I was recently talking to Dan Renwick, owner and operator of Heldeke! theater-bar here in Tallinn, and he asked me an interesting question.

“How do you Fringe?” It’s a good one, and, coming from the man behind the beating heart of the international celebration of all things creative, one that I’ve taken quite a bit of time answering.

The Tallinn Fringe Festival begins last week, and whether you’re into stand-up comedy, burlesque cabaret, experimental theatre, or just stumbling into a wine tasting that turns into a concert, it’s got something for you. So I guess my ultimate answer to “how do you fringe?” would be “it depends on who you are, or, perhaps, where you are.”

When people arrive at a Fringe Festival, sometimes they don’t know that they’re even in it. They may even wander into Heldeke!, order a drink, and find themselves face-to-face with a burlesque performer mid-routine, wondering if this is just a Tuesday in Tallinn or something they should be buying a ticket for. (It’s both.)

Tallinn Fringe 2025 Source: Anton Serdjukov

That’s the thing about Fringe that took me a full year of living in this city to understand: Tallinn doesn’t announce itself. It’s a city that reveals itself in layers, with cobblestones that turn an ankle if you’re not paying attention, a medieval wall that gives way to a Soviet-era block that gives way to a converted power station full of art. Fringe just turns the volume up on something that was already happening. For one month, the city stops pretending it’s subtle.

Dan’s answer to his own question, when I turned it back on him, was simple: “you show up.” No ticket required for much of the calendar. No dress code, unless you count “willingness to be surprised.” Heldeke! itself, tucked into Kalamaja, Tallinn’s shabby-chic answer to Williamsburg or Shoreditch, depending on your reference points, is ground zero for this philosophy. It’s not a venue so much as an artistic dream with a bar: cabaret one night, a wine tasting that turns feral by the second glass the next, a magician performing card tricks for children on a Sunday afternoon before the room resets itself for something considerably less family-friendly by nightfall.

Case in point, on opening night, the venue hosted Love is a Lube, a genre-blurring set from Lebo Sibul, d’Argento, and Cvm Unity that splits the difference between cabaret, music, and spoken word, the kind of show that resists a clean elevator pitch, which is precisely the point. Ask three people what they saw and you’ll get three different shows. That’s not a bug in the Fringe model. That’s the whole model.

Some of TFF’s local talent at a launch event in Tallinn’s Raekoja plats. Source: Anton Serdjukov / Tallinn Fringe Festival

The same night, a few doors down in the same building, Ana Falcon ran “Please the People: Comedy Challenge Show”, free, English-language, and built entirely around audience whim. You show up not knowing what the show is going to be, and neither, really, does Ana. That’s a genuine tightrope act, performed nightly, for free, by someone who clearly doesn’t need the safety net. It’s the kind of thing that could only exist in a festival built on the honor system, with no gatekeepers and no curators, just an artist and a venue owner shaking hands and agreeing to see what happens.

But here’s the part that surprised me most once I actually looked into how this festival works: no one person runs it on a show-to-show level. There’s no central booking office, no artistic director handing down a program from on high. Performers contact venues, and if a venue says yes, the show is in. That’s it. That’s the entire admissions process for one of the more ambitious arts festivals in the world. It sounds like chaos. It is, a little. But it’s also the most honest description of how creative cities actually function, not through committees, but through people saying yes to each other.

So if you’re the type who wants a plan, Fringe will accommodate you. The full program, all 31 days of it, is sitting on fringe.ee, filterable by genre, language, and how much you’re willing to spend (a lot of it, gloriously, costs nothing). Circus, dance, spoken word, burlesque, stand-up in multiple languages, an open-air magic show for kids, a Kafka adaptation, something called “AUTOTUNED: The Orchestra of Cars” that I have chosen not to investigate too closely before seeing it live. There is, genuinely, something for whoever you are.

Some of TFF’s local talent at a launch event in Tallinn’s Raekoja plats. Source: Anton Serdjukov / Tallinn Fringe Festival

But if you’re the type who’d rather just go get a drink and see what happens, Fringe will accommodate that too, arguably better. Walk around town on a Friday night, follow the noise, and odds are decent you’ll end up watching something you didn’t plan on watching, in a room you didn’t know existed, next to people who also just followed the noise. That’s the closest thing this festival has to a mission statement.

Which brings me back to Dan’s question, the one I’ve been chewing on since he asked it. How do you Fringe?

You don’t, really, not as a verb you perform. You let it happen to you. You let a whole city hand you its stage for a month and you decide, moment to moment, whether you’re a performer, an audience member, or just someone who wandered in for a beer and left with a story. Most nights in Tallinn, that line is thinner than you’d think.

The Tallinn Fringe Festival runs August 18 through September 18. Find the shows that interest you the most. Let the rest find you.

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