Opinion: Finding My Audience

As a comedian, I’d always wanted to do the Edinburgh Fringe. Coming up in New Zealand, a lot of my friends throughout the years would make the trip across the world and every year they’d ask me the same question “are you doing Edinburgh?”. And despite wanting to, every year I would reply with “nope”.

The reason I avoided making the trip for years was because I’d heard that the festival was super middle-class white – both performer and audience-wise. And as a Filipino comedian, a lot of the work I was creating was speaking to the Filipino/Asian experience of the world. And while I think my comedy still works in white spaces, I find it really thrived the most when there was a solid mix of backgrounds in the audience. So I’d filed the Edinburgh Fringe in my head as a place that wasn’t for me. 

From what I gathered, it was a pretty fair assessment. Even from afar I could see that. Every year there was a new article about the Fringe’s race/culture issue: like this one from The Guardian. Or this one from iNews. It’s clearly an issue and a simple Google search of “Edinburgh Fringe too white” will prove that.

But then in 2021, something funny happened. After being stuck in lockdown for so long I looked into doing Edinburgh again. I did some research about the city and I discovered that there was a Jollibee in Edinburgh. A freakin’ JOLLIBEE – the super niche Filipino fast food restaurant that only existed where Filipinos lived. Jollibee are like the flames for Filipino moths. And there was one in the city, which meant that there must’ve been Filipinos there.

So I did some more digging on Facebook groups and discovered that there is a small but very active Filipino community in Edinburgh and wider Scotland. And I made the decision to take my next hour to the Fringe.

Flashforward to 2022 and after the first couple of days of my show, I was devastated to find that despite what my research told me, what I’d heard about the Fringe was true – it was very middle-class white. I had very nice audiences but I could tell there was a disconnect with the material. And any POC performer will tell you that a funny thing happens when you are a POC who only performs to white audiences. You start to feel a bit like a dancing monkey, just wheeling out your culture for outsiders to have a gawk at. It was pretty disheartening. 

This told me that there was a disconnect between the Fringe and the POC communities. Much like the scene I came up in in New Zealand, arts festivals were often seen as a “white activity” by a lot of different groups – especially in already siloed migrant communities. This disconnect will often begin a vicious cycle of creating a space where POC artists don’t feel like they belong, so they quit, only to then create less diverse lineups of shows, which then further signals to those communities that the festival isn’t for them. Rinse and repeat.

Now I don’t claim to be an expert on the Edinburgh Fringe itself, and while a lot of my thoughts are anecdotal based on my own experience, I have performed at countless Comedy and Fringe Festivals around the world and have observed this exact same phenomenon.

But throughout all this a voice still rang around inside my head. But what about the Jollibee? There must be Filipinos here, I just have to find them. And I was hellbent on doing it.

So, with the help of my producers, I doubled down on my existing efforts to reach out to the Filipino community in Edinburgh. I doubled targeted ad spend, I sent messages to Facebook groups and community leaders. I looked for any small Filipino run-businesses and contacted them. I reached out to church groups. I slid into DMs of Filipinos who lived in Scotland. I even flyered outside of the Jollibee itself (after I had a Peach-Mango pie).

After doing this throughout the month. It actually worked. I opened my show to an audience of about 10-15 white people, and as the season progressed more and more Filipinos started coming to the show after they heard “there was a Filipino show at the Fringe”. On my closing night, my audience had a 70 percent ratio of Filipinos to non-Filipinos and my season ended with a relatively successful box office return, including a lot of sold-out shows. It was a far cry from what I was expecting in Edinburgh.

Now I want to say that, obviously it shouldn’t just be up to the artists to solve this problem. This is a wider systemic issue that needs to be addressed on multiple fronts. And I know some of the venues themselves, as well as the Fringe, are aware of this and already have measures in place to try to improve it. But there is always more we can do, like funding initiatives that do outreach to those outsider communities to let them know that there are shows in the festival that they’d enjoy. 

Plus, there are already groups on the ground who have been putting in work for years to try and make Fringe more inclusive. Teams like Fringe of Colour and FOC It Up have been championing this change in the UK for the past few years and are absolutely necessary. We should all be supporting them.

Also, if you are a POC artist reading this and you’ve been avoiding doing Edinburgh for the same reason as me and were wanting some advice, or perhaps this article has come up because you Googled “Fringe white audiences”, this is what I’d say to you. If you are one of the lucky few who are able to put enough resources together to do the Fringe without ruining yourself and you have a show you love – just do it. You deserve to have a voice there. While the majority white spaces can be off-putting, it is possible to carve your own space in the Fringe and find the audience you want to speak to. Just be prepared to do a little bit of groundwork on your own as well.  

One of the most satisfying and affirming moments of my 2022 Fringe was when a Filipino audience couple came up to me after asking me to take a photo with them. They said after living in Edinburgh for years that they’d never seen a Filipino show at the Fringe and they wanted to thank me for helping them be proud of where they come from. I’ll never forget that interaction and it serves as a reminder of why I create the work that I make.

I’m heading back for my second Fringe this year with my new show Champorado (the name of a Filipino chocolate-rice-dish). I’m both nervous and excited. Part of me wonders if my community will show up again like they did in 2022. I hope they do. But all I can do now is put in the work, claim my space and hope that this show can contribute to a wider change in the culture of the Fringe.