Fringe festivals believe in being different. As Dublin's approaches, Belinda McKeon asks whether it's enough of a guiding vision.

There's something about a fringe festival. Something about what it does to a city, even for a few short weeks. Something about the anticipation it engenders, the atmosphere it creates. Sweeping from polished stages to shabby lounges, from ancient crypts to public toilets, fringe has always seemed a byword for difference, for energy and innovation, for all that is possible in performance but generally unrealised at other times. Against the backdrop of the conventional theatrical calendar it has stood out boldly, challenging perceptions of what art can be. Alongside mainstream festivals it has scampered mischievously, yielding space to practitioners with startlingly new styles.

But the identity of this type of festival is coming under increasing scrutiny. With the world's biggest example of the genre, in Scotland, having just concluded its 57th season, fringe is no longer an impish teenager. As the concept matures it faces the need to justify its existence. Events this month in Edinburgh illustrate that not everyone regards the fringe as the accessible alternative platform it claims to be.

Accusing the fringe of selling out to tourism and to commercial ambition, a disgruntled group led by Colin Fox, a socialist member of the Scottish parliament, organised Edinburgh People's Festival to stage cut-price performances at venues in the city's outlying communities. And although the new festival's reaction to the prices of tickets for fringe events may be extreme - most of them cost little more than £8, or about €11.50, and theatre companies have to make a living, after all - the altercation raises questions about the stage fringe has reached, about its roles and responsibilities. Indeed, the flicker of dissent prompts us to ask what fringe is for.

Vallejo Gantner, director of Dublin Fringe Festival, which begins on September 22nd, believes a fringe festival means different things to different cities. "In Dublin," he says, "it exists to provide a sense of what the culture of the city might be. To promote opportunities to experience and experiment culturally, to take a leap into the unknown, and not to have to pay half a leg to do it."

But he accepts that complacency about what constitutes experimentation and accessibility ultimately spells death to a fringe. "The fringe has to be something," he says. "It's dangerous when it becomes just shorthand for young and cheaply produced and left wing. Because the cutting edge of contemporary practice is not necessarily any of those things."

Fringe may have started out in opposition to comfortable, mainstream genres of theatre and styles of performance, but it no longer has the monopoly on the cutting edge. Sound and movement theatre, contemporary dance and multimedia technology now comprise significant chunks of the programmes of mainstream festivals. To make an impact, fringe has to move on from simply rebelling against the mainstream; it has to stay one step ahead.

"The whole idea of fringe is devalued by just putting on work that could be seen elsewhere, but with smaller resources," says Gantner. "The focus of the Dublin Theatre Festival is on quality, but the focus of the fringe is on fresh, on new, on next. I want to see work asking questions, engaging with new ideas, with the politics and issues of its own form. I don't care who does it: I have the Abbey and the Almeida on board this year, and I would have the Royal Shakespeare Company if I felt they were really stretching the idea of what's possible. But I say this to companies: I would rather see them fail, having attempted something really ambitious, than just scrape by without really pushing themselves. That's what fringe must do; otherwise, it loses its reason to be."

It's partly because of the need to meet this challenge that Gantner believes the Dublin fringe benefits more from being run as a curated festival rather than on the open-access model practised in many cities, including Edinburgh and Adelaide. An open-access policy means artists don't have to wait for an invitation to participate but simply make their way to the fringe, set up shop and, crucially, cover their own costs.

Paul Gudgin, director of Edinburgh Festival Fringe, believes the uncurated route is the more exciting one. "In an open-access festival you basically have 600 artistic directors. There's no overarching artistic strategy; we let the event take its own direction. It's new, it's original and very interesting things crop up every year."

Karen Hadfield, artistic director of the Adelaide fringe, the world's second biggest, says the uncurated model allows a festival to serve a much wider range of artists. "If we curated it, and therefore covered the financial risks, we couldn't afford to put on the festival that we do, to do what we do, which is to provide independent artists who find it hard to reach an audience with an umbrella marketing strategy."

Tied up with the issue of curation is that of a fringe festival's responsibility to its artists. Can open access equate too easily with indifference? Gantner won't go that far, but he believes that the uncurated model can render productions in smaller, less aggressively marketed venues more vulnerable and that curating lets fringe organisers tailor the festival to the needs of a city.

"It enables us to target those sectors of the arts that we know, at a given time, to be under-represented and underdeveloped," he says. "In the last four to five years in Dublin the obvious areas to focus on have been dance and performance art."

Hadfield agrees that establishing artist-development programmes as part of the fringe remit benefits festivals as well as artists, strengthening the infrastructure on which the fringe is built, but Gudgin is not so sure. "We are not a development agency," he says. "Yes, if performers ask for specific things, like workshops, we will do them, but we are not all of those things that people want to make us become."

And what of the fringe's responsibility to its audiences? Even if you regard the Edinburgh People's Festival controversy as more snipe than substance, it points to tension in the relationship between a fringe and its city. When Colin Fox complains that the fringe is limited to two or three streets in the most attractive, tourist-friendly parts of the city, and no longer belongs to the people of Edinburgh, he touches on a sensitive point for fringe organisers.

It's not much to ask that audiences travel a few miles into the city centre to see performances, but shouldn't a fringe extend - geographically and socioculturally as well as artistically - to the fringes of traditional sites for theatre and performance? Which means using venues that are adventurous not only architecturally or atmospherically but also in terms of the types of audiences they can draw.

