the 2009 Empty Space Award, and in mere months they’ve put the money and prestige to good work and set up Microfestivals around the country. Fellow nominee The Arches will now host the Glasgow incarnation which festival director Andy Field describes as "part gallery, part scratch night, part festival", and will showcase Tim Etchells, Little Bulb Theatre, and Action Hero amongst others.

The Forest Fringe emerged out of The Forest, an entirely volunteer run collaborative project in Edinburgh which comprises a vegan cafe, a hairdressers, a record label, and a performance space. Works in progress and experiments are encouraged and, despite consisting of over sixty events in five locations over two weeks, all events are free. I spent the last two summers in The Bedlam Theatre just opposite The Forest and after some unique experiences I’m delighted to hear it’s now coming to Glasgow.

The Micro Festivals are all intensely site-specific. As Field points out, "Spaces are never empty. They are always already full. Full of conventions and prohibitions. Choked with history. Noisy with politics." I asked co-director Deborah Pearson how they approached the Arches as a venue. "The Arches is going to be a particularly exciting Microfestival," she replies."We’re setting up a very open, nearly gallery-like approach to exploring the building, which should encourage audiences to happen upon unusual encounters, while also seeing works-in-progress of end on shows." Field then lists the kind of material we can expect to stumble across – "video installations, one-on-one encounters, interactive shows, hidden treasure hunts. We want to play with quite what an epic maze the Arches is – with huge candle-lit installations alongside a lot of tiny hidden things that people will have to do a bit of exploring to discover."

Both Pearson and Field are keen to reach a wider audience with intimate personal experiences which are often limited by necessity to smaller numbers. "We want to offer these encounters to people beyond the 'in the know' elite by making this effort to take our work to them," says Field, looking to music festivals, local church halls, warehouses and galleries for future projects.

At the Fringe these fragments function as a collaborative workshop between audience and artist. However, the Microfestivals are ticketed events. You could argue that, by normalising low-budget fragmentary work as exportable theatre, the festivals undermine more established companies trying to make high-end theatre and sustain Equity rates of pay. But despite stating recently that "we should demolish the National Theatre," Field assures me "the Forest Fringe isn't trying to replace or supersede anything... Without the kind of rich and fertile community that we are building around Forest you wouldn't be able to sustain a healthy and diverse mainstream."

Of course it needs to be good. To quote Brook "A bad happening must be seen to be believed. It can be no more than a series of mild shocks followed by let-downs which progressively combine to neutralize the further shocks before they arrive." However, given my experience of The Forest Fringe – a family reunion, a western saloon, dancing to old VHS tapes in some guy’s bedroom – I’m expecting great things from Microfestival.