About the Primetime Festival

October 30 – November 28, 2021

The Primetime Festival was an online performance festival featuring interactive digital experiences from across the country. The festival featured five shows, programed throughout the month of November, which take place on various online platforms: Zoom, gather.town, and Twitch.

You could catch interactive sketch comedy, go on an adventure with a crowd-pleasing genie, enter a magical living room portal, watch an acclaimed storyteller in action, and catch up with a Fringe fave from the past. Tickets to live events were Pay What You Can.

ABOUT THE PRIMETIME FESTIVAL

Welcome to a bold vision for the future of digital theatre.

This is the first time Toronto Fringe has presented the Primetime Festival. The model builds off our popular Primetime Series at the 2021 Digital Toronto Fringe Festival, where we showcased three live theatrical experiences. This festival takes that experiment one step further, mining what worked and what didn’t, and encouraging our artists to push ever deeper into interactivity and audience participation. The "theatre-ness" of online theatre.

Thanks to generous funding from Canadian Heritage, Toronto Fringe has been able to support the artists and crew behind five new shows, as well as a robust administration and producing team to help this new model run smoothly. This is a curated festival that strives to support former Fringe artists who have bold ideas for where to take online performance.

We know theatres are opening up across the country (yay!) and can't wait to meet you all again in-person at the hybrid Next Stage Theatre Festival in January. But we also know the conversation about digital theatre is not over - it's only just beginning. We hope to meet you there – in this liminal space between pandemic lockdowns and full reopening; this space full of Fringe artists doing what they do best: push boundaries, take risks, and have a great time while doing it. Join us!

HOW TO EXPERIENCE THE SHOWS

Each show will host a pre-show lobby space in gather.town where you can mingle and interact with curated content. Some shows will then begin right there, in the gather.town space, while others will direct you to either Zoom or Twitch.