The 7th Istanbul Fringe Festival returns 19-27 September 2025, transforming the city into a hive of performance, provocation and possibility. Over nine days, more than 100 artists will take to 18 venues presenting 23 shows, backed by five workshops and a rich slate of talks, parties, and encounters that form the beating heart of this multidisciplinary gathering.

This year’s edition, also part of the World Fringe Network, balances local and international voices: ten home-grown performances mingle with ten from abroad, weaving a multicultural and multidimensional tapestry of theatre, dance and performance. The word “fringe”, after all, owes its name to an idea of breaking –“fringere” in Latin means to crack open what holds you in, by pushing outwards, over walls, beyond the known. It’s an act of exposure, encounter, and letting “the outside come in.” It’s a global tradition: think Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where since 1947 artists, amateurs and professionals alike flood dozens of venues across Edinburgh with unfettered experimental work, in what remains perhaps the most famous of all Fringe events.

Highlights include asses.masses from Canada, a highly original piece fusing cvideo games with stage performance and Animal Farm with Pokémon; Valse, valse, valse from Switzerland, an ecstatic rewriting of the waltz; How Now Becomes Then, a Turkish dance piece that bends time through movement; and Habemus Naufragium from Belgium, soothing our eco-anxiety with a dose of creative hope.

No Fringe is complete without its nocturnal rituals: on the party side, Toxxxsik Draje İntizar, held at Karga, promises a night where performance and revelry merge in equal measure; while Hangi Yıldayız Biz?, set in Dam Beyoğlu, offers another chance to plunge into sound, drama and late-night communion.

In all, Istanbul Fringe Festival 2025 stands as a declaration: art isn’t just to be watched, but to be entered, to crack open space, to disrupt the ordinary, and to allow unexpected light in.