Shaftesbury Fringe is an open access performing arts festival that takes place every summer, on the third weekend of July, in the beautiful hilltop town of Shaftesbury, Dorset.
Mission Statement
- Shaftesbury Fringe is a celebration of the Creative for the benefit of the Community.
- Our team will always be drawn from the community
- We will always seek to collaborate with Shaftesbury’s stakeholders, supporting local people and local businesses
- We will always seek to maintain our ethos of the Fringe as a festival of the arts: performing, craft and visual
- We will always promote open access to all performers, regardless of experience or genre.
We welcome both new and established artists to perform and exhibit in one of over 30 unique venues within our town, which have ranged from traditional venues, like our arts theatre, the town churches and various pubs, to a bathtub in a shop window, the rear garden of a dentist, the outside area of our local garden centre, and a florist’s shop floor. There truly is a venue for everyone.
We’re “Britain’s Friendliest Fringe”, according to performer feedback over the years!
We choose our dates carefully to ensure we form part of the country’s unofficial ‘Fringe circuit’. This enables performers booked into the Edinburgh Fringe to try out their acts in front of audiences at smaller Fringe festivals, such as ours, before heading north of the border. For audiences this means that you have the opportunity to catch some up-and-coming stars before they become famous!
Founded in 2016 by Andy Tebbutt-Russell & Samantha, Shaftesbury Fringe is one of the key Fringe festivals in the country.
Who organises it?
Shaftesbury Fringe is run by a small group of unpaid volunteers, all of whom live in or near the town. The team organise the infrastructure of the Fringe, which includes locating and liaising with the venues, finding sponsors, advertising the event, both physically and on social media, and producing the printed programme – we even have our popular Fringe app, now in its seventh year. We also organise the road closure, toilet facilities on Park Walk, the Fringebury towers which display performers’ posters, put up all the signage in Shaftesbury and neighbouring areas – everything that’s necessary to run the Fringe.
We do not book events directly. Instead we act as facilitators between the venues and performers, who book directly with the venue, then register with us to appear in the programme, the app, and on social media. Registered performers can send posters, which we put up on our “Fringebury Towers” dotted around the town. Performers also have access to a dedicated What’s App group and a performers’ web page.
During the Fringe weekend itself, the core team expands to include a number of extra volunteers to ensure that the weekend runs smoothly.