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The first Greek Fringe Festival will start on June 10^th and the performances and exhibitions will be all around Athens. This festival also became a practice in Adelaide, New York, Dubai, Praue, Amsterdam, and Budapest.

The Athenian Fringe Fest will take place in Technolopis and in other parts of the coty between 15^th and 21^st of June. The pre-festival preperations have begun already. From March 15^th until the beginning of the festival, underground bars like Booze and Art Tower, the AthenStyle Hostel, the Small Polytechnic seminars, the theatres “Some place else” and “Art Door” will present presentations, exhibitions and meetings. This way the city will prepare itself for the first real off-Festival in Athens.

Based on an old tradition, the Fringe will be conducted the same successful way it was in the other cities. The goal of the Fest is to show the work of young and talented artists, independently of whether they are Greek or not.

The organizers of Fringe have received many offers and according to them the program will be very interesting. It will take the visitors from underpasses, through squares to many different parts of Athens, in order to present the city as a more beautiful and better place.

Fringe starts in the middle of the 40’s as an alternative of the Festival in Edinburgh. The recipe comes out to be very successful and the result is that in 2008, during its 62 anniversary, 2.6 million tickets have been sold for 31 000 shows in 247 different places.

The concept Fringe means “in the art’s periphery” and off-festival are the shows, which are done outside the art channels. According to the rules of the festival, 20% off the ticket sales profit goes back to the artists “in a try to return 1% to those, who have tried to connect their art to the community,” notes the organizer of the festival in Greece Georgios Neris. The price per ticket for one day will be ?10 and with it, you can enter any show within the festival no matter where it is.

The festival’s symbol in Athens will be a ball installation with one meter in diameter. On that ball, visitors will use stickers in order to draw their own art – a street, city, or whatever they can think of. The installation is by Yannis Katranitzas and is called “Fringe Ball.” Each ball is connected to another one with a thread and this way a system is created – a toy, which develops in time through the improvisation messages of the visitors. The Fringe Ball is the trade mark of the festival, because it symbolizes the different places where the exhibitions and shows will take place and most of all because it visualizes the idea of the event: interactivity between art, people and the city.