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Fringe Programme is launched – so here are the customary show/genre stats

By | Published on Friday 6 June 2014

Fringe 2014

The official programme for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2014 was unleashed yesterday, with the customary announcement that this will be, once again, the biggest damn cultural festival to ever occur, in this small corner of the universe at least. The programme lists 49,497 performances of 3,193 shows in 299 venues, a 11% increase on last year’s show count – and not every Fringe show pays to list itself in the official brochure.

In terms of the genres into which the programme is divided, the Dance & Physical Theatre section has been renamed Dance, Circus & Physical Theatre to acknowledge the growth in the number of circus shows at the Festival in recent years, making what was already a pretty eclectic section of the brochure even more so. Elsewhere the newish Spoken Word section has 88% more listings than last year, while the Children’s Shows chapter has also grown in size pretty significantly, with 22% more productions listed.

Though overall comedy remains by far the biggest part of the proceedings, with over a third of the festival sitting in that genre. 28% of shows come from the theatre side, while 13% are music, a lower profile but nevertheless significant strand of the Fringe (even if many of the shows in it have just one or a few performances, rather than full three week runs).

Launching the programme yesterday, the boss of the Fringe Society, which publishes the programme on behalf of the Edinburgh Fringe community, Kath M Mainland, told reporters: “This programme is the culmination of the creativity and hard work of thousands of people. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is many things to many people and part of the success of the Fringe is that whatever you are looking for, and in whatever capacity you are looking, you can almost certainly be satisfied by what you find. This year the Fringe includes 3193 shows which is a record number of shows, but more importantly the programme offers the widest selection of international high quality arts and entertainment that you will find in any one place at any one time. A truly unique experience”.

The Fringe officially runs from 1-25 Aug this year, though some venues kick off previews on the 30 Jul. As always the Fringe sits alongside Edinburgh’s other August festivals, the programmed International Festival, and the city’s festival events focused on art, politics and books. Oh, and the Tattoo’s back at the castle, and the Mela will once again wrap up the proceedings at the very end of August.



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