This article proposes to use a cultural materialist analysis and draws upon Doreen Massey’s writings (1991, 1994, 2007, 2012) on place, community and the ‘sense of place’ in order to explore the imagined theatrical communities of Edinburgh’s August Festivals (EAFs). EAFs is used as an umbrella term for the four festivals that take place during that time: the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Free Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Being an academic and theatre maker, this essay is informed by my own empirical experience as a theatre maker performing at the EAFs in 2013. During this experience I negotiated my belonging and otherness in relation to theatrical communities that were defined not by geography or social relations but by the economy of the EAFs. The four main communal identities of the EAFs were: commodities (e.g. artists), consumers (e.g. audiences), direct profit makers (e.g. promoters, producers, venue owners) and indirect profit makers (e.g. local businesses). I argue that small-scale artists as both entrepreneurs and consumers of both culture at the EAFs and also products and services during everyday interactions, are granted temporal locality. Form a global perspective, Caryatid Unplugged offered an identity representation of a participant with a lower symbolic value and capital. Throughout, I reflect on the ways neoliberal power geometries are established and economic interactions commodify Fringe art.