Oh Canada: A Reflection on a Canadian Fringe Season
This week we have a guest post from one of our favorite fringe friends, Blair Moro. Blair has been writing, directing, and producing fringe shows on the Canadian circuit for years. Some fan favorites have been "Cabaret of Murder," "Brain," and this year's "Cults." Blair gives us a peek into his life as a Canadian Fringe producer.
Blair resides in Vancouver, Canada. Beyond the stage Blair runs a YouTube Chanel called Totodile Tales, and is about one of the nicest fringe friends you can make (in Lauren's humble opinion).
Oh Canada. We are so incredibly privileged and lucky to be making art on Turtle Island. I reside in the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Each year I travel across this beautiful country in the hopes that people will pay money to see my weird art. Enter: The Canadian Fringe Festival Circuit.
The Canadian Fringe Festival Circuit
The Canadian Fringe Festival Circuit is one of the best systems in the fringe world. If you’re lucky you can start in Montreal in June, making your way across the country over the course of almost 4 months until you end in Vancouver. The major festivals happen IN ORDER from east to west. In 2024 I was lucky enough to win a spot with the CAFF Lottery which guaranteed a certain amount of festivals for the year. I locked in 5 festivals, with 2 more being added afterwards. Our 7 festival journey took us from Montreal to Ottawa to Toronto to Winnipeg to Calgary to Edmonton to Victoria (and somehow I missed out on my hometown of Vancouver). Now, there are 21 Canadian Fringe Festivals currently, and each has a different level of audience and length.
The fests I will be talking about today are the ones I have participated in, and the ones that I believe have the best potential. Because as much as I would love to make art just for the joy of making art, this late capitalistic society means that I also have to focus on making my tours financially viable.
Creating A Fringe Season
I start each fringe season the same. Making a spreadsheet of all the festivals I would like to apply for with application dates and costs. For those who don’t know, every Canadian Fringe Fest is a lottery. Anyone can get in. This isn’t curated like many festivals in the UK, Europe, or Australia. I usually apply for around 10 festivals, realistically getting into 2-3 each year. This year was the worst, I applied for 8 fests and got pulled for ZERO of them. But, that doesn’t stop us from being a part of the festival.
Once the main lotteries are completed, many other venues that don’t fit into the Fringe mold will offer their venues up as BYOV’s (Bring Your Own Venue). This is a great way to fill in the gaps between any lottery cities you may get.
This year was interesting. I only ended up doing 4 festivals because of the zero lottery pulls. Good news, Vancouver added a venue and I was officially in the fest as of March. The other three were Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton. I was easily able to find a BYOV for Winnipeg and Edmonton as those two fests are the largest in Canada. One of the difficult parts of the Canadian tour is filling the two weeks between those two cities.
There are a few options. Both Calgary and Saskatoon Fringe Festivals happen at the same time right in between Winnipeg and Edmonton. If you’re able to be drawn in either of those fests, you’re golden. They are small, but you get a few more shows, and you get billeting which is so important to the tour. But, these are small festivals with only a few lottery slots for each category.
This year I ended up first on the waitlist for Calgary!... And then never moved from that spot. At the same time that I was waiting to be bumped off the waitlist, I decided to reach out to Saskatoon about running my very own BYOV. It was a monumental task as I had only just done Saskatoon for the first time the year before, and the amazing staff were hesitant, but I started reaching out to potential venues. Eventually I found one that was willing to host us, I found other artists who wanted to be a part of my venue, and was able to go back to the staff and say “hey, I’ve got the venue and artists, can we be a part of the festival?” And luckily they said yes! Make your own opportunities! It was a ton of work, but both the venue and festival were happy with us and are interested in having us back next year!
2026 Tour Takeaways
The big takeaway from this year’s tour is this: ticket prices are not keeping up with life. Every day we spoke with artists who were struggling to justify being on tour and were considering this as their last year. The festival costs keep going up, the applications keep going up, travel costs keep going up, but ticket prices remain stagnant. Artists had to come together in 2020 to request that all CAFF festivals increase their ticket cost to $15. Most of them did, a few didn’t. But that doesn’t include milti-passes, media passes, other random mystery free tickets listed in your sales sheet.
Here is a per-ticket price breakdown of the 4 festivals I attended this year. :
Sold Tickets
Winnipeg $12.29
Saskatoon $12.83
Edmonton $13.57
Vancouver $14.04
All Tickets Including comps, media, etc.
Winnipeg $8.74
Saskatoon $10.64
Edmonton $11.01
Vancouver $12.08
With all that being said, I still love Fringe. I would love to keep doing Fringe every year. I love seeing my Fringe family every summer. I love seeing the creativity and artistic expression. Especially at this moment in time, real people making real art is so incredibly important. It’s not about the end product, it’s about the journey getting there and sharing those real moments with an audience.
Happy Fringing,
Blair Moro
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