Over a coffee table on one of the narrow streets in Tallinn's Old Town, Dan describes TFF as "a multi-genre short performance festival based on the same ethics and morals as the original Edinburgh Fringe Festival".

This means it "puts the power of curation in the hands of artists and venues", important because nothing like this exists in Estonia. Generally, Dan says, festivals here are "heavily curated". While he thinks art and culture are supported and respected, they aren't supported in all their forms, and this makes TFF necessary.

The general festival program is entirely non-curated, with Dan and his team often completely unaware of a specific show until it appears on the website. Would-be performers are responsible for reaching out to venues and negotiating dates, prices, and marketing. 

"There's no limits on where you can perform and what you can perform," Dan says, but adds with a smile their "only red line" is DJ shows, which they won't include on the program as there has to be a live performance element.

The day we meet happens to be the anniversary of Estonia's Restoration of Independence, marking the date the country regained its sovereignty from the Soviet Union in 1991. Dan asks me what I think the benefits of fringe might be in the context of Estonia's history of Soviet occupation: "We're talking on Re-Independence Day about freedom, right? And we're talking about freedom of the arts."

"It's dangerous," Dan argues, "Because this [festival] actually democratizes the arts industry here and gives people access."

Fighting old mindsets

The festival's website states two of its core commitments are to platform "non-mainstream arts and performance" and to help audiences encounter and appreciate shows "outside of their usual bubbles".

However, slightly contrary to this and to the connotations provoked by the term 'fringe', Dan tells me he is eager for the festival to be interpreted as mainstream. He recounts a conversation he had recently in Tallinn where a local told him they thought the festival was "alternative".

"It's not an alternative festival," Dan says, adamant. "This is mainstream. And we need it to be mainstream, so it's normalized. Stand-up comedy is not alternative." 

Dan thinks the relative novelty of fringe in Estonia has led to this 'alternative' framing and left the festival facing a host of stereotypes and misperceptions that alienate potential audiences and venues.

Beyond expanding their appeal, Dan hopes acceptance of fringe as mainstream could also make the festival more financially sustainable. He believes it's looked down on by the Estonian state institutions responsible for supporting art and culture. This year they received about €10,000 in funding from the City of Tallinn, and nothing from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Initially, they were bounced back and forth between different funding bodies, a process that took about four years. When they finally reached an in-person meeting Dan says the person beside him turned to him and said flatly, "We don't need your festival in Estonia."

Dan believes comments like this point to an attitude derived from old Soviet norms that placed high value on "prestigious" culture, such as theater and ballet, but also heavily restricted what counted as 'culture'. He thinks this attitude is embedded in Estonia's cultural administration: "They have their mindset of what arts and culture should be."

One justification he's been offered for rejected funding applications is that the festival isn't "professional".

"What is professional in the end? I don't think we should even be talking about it," he says. "Why not let the audiences decide?" 

Apparently one funding official, when asked in a meeting, said they considered someone a professional if they had an arts degree. This is something Dan, who has been working as a performer for over 20 years and running TFF for eight, doesn't have: "And so my career then doesn't exist."

The unnecessary intellectualization of art spills into the public perception. Dan says people have told him they don't feel they can watch theater because they aren't "smart enough" to understand it. 

"That's such a shame. Your opinions are valued. If you understand differently to someone who's got a PhD in arts, that's fine. That's what fringe is for as well, to say hey, go and see a show."

He thinks this dismissive attitude is particularly strong towards street performers. Beyond the festival, they face an old-fashioned administrative system still reliant on paper permits. The spaces these grant access to are almost invariably buried in quiet corners, far from the public eye. 

Dan jokes the city seems to think street performance is costless: "They're like, you're a magical creature. You just sleep under chairs and lick rocks for sustenance. They don't understand that you're just a normal human being."

This year TFF includes a special street performance program in the Town Hall Square from August 23-25. Unlike the main program, Dan is curating this segment in an effort to shift perceptions of the art form: "We need to show that there's a lot of great professional street performers out there."

