Bath Fringe
Bath Fringe is an arts festival showcasing the innovation and talent of Bath's artistic community.
Bath has always been a city of creativity, of the arts, of visitors and travelling performers.
The Bath Fringe festival is the current home to those artistic endeavours not covered by other events in the city. With its modern day origins from the Bath Artists Workshop in the 1970s, and the Bath Festivals of Blues and Progressive Music in 1969 and 1970, the Fringe provides a place for everyone to enjoy art in all its forms.
The annual festival takes place during two weeks at the end of May to the beginning of June, providing a range of events including visual arts (Fringe Arts Bath), theatre, music, comedy, dance, and numerous activities for children, for diverse audiences in a multitude of venues across Bath.
Bath Fringe is led by the community in which it sits, is built by the artists it serves, and is a well-loved addition to the summer calendar in the region.
About the partnership
Bath Fringe and Bath Spa University are just at the beginning of our Cultural Partnership, however that doesn’t mean we haven’t already been collaborating.
Since 1998 Bath Fringe has been working with Bath Spa University 3rd year Students from the Bath School of Art Film and Media to create the festival image each year.
This year Sophie-Marie Webb’s image was chosen to represent the Bath Fringe Festival 2023 programme, posters, website and social media.
We hope that the collaboration between Bath Fringe Festival and Bath Spa University will continue to be a great ideas laboratory, to provide a space for innovation in production and audience experience (as well as in the more obvious artistic areas), and other ways in which we can work together to develop ideas and engage our shared audience. Together we may be able to magically transform an idea into an event, we have a history of working with incubating artistic ideas, and have experience of many kinds of arts events (or know someone who has).
Bath Fringe's sister organisation Fringe Arts Bath (FaB) is an artist-led organisation which engages more with visual, digital, video, ‘live’ and conceptual art. Bath Fringe and FaB work closely together, and together they make up ‘The Fringe’.
“Our final year Graphic Communication students have been designing the poster and visual identity for the Fringe Festival for many years. It's a really good opportunity for students to work on a professional project, and to present directly to the client. It is a really nice moment every year when the design has been chosen and the Fringe Festival has its own unique identity for that year."
Tim Vyner, Professor of Illustration at Bath Spa University
