'Think of it like a potluck supper': Calgary Fringe returns to Inglewood

Kat Armstrong appears in Date Night, one of 22 shows being presented at this year's Calgary Fringe Festival in Inglewood

Not everyone spends the August long weekend camping in the mountains. Some Calgarians spend it discovering independent theatre gems at the Calgary Fringe Festival.

The festival returns to Inglewood this weekend, where patrons can attend shows at eight different venues – four mainstage and four venue boutiques.

It's a festival where the motto is "anything goes" onstage, where artists present comedy, drama, musicals, puppetry, improv, monologues – or a theatre genre to be named later.

"Think of it like a potluck supper," says Fringe executive director Michele Gallant.

No show is more than 70 minutes long, and 100 per cent of the box office receipts go to the artists.

For those who can't attend in person, there are on-demand options, Gallant said in an email to CTV News. Over the first three days of the fest, 15 shows will be taped live and released for on-demand viewing Tuesday Aug.8 through end of the day Saturday, Aug. 12.

There are around 22 different productions at this year's festival, with artists from Berlin, Singapore, the U.S., across Canada and Calgary.

Fringe festivals are artist-driven and over the past few decades, some highly successful shows have been launched as fringe shows in places like Edinburgh, Edmonton, New York, Toronto and elsewhere, including Fleabag, Six: The Musical, Kim's Convenience, Urinetown, Rosencranz and Guildenstern, The Shark is Broken, a comedy about the behind-the-scenes activity during the making of the movie Jaws - and Matt and Ben, a comedy about a pair of struggling actors named Ben Affleck and Matt Damon trying to write a screenplay together. It was written by then-unknown playwright Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers.

The Calgary Fringe Festival runs through Sunday, Aug. 13.

For more information, go here.