Eleven students from Brenau’s Theatre Department and one from the Dance Department performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland earlier this fall.
Fringe Festival is a three-week performing arts festival that happens annually in August. In 2026, the festival celebrated its 79th edition, with more than 4,000 shows from 77 countries.
Brenau students performed “Verona Nights,” a musical comedy written and produced by Brenau professors and students, and inspired by “Romeo and Juliet.” Theatre and dance students starred in, produced and directed the play, which performed four times during the festival.
Pamela Workman, MFA, chair of the Theater Department, joined students at the festival. She highlighted the significance of introducing students to a global community through events like the Fringe.
“For our mission of making students more globally aware, they have to go out and be global, be aware of the world around them and be part of this global community,” Workman said. “Otherwise, we stick to our own viewpoints, and we can’t solidify that until we have heard other viewpoints.”
Hope Cohran, a musical theatre major, said that seeing different productions from across the world was one of the most interesting parts of this experience.
“It was incredible to see all the different types of things that people want to present to others through the festival,” Cohran said. “It was also awesome to be in a different part of the world and experience the different cultures that come together at the Fringe.”
For Workman, one of the most important parts of the festival was to see students promoting their own show in the streets of Edinburgh.
“Students have to do what’s called busking, where twice in those two weeks, they took hundreds of flyers out onto the Royal Mile, handed them out, talked about the show and promoted it to people,” Workman said. “Seeing them do that was rewarding, because that’s a skill they don’t necessarily have: selling themselves and networking. Seeing them getting more of that experience was a great part of it.”
Along with performing and busking, students also had the opportunity to watch performances from other institutions, do historical tours around the city and learn more about Cèilidh, a traditional Scottish dance.
“Participating at the Fringe was a really big learning experience, going beyond just college productions and going into a broader world of theatre,” Vega Peace, a costuming for film and theatre major, said. “I got to interact with more of my fellow theatre artists on a global scale.”
