The Asheville Fringe Arts Festival

Fringe is a performing arts tradition that started in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1947 when eight performing groups were excluded from the mainstream annual arts festival. They decided to perform anyway, finding inexpensive or free venues on the fringes of the city. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has since grown into one of the largest arts festivals in the world, eclipsing the original festival exponentially.

Great ideas spread. Over the years, Fringe festivals have started all over the world from Europe to Canada to Australia to the United States to Asia and beyond. The Asheville Fringe Arts Festival began in 2003 after Susan and Giles Collard of Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre experienced Fringe festivals in San Francisco and Toronto. They started Asheville’s Fringe in one venue, the beloved BeBe Theatre. But the following year, it had expanded to other venues. The Festival is now a multi-day, multi-venue performing arts extravaganza, with performances in theatres, galleries, clubs and odd spaces that even include the LaZoom bus.

Asheville Fringe continues to ask artists to explore the edges of their work, to collaborate across genres and to bring new and innovative performances to culturally adventurous audiences. We strongly suggest that you see more than one Fringe show because of the incredible variety of artists and types of work. One show is just not enough to really have the total Fringe Festival experience!

OUR MISSION

The Asheville Fringe Society is dedicated to cultivating strange and wonderful work that lies outside the mainstream. The Asheville Fringe Arts Festival provides artists with opportunities to explore the edges of their work, to collaborate across genres and to bring new and innovative performances to culturally adventurous audiences. Our continual goal is to curate experiences that expand the minds and hearts of our audiences and to be inclusive of artists who work within a myriad of genres, styles, and forms to create truly unique and original pieces in our community.