It's an issue faced by Steven Gove, director of Prague's fringe festival, which had its second season in June, largely based in the city's Old Town district. "As the festival gets older I think it will definitely spread out to other interesting spaces around Prague," he says. "We are conscious that the fringe should be very much for the Czech people."

Vallejo Gantner realises accessibility needs rethinking even more urgently in Dublin, a city where "the people" is a rapidly changing concept. "It becomes a really taxing question when you ask how to get multicultural audiences in," he says. "They may not have the money, certainly, but it may also be that the marketing doesn't speak to them or that they have different tastes or ways of engaging with culture. So how do you cross that boundary?"

In Adelaide Hadfield has tackled part of this issue with a visual-arts outreach programme that brings the fringe to refugees and asylum-seekers in detention centres by making their creative activities a part of the fringe. "It's open access," she says. "And that means access should be open to everyone."

Central to meeting such weighty challenges, of course, is the challenge all fringe organisers constantly grapple with: financial survival. Gudgin points out that fringes can become victims of their success. "Although public bodies give us funding to the tune of £64,000 \," he says of the Edinburgh fringe, "we generate £52 million [€75 million\] for local economies. So we come to represent a large degree of economic activity for relatively little investment."

But when investment comes it can be a poisoned chalice: state and corporate sponsorship don't sit easily alongside the independent, irreverent spirit of fringe. "There's a delicate line between the need to source money and the need to realise that a lot of artists don't want to have anything to do with a corporate identity," says Hadfield. "So it's about finding sympathetic investors who will support something not just so their name is plastered everywhere but because they have a real passion for the arts and what the arts can do. And that's not easy."

Still, as Dublin fringe-goers gear up for this year's cultural explosion, for three weeks of tearing between venues and deciding between shows, for the hum of activity, the flurry of curiosity, the buzz of creativity, it's clear that such passion for the arts is the ultimate meaning of fringe. And that the show must go on.

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Some to watch at this year's Dublin Fringe Festival

Dance

Ella Clarke and Julie Lockett will somehow conjure up the energy to dance three-hour installations combining two works, Beauty and The Other Side of 'O', choreographed by Deborah Hay, at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios each day from September 23rd to October 11th. Over at Theatre Space @ Henry Place, sleep and the supernatural are the themes of Spinstren, a new work from the UK company half/angel (September 24th-27th). Young choreographer Niamh Condron will present two shows, WhiteWASH and 2b, in the same venue from September 23rd to 27th. The second week of the fringe sees the premiere of Tearmann, Corp Feasa's take on asylum and belonging.

Visual arts

Sited, this year's fringe public-art programme, curated by Mark Garry, will see seven shipping containers in prominent spots around the city become the surprising sites for installations from young Irish and international artists. From comic books to tiny trees, the emphasis with these bulky, unconventional spaces, open daily (except Mondays) for the duration of the festival, is on audience development. Each strange, enclosed world exists to be stumbled on - but not, let's hope, subjected to the Cow Parade treatment - by as broad a public as possible.

Opera

Thwaite, the fringe's first full-scale opera, produced by Opera Theatre Company and the Almeida, is at Project arts centre on September 23rd and 24th. Billed as a story of catastrophe and survival, both poignant and satirical, devised by Simon Doyle of Whispering Gallery and scored by The Jimmy Cake's Jürgen Simpson, its credentials look well on song.

International

Diaspora is the theme of this year's fringe, with several events exploring the fusions and tensions between cultures. Socially conscious ragga-jungle-punk meisters Asian Dub Foundation, left, will perform to La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film, in what promises to be a searing sonic experience at the Temple Theatre on September 22nd. Directors Jimmy Fay and Bisi Adigun present an African vision of Oedipus Rex, Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not To Blame, with actors who are resident in Ireland but of African descent (Project, September 25th-27th). From September 29th to October 4th, SS Michael & John's church will host the European premiere of The Untitled Series, from Singapore's acclaimed avant-garde company the Necessary Stage, right.

New Irish writing

Corcadorca is back at the fringe with Snap, an uncompromising portrait of an abusive relationship by Ger Bourke (Project, October 7th-11th). Another Cork company, Mountebank, presents magical realism, Irish style, in The Cobbler, at the New Theatre, October 6th-11th. There's gritty Dublin drama in Gloria, at the International Bar from September 29th to October 4th, and a lyrical interweaving of narrative and music in Grace Before Meals by Una Woods, at T36 (September 22nd-27th). And, for the first time, the National Theatre is part of the fringe, with Autumn Stories at the Peacock (September 25th-27th), public readings of plays in development by Conall Quinn, Philip Davison and Talaya Delaney.

Fringe of the fringe

Playgroup's Soap, a live soap opera with four actors playing 40 characters and a new episode daily, should provide for some exhausting antics at the Globe from September 30th to October 10th. Freakshow? will explore a 1930s-style freak show on East Essex Street. Performance Corporation, winner of last year's best-fringe- production award for the marvellous Candide, returns with "sci-fi-meets-Bollywood" in The 7 Deadly Sins (City Arts Centre, September 23rd-27th).

Spiegeltent

Don't miss the Belgian Spiegeltent, which has been to Edinburgh and Adelaide and was once filled with the sultry tones of Marlene Dietrich, at Wolfe Tone Park on Jervis Street. Acting as the hub of the fringe and main festivals, the Spiegeltent will host afternoon debates, evening performances and a late-night festival club.