Edinburgh Arts Festivals

Edinburgh Arts Festivals

Walking around Edinburgh in late July, you'll likely feel the first vibrations of the earthquake that is festival time, which shakes the city throughout August and into September. You may hear reference to an "Edinburgh Festival," but this is really an umbrella term for six separate festivals all taking place around the same time. Visiting Edinburgh in August is an experience you are unlikely to forget.

Edinburgh International Festival. The best-known and oldest of these is the Edinburgh International Festival, founded in 1947 when Europe was recovering from World War II. Festival founders, including Austrian Rudolph Bing, who founded the Glyndebourne Festival in England and managed the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, believed that some event was needed to draw the continent together and, as Bing put it, "provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit." Bing rounded up support from the British Council (an organization that promotes British culture abroad) and a program was written. The first festival, presenting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter, was a gigantic success.

In recent years the festival has drawn as many as 400,000 people to Edinburgh, with more than 100 acts by world- renowned music, opera, theater, and dance performers, filling all the major venues in the city. Tickets for the festival go on sale in April, and many sell out within the month. However, you may still be able to purchase tickets, which range from £6 to £60, during the festival.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe. If the Edinburgh International Festival is the parent of British festivals, then the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is its unruly child. (The Scottish film Festival captures some of its spirit.) The Festival Fringe started in 1947 at the same time as the International Festival, when eight companies who were not invited to perform in the latter decided to attend anyway. Knowing there would be an audience, these companies found small, local theaters to host them. Since then, the Festival Fringe has grown at about the same rate as its counterpart. In 2005 there were 1,800 shows and 27,000 performances of those shows at the Fringe, making it the largest festival of its kind in the world. Its events range from the brilliant to the impossibly mundane, badly performed, and downright tacky. No one censors the material. It was at the Fringe in 1971 that Robin Williams was discovered when he performed in The Taming of the Shrew. Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson, and Dudley Moore also put in appearances early in their careers.

While the Fringe is going on, most of the city center becomes one huge performance area, with fire eaters, sword swallowers, unicyclists, jugglers, string quartets, jazz groups, stand-up comics, and magicians all thronging into High Street and Princes Street. Every available theater and pseudo-performance space is utilized—church halls, community centers, parks, sports fields, putting greens, and night clubs. In 1954 the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society was formed, and it oversees everything from ticket sales to publicity.

Festivals for all interests. Edinburgh festival time can fill almost any artistic need. Besides the International Festival and Festival Fringe, look for the Edinburgh International Film Festival; the International Jazz & Blues Festival, the International Book Festival, and the Military Tattoo, which includes re-enactments of historic events, military marching bands, Highland dancing, and more.