Spirit of innovation - Jon Morgan

Newly appointed Edinburgh Festival Fringe director Jon Morgan tells Nick Awde about his plans to keep the growing event fresh.

Settling into his new job as director of the Festival Fringe, Jon Morgan can count on his experience of coming to Edinburgh for the last 17 years as punter, producer and venue manager buying shows. And yet he admits: “I know the fringe well, but it’s only a few weeks since I started and I already know it a damn sight better than I did a few weeks ago.”

Morgan only took up the position in June, replacing long-standing Paul Gudgin, and says he is happy to be in Edinburgh, despite having the rigours of the festival already upon him.

The intricacies of how the fringe runs and how the Fringe Society works in partnership with a huge range of other venues, artists, promoters and the city is something he is beginning to get his head around.

“It’s a bit like when you go and see a play - unless you’re a bit sad like me, you generally don’t think about what’s going on backstage, you just see what’s happening in front of you. It’s the same when I used to come to the fringe. Even as a promoter, I’d be thinking mostly about my personal interest, which was seeing shows and working out which ones I was interested in buying, rather than having the Fringe Society make sure a promoter found out about those shows.”

Morgan’s background is in producing theatre and a number of contemporary music events, much of which has had a focus on work with or for young people. His previous position was at Contact Theatre in Manchester where, for four years as executive producer, he created work that appealed to younger audiences that might not normally get involved in theatre, as well as supporting emerging young artists.

“That fits in well with the fringe. Our audience demographic is very young - there’s a high proportion of under-30s who attend the fringe or who participate in it. So supporting young and emerging artists and attracting young audiences who perhaps might not normally get involved in the arts the rest of the year is just as much part of what we do.”

The past few years were a period of significant growth under Gudgin’s directorship, as audiences and the scale of the event itself increased massively, more than doubling in scale and size. Every year the fringe has been able to announce the biggest yet, and the same is true with the biggest again this year. But Morgan doesn’t necessarily see it as being about size.

“The fact that the fringe has grown bigger and audiences have grown with it is a sign that it’s growing in a way that is appropriate to what people want. Artists still feel it is worthwhile coming here, so more and more artists come to perform, and more and more audiences want to see their work. Although I’m not about to try and put a stop to that kind of growth, we also like to - and need to - look at other aspects.”

Morgan is especially keen to maintain the fringe’s successful record in attracting Edinburgh and Scottish audiences. In terms of audience and artists, he stresses that a festival is rooted in its locality, that the fringe is both Scottish and international. He is keen too to emphasise the uniqueness of the city’s festival heritage.

“It’s about taking that risk and plunging into the unknown in Edinburgh, as the fringe did back in 1947 by setting up a self-regulated festival as opposed to a programming festival, which in itself was probably quite a brave thing for the time. I don’t know whether the artists who were doing it saw it in that way - they probably had no idea how it was going to grow some 50-odd years later. But in a sense we have to continue to innovate, we have to continue to make it more attractive for audiences and for artists to appear here. It’s almost like being a marriage broker.”

The Festival Fringe this year continues that spirit of innovation with an almost bewildering range of new works, including highlights like Argentina’s Fuerzabruta, whose Black Tent is a purpose-built 1,200-seat venue at the Ocean Terminal on the Leith waterfront. The show is a mix of physical theatre, dance and clubbing, something that sums up Morgan’s personal interests, because he is ever on the look out for audience crossover, in attracting people who do not perhaps normally think of theatre or the arts as something that is for them.

There are also more new awards this year, of which probably the most significant is the Edinburgh International Festival Award, launched in collaboration with the Edinburgh International Festival. It will offer the opportunity for a fringe show to perform at the 2008 Edinburgh International Festival.

“It does what it says on the box,” Morgan observes, pointing out that it symbolises far more. “It’s important the Edinburgh festivals work together more, and this is just one example of ways in which we hope to collaborate in the future, because we have a joint interest in marketing Edinburgh as the ultimate festival venue.”