There is a show in this year's Yukon Fringe Festival about a woman who is a furry and decides to have the furry part of her mind removed through something called Scientific Exorcism. There is a one-woman show about perimenopause that has already sold out every performance. There is a drag and burlesque variety show in which a dozen artists were given total creative freedom and the lineup is drawn at random each night, so even the performers may not know what is about to happen. There is a poetic psychological drama about migration and memory, inspired by classical Persian storytelling, that begins with a late-night immigration interview and drifts into something stranger. And there is a solo clown-adjacent tale about a barely average man who flies to Japan to run a marathon and encounters rice balls, Japanese toilets, Nintendo, and a failing body.
None of this was curated. That is the entire point.
The Yukon Fringe Festival runs October 1 to 4, 2026, in downtown Whitehorse — the territory's first Fringe, and by the standards of the form, a deliberately unruly one. Eight artist companies, drawn from the Yukon and across Canada, will each perform five times over four days in roughly one-hour slots, which means an audience can plausibly catch two or three shows in a single evening. Tickets are eighteen dollars plus fees, or less, and the festival's own framing is blunt about the economics: one hundred percent of ticket revenue goes directly to the artists.
That last detail is not a marketing flourish. It is the defining rule of the Fringe model, and it is worth understanding where it comes from.
The first Fringe was an accident of gatecrashing. In 1947, eight theatre companies showed up uninvited to the newly founded Edinburgh International Festival and put on their own shows in small venues on the edges of the official program. The word "fringe" stuck. What began as a protest against curation became, over decades, an entire parallel philosophy of performance: unjuried, uncensored, accessible. The Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals codified it into a set of principles — artists chosen by lottery rather than by jury, no censorship of content, low entry fees and low ticket prices, and one hundred percent of ticket sales returned to the performers. Fringe, in other words, is what happens when you take away the gatekeepers and see who walks through the door.
That is the model the Yukon is now adopting, and the person who pushed it north is Cherie Ratté, the festival's founder and executive director. Ratté is an educator, theatre artist, and producer of interactive and participatory theatre who was born and raised in Winnipeg, lived across western Canada, and eventually settled in the Yukon. She holds a master's degree in adult education with a focus on community development from St. Francis Xavier University and is a graduate of the Theatre for Living program with David Diamond in Vancouver. She is not new to Fringe: she created, produced, and performed in pieces at the Calgary Fringe Theatre Festival — "Knocked" in 2016 and "Booked" in 2017 — and worked on Jane's Walk Calgary in 2018 and 2019. Her artistic practice leans toward participatory work, the kind that asks audiences to step into someone else's shoes and sit with uncomfortable conversations.
The festival is produced by chiMOchiMO experiences society, a registered Yukon not-for-profit, and its stated purposes read like a direct translation of Fringe orthodoxy: unjuried and uncensored programming, artist selection by lottery, and the return of all ticket sales to participating artists. The society's mission is to support independent performing arts in the Yukon through accessible, artist-driven events that champion creative risk-taking and emerging voices. Its vision statement imagines a Yukon where anyone with a story to tell can take the stage.
The road to October ran through a warm-up. On October 4, 2025 — exactly one year out from the inaugural festival — the organizers held a launch event at the Beringia Centre theatre in which the community voted on a famous movie and four different groups each performed a different portion of it, reimagined however they liked: serious, silly, musical, as a puppet show, as shadow play. The winner was "The Princess Bride," the 1987 cult classic about a farm boy turned pirate, and the four groups — Storri Time, The RollPlayers, the Elijah Smith Drama Group, and the Yukon Circus Society — ran their scenes together in sequence for one night only. It was an all-ages show, and it was a fairly precise statement of intent: this is what we mean by no rules.
The festival has also staged at least one other event in the run-up, an immersive, ambulatory experience called Oddities & Amusements, in which participants moved through a series of rooms filled with unusual activities — no role play, no improv, no pressure, engage as much or as little as you like. Tickets were twenty-two dollars. It was created for adults and rated suitable for ages six and up, which is a fair summary of the Fringe sensibility: strange, but not exclusive.
What makes the Yukon edition distinctive is where the shows are going. Fringe has always thrived in found spaces, and Whitehorse's lineup leans into that. The four venues are the Sacred Heart Cathedral, the Gold Rush Inn Games Room, the Old Log Church Museum, and the Golden Age Society — none of them conventional theatres. The Old Log Church Museum, for instance, is a log building whose exhibits trace Anglican history in the territory back to before the Klondike Gold Rush, covering missionaries, pioneers, and First Nations peoples; it is a strange and rather wonderful place to watch a comedy about running a marathon in Japan. The Gold Rush Inn sits on Main Street in central Whitehorse, a historic hotel steps from the S.S. Klondike and the MacBride Museum. The Sacred Heart Cathedral hosts the opening event and the late-night programming, including an After-Dark Cabaret running from nine to eleven on the first night.
The schedule is built to be wandered. Wednesday, September 30, opens with a Fringe teaser at the cathedral. Thursday brings all eight shows into play across the four venues, staggered so that start times cascade through the evening — Black Fish at six, Steven Goes to Japan at six-thirty, Bloody Hell and the dog exorcism show both at seven, Banished at quarter to eight, Islandography at quarter past eight, and 15 Minutes to Powwow Time! alongside Mixed Bag at quarter to nine. Friday and Saturday repeat the pattern with variations, and Sunday closes things out with afternoon performances and a closing event and awards.
The individual shows carry their own weight. "Black Fish," written by Pouya Pirhooseinloo and directed by Sima Sheibani, arrives with a stack of praise from the Canadian Fringe circuit — Apt613 in Ottawa called it "a deeply human experience that is unsettling, poetic, and unforgettable," the Winnipeg Free Press gave it four stars, and JennyRevue called it "easily one of the Fringe's standout dramatic offerings." "Islandography," from comedian and storyteller Justin Shaw, is a fish-out-of-water comedy about leaving Prince Edward Island, described as the work of a "slightly caffeinated Stuart McLean"; Shaw has appeared on CBC's Laugh Out Loud and is artistic director of Storytelling Toronto. "Steven Goes to Japan to Run a Marathon" comes from Steven Andrews, billed as a thirteen-time theatre festival award winner. "15 Minutes to Powwow Time!" is Nyla Bedard's own story of powwow dancing from Tiny Tots through Senior Adult, told with, as the show's description puts it, a moccasin in one hand and duct tape in the other. "Banished," from Mauretia Holloway, braids storytelling, music, and dance around the fall of a woman and her return. "Mixed Bag: A Draglesque Variety Show," produced by Kira Henderson, features twelve drag and burlesque artists including Shoop Dumplin, Princess Persuasion, Raven Rhapsody, and a performer named Gary G'nome, hosted by CB Dee Dee.
Beyond the ticketed shows, the festival is designed to be porous. There is a free public stage, open-to-all post-show mixers that the organizers cheerfully call the after-parties, and what they describe as a block-party vibe overall. The whole thing is all-ages, with individual shows rated for appropriateness. It is, in other words, built so that someone walking through downtown Whitehorse on an October evening can stumble into it without a plan and without much money.
That accessibility is the through-line. Fringe's founding gesture in Edinburgh was a refusal to accept that someone else gets to decide who performs. Eighty years later, in a territory of roughly forty-five thousand people, the same argument is being made in a log church museum and a hotel games room, with a lottery instead of a jury and eighteen-dollar tickets instead of a velvet rope. The Yukon is about to get a lot more creative, and the door is open.