Balancing the local and the international

The state's reluctance to adequately fund the festival means Dan and his team have resorted to sourcing donations from foreign bodies, which this year have contributed around €5,000, a third of the festival's funding. These funding deals are attached to curated elements. The street program Dan is overseeing is an "All Irish Showcase" and has drawn funding from the Irish Embassy and Culture Ireland. Culture Australia has similarly given funds to support Australian artists partaking in the festival.

This year the festival includes a week of Russian-language stand-up comedy, which has received funding from the British Council, Britain's international organization dealing with cultural relations. Defending the decision to include this on the program, Dan argues cultural events like TFF have the potential to bring sections of society together. He doesn't like the term "integration" but thinks art can be an "integrative tool". The team managing the festival comes from a range of backgrounds and speak a mix of languages, but this doesn't interfere with their work.

The TFF program is constantly being updated, but when I study it at the beginning of the festival about 61 percent of the shows are in English, 17 percent in Estonian, and 10 percent in Russian (with another 12 percent appearing in all three, non-verbal, or unspecified).

The high proportion of English shows, Dan explains, is partially due to international performers and partially to Estonian performers opting to use English to increase their chances of breaking out into the international market. Dan believes fringe has enormous potential to pioneer Estonian culture as an export commodity, a way of boosting Estonia's international profile. As an example he points to Estonian stand-up comic Ari Matti Mustonen, who recently featured on Joe Rogan's U.S.-based podcast (reportedly the most listened to podcast in the world).

The juxtaposition of the local and the international is a thread that seems to run through our conversation. I'm curious whether this international outlook hampers the festival's ability to play a significant role in Estonian culture more locally. Dan suggests the festival's multilingualism is itself representative of Estonian society, but admits, "It's a really difficult tightrope to walk. We want more Estonian language shows, of course."

Originally from Australia, he thinks his slight outsider perspective allows him to "walk between" different segments of Estonian society and gives him a more neutral vantage point from which to recognize when the festival's local-international balance might have slipped out of whack. 

Looking to the future: training the next generation

Ensuring the festival's longevity isn't just a question of changing public perceptions and convincing the state to dish out more funding. Venues and performers alike are naïve to the business side and treat it almost with disdain, Dan says.

He believes performers feel drawn towards the stereotype of the destitute artist: "There's nearly a badge of honor when you say, yeah, we did our run of shows and we lost money. That's very old school thinking."

TFF, by forcing performers to make their own business arrangements with venues, provides an essential training ground. "That's what the fringe is there for as well, it's a practical education. 

"Having a financially successful show and a career comes down to doing business, talking to people, making connections, building relationships, doing Excel spreadsheets. I really want artists to take more control over that."

Asked whether there's a risk this model could see truly 'fringe' performers side-lined by venues in favor of shows that will attract higher ticket sales, Dan implies this would be a nice problem to have as it would mean the venues at least understood the business side of the performance industry well enough to discriminate. He thinks this is at least two or three years away. 

Does Dan see himself running the festival forever? He says he'd love to get it to a point where it's stable and manageable enough to hand over but worries if the wrong people become involved the festival could lose sight of its core values and become too commercialized, serving big-ticket advertisers more than performers. He's put about 14 years of unpaid work into keeping it afloat, relying heavily on his own bar-come-performance-venue, Heldeke. To run a festival that would be financially sustainable and not rely on leveraging friends and family to work for nothing, Dan estimates they would need a budget closer to €50,000 – a far cry from the €15,000 they received in funding this year.

But he's quick to stress it's not all doom and gloom: "I don't want to frame things as being super negative. We've got strategies already to make sure we have better impact with funding bodies and that we do get venues to understand what we're doing. 

"And audience-wise, it's been growing. It's great."

Stand-up comedy in particular has proven quite popular. Where 12 years ago there was nothing here for stand-up, Dan says, there are now at least 10 full-time stand-up comics who work in Estonian and go to different festivals. "So stand-up has blown up really big and will keep on going."

I ask him whether there are any shows this month he's especially excited about and would recommend, but he smiles and refuses.

"I can't say. We don't play favorites. Check out the program, find something you think you won't like and something you think you will. They're all different genres and styles, they're all different kinds of performers that are new, fresh, old. 

"Push your own boundaries, that's the most important thing. There's so much potential here."

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The 2024 Tallinn Fringe Festival ends on September 18. The TFF program is available here.

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