January and February are AYT Career Central months with guest blogs and features from arts professionals. Our fourth guest blog in this exciting series is from Julian Caddy, Brighton Fringe MD 

I shouldn’t really be writing this blog.

Outside of May, February is the very busiest time of the year.  We are about to push the button with a 100,000 print run of our main brochure and 80,000 for our Family Guide just went yesterday.  Along with the brochure proofing and production comes setting up the box office system, website, event organising, PR launches, last minute advertising and sponsorship-raising.  And on top of that, we are still, even now, trying to get hold of a pop-up box office site for no money.  We launch ticket sales from 24 February onwards.

Brighton Fringe, to the uninitiated, is a completely open-access arts festival that takes place for four weeks during the month of May (1-31 May in 2015).  Open-access means that anyone can take part: they find a venue, pay their registration fee and they are in.  This means that there is a massive cross-section of work on show, from all creative genres and from all perspectives- anything from community choirs and school groups, to internationally-renowned performances in the larger venues.  This year there will be over 750 events and we are expecting more than 250,000 people to attend, based on previous form.  To put that in perspective, that is pretty much as if the entire population of Brighton were to come to Brighton Fringe.

The rise of the uncurated arts festival is a relentless one and today, according to worldfringe.com, some 60 towns and cities in the UK have their own “Fringe”.  Some even have more than one.  In total, there are more than 230 of these festivals around the world, with combined attendances of 19 million people to 60,000 free and ticketed events and over eight million tickets sold.

These numbers belie the fact that it still remains an incredibly new area in the arts and the arts ‘establishment’ in most cases has either not quite cottoned onto the opportunities for it or feel somewhat threatened by the impudence of these upstarts. It’s also full of contradictions in that yes it’s this huge, vital movement, but it’s also extremely financially fragile, receiving very small sums of public subsidy.

So, even though we’re the biggest arts festival in England by quite a long chalk, we the charity administering it remain a tiny organisation with virtually no public funding (less than 3% of our income over the last five years has come from public sources).  We charge a registration fee to participants which covers about a third of our overheads, the rest being covered by sponsorship, advertising, box office commissions, Friends memberships and donations.  We also run year-round professional development training and networking and have even just started working with the British Council to help train up arts professionals in Nigeria about how to run a Fringe.

We struggle with the Arts Council England as we don’t actually decide centrally on the quality of the work, because we are open access.  This is an absurd situation as it is become a universal truth in the arts that the Fringe is the place for emerging artists to cut their teeth.  Just imagine what we all might be able to achieve with even a fraction of what the conventional arts establishment receives.

The silver lining to just scraping by is that it all makes us resilient, resourceful and basically business-like in our approach to supporting and championing the arts.  When the arts funding apocalypse is complete, the Fringe will always survive: the cockroaches of the arts world.

Being in charge of a Fringe festival is quite an unusual job therefore.  There are no degree courses in this line of work just yet, although I’m sure there will be soon enough.  For me, it pretty much went from 1996 with “Yay! I’d like to do a show at Edinburgh Fringe!” to 2002 with “Hey this is fun, why don’t we start our own venue?” and then in 2011, exhausted, indebted, “I’ve done that now, why not see about running a festival?”  And here I am.

Although I’ve been MD of Brighton Fringe Ltd for three and a half years, due to family circumstances, I still live in Holloway, North London.  Over this time I’ve spent a total of eight months straight commuting.  So I guess you could say that I don’t make things easy for myself- then again, if did, I probably wouldn’t have ended up doing the job I’m doing- and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Discover more about the Brighton Fringe on their website.