Location

Tracing its roots back more than fifty years to Scotland's famed Edinburgh International Festival in 1947, "fringe" was the name taken by performance groups excluded from this prestigious event. Undaunted and determined, these companies created makeshift theatres on the outskirts - or "fringe" - of the established festival.

Soon the Fringe Festival gained a large and loyal following, outstripping the mainstream festival. The Fringe Festival concept migrated to Canada in the 1980s and today that country boasts Fringe Festivals from coast to coast - including the Edmonton Festival, the largest in North America, which annually draws more than a half million people.

In the early 1990s, the fringe concept was embraced in the United States, and today Fringe Festivals are annual events in Orlando, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York.

Emphasizing the edgy, the offbeat, and the uncategorizable, the Fringe cultivates experimental work of extraordinary merit while remaining open to all.

The Capital Fringe Festival will be the Washington area's contribution to the Fringe phenomenon. The need is clear. Local artists need an outlet to produce and provoke, while local audiences are craving the energy and excitement that a Fringe Festival brings.

Each year during the Capital Fringe Festival, downtown DC will come alive with hundreds of performances by adventurous and innovative artists from Washington DC, Baltimore, and the United States and overseas. Performances will take place in traditional and non-traditional performance venues and will include performing artists producing in theater, dance, music, poetry, spoken word, puppetry, and art forms that are simply unclassifiable. Venues will be filled with multiple performances everyday, creating one of the city's busiest and most exciting outlets for the performing arts.