Fringe Unforgettable: the upcoming 45th annual edition of the Edmonton Fringe Festival has a theme, a nickname, and shows

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

This year’s upcoming 45th annual Edmonton Fringe, the oldest and biggest of its kind on the continent, now has a theme, a nickname that gets to the heart of the matter: Fringe Unforgettable.

At the christening Monday, Fringe Theatre’s executive director Megan Dart and artistic director Murray Utas announced that Fringe Unforgettable, this year’s edition of our mighty summer festival (Aug. 13 to 230) also has shows, 209 of them from here, across the country, and around the world, running in 37 venues. Some 80, selected by lottery, will happen in the 10 “official” Fringe-run venues. The other 129 shows are in 27 BYOVs, bring-your-own venues acquired and outfitted and curated by artists themselves, mostly in Old Strathcona, with notable exceptions like the four curated venues in La Cité francophone. New venues this year include Queen Alexandra Community Hall, with five shows, and Mile Zero Dance studio, with shows curated by Common Ground Arts.

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What hasn’t changed since the 2025 edition is the $20 top ticket price fringees will be paying for shows. Artists set the price, to a $15 maximum, and there’s a $5 Fringe surcharge, which shrinks in the case of smaller ticket prices.

And the Fringe maintains its free programming this summer. The free KidsFringe — imaginative activities and crafts, workshops, performances, music, storytelling, and more for kids under 12 — is back. So is the Fringe’s free outdoor carnival of circus and street artists, and the free music series, this year 16 concerts in ATB park. Food trucks, beer tents, and the featured Sea-Change brews — of course!

New this year (well, newly returned by popular demand after last year’s cost-saving cancellation) is the free Fringe shuttle that takes fringees and artists between the main site and the French Quarter. And the  Fringe has launched Q2Q: as billed a “queer Barns series featuring open mic, drag workshops, cabarets, art markets and more….”

Pêhonân (nêhiyawêwin for “meeting place”), an Indigenous-led Fringe initiative that features Indigenous artists, knowledge-sharing, and Treaty 6 storytelling, is back in an expanded form, with “a community of tipis” in the green space south of the Strathcona Community League.

The dimensions of Fringe Unforgettable are (so far) a bit smaller, in show count and venues, than last year’s A Fringe Full of Stars, with its 223 shows in 40 venues. But it’s a moveable feast, right up till show time. And as Utas says, “we could invite more shows … but how big do we need to be anyhow?” He and Dart, Fringe artists both, have long been determined that expansion shouldn’t outpace audience and resources, in order for both artists and their audiences to have a peak (let’s say “unforgettable”) experience. Since the  Edmonton Fringe remains North America’s largest, a festival that’s bigger for the sake of size would be “a colder journey,” as Utas puts it, one with an emphasis on competitiveness instead of “celebrating that we are all in a festival together.”

Utas and Dart are particularly attentive to the “average audience attendance” at the shows (tricky since the size and audience capacity of the venues varies). “And that’s been trending upward” from 60 per cent, Utas says happily.

So, “45 years of Fringe,” and still Unforgettable, says Dart, based on “the simple but radical idea that anyone can be an artist, and everyone has a story to tell…. Unforgettable is what happens when a memory makes its mark.”

Festival guides, containing your memories-to-be for the 2026 Edmonton Fringe go on sale July 29, tickets and passes August. 5 at noon. See fringetheatre.ca for further information.