Je m’appelle Mitchel is one of the French-language plays featured in this year’s Ottawa Fringe.Melody Maloney/Supplied
While Ottawa Fringe has long led the way for inclusive, boundary-pushing new theatre in the city, this summer, the festival is offering something it never has before – a dedicated francophone category for French-speaking artists from the national capital region and beyond.
It’s a long-overdue initiative for the festival, headquartered in a city where approximately 36.4 per cent of the population speaks both English and French, according to Statistics Canada.
Ottawa is far from the first Canadian fringe festival to mandate multilingual programming. The Montreal Fringe regularly includes performances in both English and French, for example, and shows at the Nogojiwanong Indigenous Fringe Festival in Peterborough, Ont., often feature a range of Indigenous languages alongside English and French.
But Ottawa’s increased focus on bilingualism could mean big things for the greater city’s theatrical landscape, which has long been severed along linguistic lines. While the University of Ottawa’s theatre program is more or less bilingual, local theatre companies overwhelmingly are not: Apart from the National Arts Centre, very few venues and producers are able to produce work regularly in both English and French.
The addition of a francophone category at the Ottawa Fringe – a low-barrier, high-reward theatre festival, where work is programmed via lottery and which has often served as a professional springboard for emerging artists – could interrupt the trend of bilingual theatre makers jumping ship to other markets with more robust language infrastructure.
Leaders at the Ottawa Fringe, which opened on June 12 and runs until June 22, said they’ve already seen the change pay off for both artists and audiences.
“For years, there’s been conversations about these two worlds, English and French, talking to each other more,” said executive and artistic director Alain Richer.
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Since 2023, the company has experimented with bilingualism for its much smaller, curated winter festival, said Richer. But this summer’s fringe – including seven francophone-friendly shows – represents years of administrative work from the festival’s staff and board, including translation for the fest’s website and marketing.
“Not everything is bilingual, but it’s a pretty high percentage,” said Richer. “If an artist wants a contract in French, they can get it in French. If they want to receive our emails in both languages or read more about our policies in either language, they can.”
On the artistic side, the festival has provided its francophone artists with a caption operator and projector – all the artists need to do is provide a translated script.
“Out of the seven shows presenting during the festival in French, four of them have captions for English audiences,” Richer continued. “One of the seven shows, Sammy and ‘Le Grand Buffet,’ has three shows in French and three in English, so they’ll be captioning in French as well.”
Working with the Montreal Fringe has helped the Ottawa festival establish a mini, two-city touring circuit for bilingual Fringe shows, added Richer. “Francophone artists, historically, will build their shows for Montreal Fringe, and then they can’t confidently tour anywhere else in the country,” he said. “The addition of a francophone category here means that if bilingual shows get picked in both cities’ lotteries, they can have more than one festival shot.”
Associate artistic director Emma Ferrante – also a bilingual actor and director – said it’s been a pleasant surprise to get to know a new side of her community.
“We’re seeing people we already know, but interfacing with them in a completely new language,” she said. “A lot of us are bilingual – I’ll find myself all of a sudden speaking French all the time with people I’ve known for years in English. It’s beautiful.”
