New Year, New Collaborations – Junction Double Bill in Association with Forest Fringe

^{3 Bistro Place - Forest Fringe's Edinburgh Festival hub}

This spring we are excited to announce a series of exciting collaborations as part of our Live Performance programme starting with season opener –  double bill Made in China: We Hope That You’re Happy? (Why would you lie) and Dan Canham: 30 Cecil Street  in association with Forest Fringe.

To find out more, we invited Forest Fringe Co-Director Andy Field  to write for The Junction blog this week. In his guest post below Cambridge born Andy introduces us to the Forest Fringe, featured artists Made in China and Dan Canham and what audience goers can expect from the two showcases next week... 

Forest Fringe is not so much an organisation as a gathering. It’s a gathering that has happened every summer in Edinburgh for the last five years, where unusual and experimental artists from across the UK and beyond come together with adventurous audiences to put on shows that couldn’t happen anywhere else at the Festival. The artists don’t pay to be there, we don’t charge audiences to be there and no one is being paid a salary to run Forest Fringe. We are all there because we believe that art has a value that goes beyond how much you pay for it. 'We are there because we believe that it is important to be there, in the midst of the biggest arts festival in the world', seeing if it’s possible to do art in a slightly different way.

Over the course of the last few years Forest Fringe has also become a gathering that happens elsewhere as well. We have created miniature weekend long festivals across the UK, we have been to big music festivals like Latitude and soon you can find us at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, where we’ll be in residence for two weeks with all kinds of interesting and unusual artists.

And here we are now, in Cambridge, where I grew up, at a venue that I remember trying desperately to sneak into with some bad fake ID when I was only 15 years old. In this case the ‘we’ of Forest Fringe is two brilliant companies who we’ve known for a couple of years now. Dan Canham is a stunning dancer who is finding brilliant new ways to think about history and memory as living, fleshy things. Made in China make startling shows that describe the confusion and the fear and the anxiety of a generation growing up in the dying embers of Western global domination.'These shows are very different, and yet at the same time they are describing something very similar, which is what it feels like to know that something important is coming to an end. They are also both uniquely innovative, clever, occasionally funny and occasionally heartbreakingly sad.

Forest Fringe didn’t produce these shows. It didn’t write or direct them either. Forest Fringe is a name that a broad collection of artists (including Dan Canham and Made in China), are welcome to give themselves as a way of saying ‘here we all are, working together and alongside each other, trying to do something interesting and new’. And hopefully it is also becoming a way for audiences to be sure that, whilst they may not know what they are going to see, they can guarantee it will always be worth taking a chance on. 

To find out more about the Forest Fringe, it's collection of artists and upcoming events visit www.forestfringe.co.uk or follow on twitter @ForestFringe 

The Junction presents double bill Made in China We Hope That You're Happy? (Why Would We Lie) / Dan Canham 30 Cecil Street Wed 01 Feb in association with Forest Fringe. For more information visit our website www.junction.co.uk or follow us on twitter @TheJunctionCamb for show updates.