The Young Fringe Producers project begins in earnest this week as members of Gothenburg and Bergen Fringe’s core team travel to Iceland to take part in Reykjavik Fringe.
The collaboration between the three Fringes in Sweden, Norway and Iceland, supported by Nordic Culture Point and Bergen Kommune, is aimed at offering knowledge exchange opportunities, a sustainable working environment and opportunity for growth for those working behind the scenes to produce these festivals.
Hanna Gödl and Sidhant Ray from Gothenburg have been sent alongside Emilie Fanor-Fontaine and Line Jensen from Bergen Fringe to take part in this leg of the project. During Reykjavik Fringe, beginning on Saturday 3 July, the participants will take on roles within the core organisational team, take part in knowledge-exchange workshops and represent their events and the opportunities within the wider Nordic Fringe Network, in which the three festivals first met in 2018.
"RVK Fringe will be the first festival to take place after all restrictions have been lifted in Iceland. There are a lot of last-minute changes in planning and having extra hands and expertise from our fellow festival organisers is invaluable.
“Additionally we are ecstatic that we are able to offer our artists the chance to meet international festival organisers and to start planning and networking for the future again,” says Reykjavik Fringe director Nanna Gunnars.
This is the first in-person leg of the project, which has until now been run via online meetings. Following this month’s festival, fringe makers will go to Bergen on 2-5 September and shortly afterward to Gothenburg on 8-13 September.
“We are really thrilled to get this project up and running this year, not least to provide extra support to each other’s Fringes and brilliant opportunities to our staff after working through a particularly difficult year and a half.
“This is just the first year of the project and we’re excited to see where we can go with it from here and how we can expand it to include more of our Fringe family in the Nordic region and potentially beyond,” says Gothenburg Fringe producer Chris O’Reilly.