Fringe season is exciting, exhausting and often both at the same time. You’re performing, promoting, meeting people, seeing shows and trying to enjoy the festival while somehow remembering to eat and sleep.
And Fringe doesn’t happen in just one place. Edinburgh Fringe just wrapped an epic month, Melbourne Fringe is coming up and artists are already looking ahead to Adelaide Fringe. The festivals are different, but the pressure can be surprisingly similar.
So how do you look after yourself while you’re in the middle of it?
Why Is Fringe Season So Mentally Exhausting?
Online counselling programs can help artists flexibly access mental health care when festival schedules often don’t have much room for anything else. Going to Fringe isn’t just about getting yourself up on stage. You’re selling the show, checking ticket numbers, updating social media, flyering, watching other artists, networking, travelling between venues, eating (maybe) and staying awake enough for the next day.
This is where the sheer size of Edinburgh Fringe makes it especially apparent. With so many artists performing at hundreds of venues across the city, it’s easy to spend your day rushing from one side of Edinburgh to the next, handing out flyers, performing, seeing another show and rushing to an industry or social event after that’s finished. Smaller festivals can create the same frenzy for artists who want to pack in as many shows as possible during a short run.
When life gets like that, it can be hard to keep up with the self-care that keeps your mental health in check. Making time for a traditional counselling session can seem completely out of reach when your daily plans can shift without warning, particularly if you’re travelling to Melbourne or Adelaide Fringe from elsewhere, or flying abroad for Edinburgh. Learning about professional support gives artists the opportunity to self-regulate without needing to commute to see their therapist, or organise around one set location.
Neglecting your mental health doesn’t make you a better artist, and dedicating time to look after yourself doesn’t mean you’re not taking Fringe seriously. In fact, seeking out the right support can help you better deal with the pressures of performing, promoting and surviving the rollercoaster that is festival life.
Don’t Let Your Ticket Sales Become Your Self-Worth
It’s rare to find anything that can wreak havoc on an artist’s fragile ego quite like monitoring ticket sales. You may wake up after a sold-out show feeling brilliant, only to log into your ticketing dashboard the next morning and catastrophise about all of the seats you haven’t sold yet.
If you’re performing at Melbourne Fringe, you may find yourself checking midway between shows. But when you’re surrounded by thousands of shows at Edinburgh Fringe, it can feel even easier to fall into the trap of wondering if everyone else is selling more than you.
The issue is that it can become all too easy for ticket numbers to feel like a reflection on your abilities as a maker. If you have a slow day, you may start questioning whether people liked your show, whether you’ve marketed it incorrectly or whether you should have made something else altogether.
The truth is, audience numbers can be affected by so many factors outside your control. From venue location and scheduling to other shows running at the same time as yours, advertising, and how long into the festival your show has already begun.
Try distancing yourself from the numbers game where you can. Instead of obsessively refreshing your ticketing page all day, pick set times that you’ll have a look at how you’re tracking and spend the rest of your time enjoying your Edinburgh Festival experience. Remind yourself that your show isn’t any less valuable if there are a few empty seats and try focusing on connecting with your audience instead.
There will always be lots going on behind the scenes at a festival that you don’t see. Someone posting about a sold-out show doesn’t mean that everyone else is busy winning and nobody has come to see your show. Your focus should be on making the best show you can and talking to the people who attend, rather than criticising yourself over every empty seat.
Give Yourself Permission to Have a Bad Show
All performers have off nights. Fringe in particular loves to make you feel like a bigger deal than you really are. You can nail a show one night, walk offstage feeling like a million bucks because everything just clicked.
The next night you can forget lines, flub cues or wonder why the entire room has decided to become eerily quiet all at once. It can be easy to start thinking that this bad performance has revealed some horrible truth about your show.
Take a breather. You might be tired, distracted, anxious or just having a weird night. Remember that one show is just one show. It doesn’t necessarily mean your show is great or that your show is awful.
If you think something actually did feel off, write that thought down and revisit it later. You may discover there is something to edit, or you may realise that the issue felt larger than it was in the heat of the moment. Talking it over with another performer, friend or loved one can help you gain perspective instead of letting one bad show ruin your whole night.
