Attention early birds: Montreal Fringe’s application window opens tomorrow

A moment from the 2018 Frankie Awards. Photo by Cindy Lopez

If you’re interested in staging a show at the 2019 St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival, you should know that early birds get (a better chance at) the worm. At noon tomorrow (Friday, Aug. 17) the application window for next year’s Fringe will open — and there’s an incentive to be an early entrant.

On both the Montreal Fringe homepage and its Facebook page, the “Early bird special” is explained and defined as follows:

“We will accept the first 8 completed applications in each local quota and the first 5 in the Canadian and international quotas that come in through our online form with payment of the Administration Fee. If successful, you will be expected [to pay, sic] the full Application Fee within 24 hours to be accepted. If you are not among the first 8 or 5 applications [respectively in re: the aforementioned quotas], your application will carry over automatically to the November lottery.”

TL;DR if you get your application in early, you’ll have a much better chance of getting accepted.

If you’re not gunning for one of the quota slots, that’s okay, too; while the application window opens tomorrow, it doesn’t close until Nov. 17 — the date of the Fringe lottery.

“The reason why everyone should apply to be a part of the Fringe is because it is the largest and most important artistic movement on the planet right now,” says Montreal Fringe Executive and Artistic Director Amy Blackmore over the phone from Edinburgh, where she’s attending the Fringe World Congress and the renowned Edinburgh Fringe. “In Montreal, the Fringe has one of the most generous audiences in the country — one that is genuinely interested in discovering anything and everything.”

If you’re wrestling with what kind of show you may want to mount, you should take that “anything and everything” to heart. For the uninitiated, the Fringe describes itself as a “international multidisciplinary arts party celebrating creativity without limits” and as such, any/all of the genres and performance styles below are fair game (and yes, they wrote it in all-caps):

“THEATRE, DANCE, POETRY, PERFORMANCE ART, PUPPETRY, IMPROV, MIME, MAGIC, COMEDY, CABARET, CIRCUS, SKETCH, DRAG, SHAKESPEARE, CLOWNING, PHYSICAL THEATRE, STAND UP, SPOKEN WORD, MUSICAL THEATRE, BURLESQUE, DRAMA, OPERA, ROCK OPERA, OPERETTA, ROCKERETTA, STORYTELLING, CONTORTION, WORK-SHOPPING, TRUE STORIES, NEW WORK, OLD WORK, BILINGUAL WORK, MUSIC & MORE!”

For application directions and other relevant information please visit montrealfringe.ca. ■