Peripheral Legitimacies: Towards recognising and defining the Fringe Maker as a distinct and valid form of theatre producer outside of the mainstream.

The 2008 financial crisis turbocharged existing embodiments of neoliberal doctrine within the arts, as thirty years of successive marketisation conjoined with an austerity-era mantra to do more with less. As the competition for limited resources intensified, acceptance increasingly concealed itself behind quantitative measures, with funding principles intrinsically linked to government policy and political reasoning. Efforts to widen participation have coincided with significant budget cuts and a broader cultural shift, resulting in reduced availability of the arts and decreased engagement in schools, which has led to accusations that the arts are being repurposed to fill gaps in state provision. This has all helped to create an unsatisfied subset of aspiring new artists, encouraged by an opportunity culture and an apparent democratisation of access but limited by a professional sector materially unable to support their growing numbers and disincentivised from doing so through rigid funding channels.
Although Arts Council England’s Let’s Create strategy proudly proclaims its belief that everybody is entitled to express their innate creativity, the politicisation of state subsidy and its impact on funding criteria has helped to shape a landscape of winners and losers. The rise in fringe festivals internationally serves as a small indicator of this new wave of activity, almost exclusively created in peripheral spaces by artists who are unpaid and mostly untrained. While meritocratic ideals advocate that the worthy majority will rise and be co-opted into the mainstream, existing terms of 'fringe', 'student', 'amateur' and 'freelance' do little to capture the creativity, frustration, motivation and experimentation of this vast emerging creative space. Relationships to the periphery as framed through circumstance and not through choice, ambivalent attitudes to other forms of non-professional practice and aspirations towards professional recognition have shaped a subset of non-professional practice, which has been overlooked.
In this PaR thesis, I seek to explore the degree to which a neoliberal policy landscape has helped to fuel this rise and to consider how narratives of opportunity and histories of state subsidy have shaped a view of the non-professional as illegitimate. I analyse the material barriers to creation within this space, aiming to move beyond an existing perception of things being ‘just the way they are’ to redress how restriction shapes the aesthetic presentation and reception of this peripheral work. In conversation with Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, I aim to consider how the politics of aspiration have helped to contribute towards the framing of this space as obscured from view. Arguing that there are elements of this practice that are unique and provocative to established ways of working, I then use Diderot’s Paradox of Acting to explore the attitudes to performance practice, in search of a framework to describe the unique qualities of the untrained body in performance. Finally, by defining the contested mix of external influence and conscious practice that continues to shape a framing of this area as hidden or misunderstood, I engage with ideas of critical consciousness and co-production to consider how peripheral making can make a case for its own artistry and validity as a key part of a wider ecology.