From visitor to insider — Jessi Dimmock '19 works for the Edinburgh Fringe
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In 2017, UMass Theater alum Jessi Dimmock '19 took the Edinburgh Fringe course, traveling to the legendary Scottish performing arts festival that puts thousands of performances in front of audiences over three weeks every summer. She was blown away by her experience as an Edinburgh Fringe audience member.
This summer, Dimmock, who is now living in Edinburgh, took a leave of absence from her job as a librarian to work as a technician and operator for Underbelly, one of the companies that presents shows during the festival.
We asked Dimmock if she'd answer some questions about her summer behind the scenes. Read on for more:
Can you give us a brief “life since graduation” update of how you got to Scotland?
Since graduating UMass, I became an ESL and ELA teacher at a Massachusetts middle school where I started and ran a school theater program for four years. I left that job to move with my partner to Edinburgh, Scotland when he began studying at the University of Edinburgh. In Scotland, I became a public librarian at a local Edinburgh library. My library is one of Scotland's 9 "Lend and Mend Hubs" which means we have sewing machines, fabric, and other crafting materials for our community to use completely for free. I get to teach sewing classes and help people make and alter clothing and other fabric goods every week, which was totally unexpected, but one of my favorite parts of the job! I took a brief break from that this summer though, to work as a technician for the Fringe Festival.
How did you get involved in theater in Scotland once you moved there? Did you connect with particular companies, or make friends in the theater scene?
About a year after moving I was ready to jump back into doing theater, so I reached out to a few of the amateur theater companies in the city about helping backstage. Since then, I've gotten to deputy stage manage (call cues) for a few companies, help make costumes for another, and even be in one production!
Did you find it different than theater in the US? If so, in what way?
The biggest difference is just vocabulary. Instead of calling "places" here, they call "act 1 beginners" and the spike tape is all different! So that's all been fun to discover!
Now let’s talk about Edinburgh Fringe. You alluded to attending Fringe a while back — was that with the Fringe course (ENGL 397H Edinburgh Fringe Festival study abroad course)? What was your impression of Fringe back then? Did you have a particular piece that stuck with you?
Yes, I originally attended the Fringe Festival in 2017 with the UMass summer Fringe course. I just found myself in awe of the festival the whole time because I'd never been to anything like it before. I remember combing through the program of 3000 shows (which I still do every year) marking the ones I wanted to see and just being blown away by the sheer number of productions and genres of performance to see. Hilariously, some of the pieces that stuck with me the most are the terrible ones I saw — but that's Fringe! You get to see the best of the best and stuff that needs a ton of work. One of my favorite shows from that summer though, The Nature of Forgetting (a physical theater piece about memory loss), returned this year and I was so excited to see how it evolved in the eight years since I'd seen it last.
Was working on Fringe something you always wanted to do?
Working for the Fringe was not something I ever actually thought I'd do. It was only once I moved here that it became a dream I could actually make into a reality.
How did you get involved?
I applied for technician jobs with a few of the big companies that run Fringe venues and was hired by Underbelly. Underbelly runs about 30 different performance spaces during each festival.
What was your role? Were you affiliated with a specific theater, or a particular show?
I worked as a General Technician for Underbelly in a 115 seat black box theater in Bristo Square. This meant that I helped build Underbelly's performance spaces before the festival began — most are not theaters the rest of the year, so it's quite the transformation! During the festival, I oversaw and helped program and operate ten different productions in my venue over the course of the festival. We had 7 to 8 shows a day with a 30 minute turn around time between them.
Because we like to relate things back to UMass: Were there skills you used during your Fringe work that you learned at UMass?
While at UMass, I tried to learn a little bit about everything theater-related. I had never really done any backstage theater before coming to college, so everything I learned about lighting, sound, costume, stage management, etc. came from UMass initially. My goal was to leave university with the skills to run my own school theater program by myself, so that meant taking classes in every discipline I could and ultimately focusing on stage management. All of it was so helpful for this job because we were building theater spaces from scratch, designing and running lights and sound for multiple shows, and coordinating the transitions from one show to another.
What’s it like being behind the scenes at Fringe — does being part of a huge festival make it different than a regular backstage?
I have never worked a festival before, so teching eight shows a day was so different than just one. The pacing is so fast and you just can't help but be swept up into it all!
What’s a favorite memory from your time working?
It's not a specific memory, but something that's really stuck with me from this experience: Even with working 14 hour days and close to 100 hour weeks at times, I was just so excited to come to work every day. Even with putting everything I had into the long days, I was getting back all of it and more. I would spend my days off back at the Fringe seeing as much as I could because I just love the atmosphere of the festival.
What’s the best show you saw this year?
I saw so many excellent productions this year — including every show that was in my venue! Overall, though, my favorite was "Bernie Dieter's Club Kabarett". It was a fabulously energetic and breathtaking cabaret style circus show!