Be Careful About the Comparison Trap
Fringe will make you want to compare yourself to everyone else. You open Instagram and see someone sold out their show. You scroll a few more times and see another artist got a five-star review. Someone you know got nominated for an award, announced an extension or posted a picture with their biggest audience yet. Meanwhile, you’re sitting backstage wondering what you’re doing there while only six people came to see your show.
Social media can make this especially hard because you only see the highlights of everyone else’s festival while you live through every single moment of yours. You see the sold-out poster, but not the months of wondering if they’d sell any tickets at all. You read the great review but don’t see the terrible review they might have gotten last night.
If Instagram accounts or people in general are making you feel bad about your Fringe experience, it’s OK to mute them for the length of your showrun or for the entire festival. You don’t need to watch everyone else’s ticket numbers, read all their reviews and see all their updates while you’re trying to focus on your show. More than that, don’t let someone else’s festival be the measuring stick for whether yours is successful.
A fringe festival isn’t one big competition with one standard for success. Two artists can have wildly different experiences and both leave feeling like they did something awesome. Remember to focus on your own show and what you want to achieve instead of someone else’s highlight reel proving you’re losing.
Build Actual Rest Into Your Fringe Schedule
Rest isn’t always as easy to come by as you might think at Fringe. You might finish a show at 10pm, have drinks with the rest of the cast, then find yourself catching up with someone late night about another show and organising breakfast to meet up after the festival the next morning. Throw in flyering, updating social media, rehearsals, industry events and wanting to see other shows that you love, and it’s easy to find yourself buzzing around on little sleep, convincing yourself you’ll make up for it later.
The hustle is different depending on which festival you’re at. Edinburgh Fringe means hours walking between venues, sometimes seeing back-to-back shows each day. Melbourne Fringe can mean public transport criss-crossing the city to get to different venues.
Adelaide Fringe can mean spending so much time socialising and catching other artists’ shows that it becomes a huge chunk of the Fringe experience itself. No matter where you are, there can be a sense of pressure to make sure you’re taking full advantage because you only have a limited amount of time there.
However, you don’t have to say yes to every social invite or fill every spare moment of your day. Try scheduling at least one block of time per day that doesn’t involve performing, promoting your show, networking or watching another show. Make your sleep a priority too; even if that means missing out on post-show drinks every now and then.
There’s also plenty you can do to make resting easier. Keep snacks on hand that you can quickly grab between shows or meetings. Bring a water bottle with you and stay hydrated. Don’t rely solely on what foods happen to be near your venue, either. If your schedule allows, taking one full day off might even be more helpful than trying to pack in another handful of activities.
Fringe is only around for a short amount of time, but that doesn’t mean you have to do something every minute of it. Sometimes doing nothing is exactly what you need to do to prepare for your next show.
Take Care of Your Body When You’re Performing Every Day
It’s easy to view Fringe as a test of mental stamina and forget that running yourself into the ground is just as much a physical activity. Your body still needs food, water, rest and recovery even when your festival to-do list is demanding you cram another thing into the day.
The basics are still important. Allow yourself time to warm up and cool down if you’re doing any kind of physical performance. If your show is vocally demanding, schedule some non-speaking time if you’re performing more than once or twice a week.
The physicality of Fringe can be especially apparent at Edinburgh, where performers might spend several hours a day trudging between venues, handing out flyers and transporting whatever they need for their shows. Wearing comfortable shoes isn’t the first thing most people think of when they consider their mental health, but when you’re shattered and your feet are killing you, everything else feels like more of a struggle too.
Remember that late nights still catch up with you when you’re caught up in festival buzz. A short run of performances, coupled with after-show drinks, socialising, or packing up gear, quickly adds up to significant physical exhaustion. Looking after your body won’t sap the fun out of Fringe. It can leave you energised enough to enjoy the festival and nail your performances.
You Don’t Have to Have a “Successful” Fringe
Perhaps your Edinburgh show is awarded five stars, but you can’t fill the room. Perhaps your Melbourne show sells out, but by week three you’re absolutely dying on stage. Perhaps you meet the person who’ll be your creative partner for the next five years in Adelaide.
The fringe doesn’t have to run flawlessly, sell out or win an award to make it worthwhile. You can be proud of your creation, yet acknowledge that the festival itself can be messy, exhausting, surprising and sometimes disappointing.
Surviving it and looking after yourself along the way is an achievement too.
