This looks like more fun than most of this year's festival.

Back in the day, the end of July in Saskatoon brought the excitement of chilling on Broadway Avenue when the entire street was shut down for the Fringe. The street was filled to the brim with buskers and fascinating performances that you couldn’t see anywhere else. It was like the area came alive and all those ordinary people you saw walking the streets transformed into crazy performers with the most random (yet always entertaining) skill sets. Not every performer was local and not every performance was great, but at one point the Fringe was a must-attend event.

This kind of excitement no longer exists. Nowadays, the Fringe seems like an afterthought — a sad echo of what it has been in the past. And this is not the fault of the many great local artists who pour all they have into a festival that no longer deserves it.

Every year the Fringe gets smaller. What used to take up most of Broadway Ave. has been shrinking like a glacier. As it stands, it’s just three blocks long and even these blocks aren’t filled to their capacity.

One of the main factors fueling the Fringe’s decline is an awkward change to the festival’s busking rules. This year the organizers of the Fringe, the 25th Street Theatre, decided to enact a new set of guidelines curtailing the festival’s street-side musical performances.

Musical buskers were separated into two categories: circle buskers and curbside buskers. According to the guidelines, curbside buskers could not “use amplification of any kind.” This immediately alienated an entire subsection of musicians.

“Professional” circle buskers did not face such restrictions, but unfortunately, there were only two sets of six permits for sale for this privilege. To make matters worse, circle buskers were “responsible for determining their own schedule with the other circle buskers on a day-to-day basis.”

These confusing restrictions placed on musical performances, which effectively banned most electronic instruments, severely dampened the atmosphere on the street. While there were still some entertaining acts scattered along Broadway, Fringe-goers in general were missing out.

Luckily, these problems didn’t affect the various theatrical productions on the stages around Broadway. This year still offered plenty of interesting performances Fringe-goers could take in. However, each year’s festival sees a reduced number of local acts. It is nice to see performers from all across Canada and the world travel to our city to share their acting talents, but the local plays are what draw Saskatoon residents out to the theatre.

The Saskatoon Fringe should by no means go the way of the dodo, but there is no doubt that it’s on a sad slope of diminishing artistic returns. It will be a dark day when a Saskatoon resident can go through the final week of July without realizing that the Fringe is on — and this year came dangerously close to that. Let us hope next year breaks the trend and the festival once again grows with more street space, more buskers, more local acts and fewer restrictions. This would mark a return to the former glory days of everyone’s favourite Broadway street festival.

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photo: Raisa Pezderic/The Sheaf