Made by (and for) Melbourne

Featuring nearly 300 shows and involving some 4,500 independent artists, the Melbourne Fringe Festival – first presented in 1983, when only 120 artists participated in the debut program – is a 19-day celebration of the city’s vibrant creative culture and a showcase of new work across almost every artform imaginable.

But while the breadth and depth of the Melbourne Fringe Festival’s program is significant, so too is the fact that – unlike the world’s other major Fringe Festivals, including Adelaide, Edinburgh, Edmonton and Prague – over 85% of the artists participating in the Festival make Melbourne their home.

“There are a lot of reasons for that, and I think it gets to the heart of what Melbourne is as a city,” observes the Festival’s Creative Producer, Emily Sexton.

“We have an independent arts culture that is active all year round and pervades much more than a pocketed, elite creative community; it feeds right out into our character and our personality and identity as a city. We are a city of independent thinkers and people who create in a very society-minded way; they are people who make meaning for the benefit of the greater good, not just for being a rock star or an art star of any description.

“And I think our festival is definitely bolstered and supported by the fact that we have institutions that are pervasive and productive all year round, like La Mama and TheatreWorks and all our independent art galleries; and like the community radio sector, JOY and 3RRR and 3PBS,” she says.

That year round culture of creativity is why the Melbourne Fringe Festival has such a high level of local engagement, Sexton continues.

“Rather than being the time at which Melbourne does stuff, at Fringe time everything that’s bubbling away all year round coalesces into something exciting. The festival is an encapsulation and a slice of a very deep sector rather than an accumulation of that sector.”

A quick glance through this year’s Festival guide reveals the breadth and diversity of work on offer at the 2010 Melbourne Fringe, ranging from a new production by emerging circus artist Skye Gellman (whose co-devised show Scattered Tacks, which débuted at the 2008 Melbourne Fringe, was acclaimed as “One of the most challenging and significant pieces of New Circus to emerge in years,” by the Artistic Director of Circa, Yaron Lifschitz) through to the long-running design event Fringe Furniture, which this year is hosted by a relatively recent addition to Melbourne’s arts ecology, The Substation, a community arts centre in the western suburb of Newport.

Then there’s the wry, subtle and sometime heartbreaking comedy of Poet Laureate Telia Neville, whose For Whom the Bell Tolls promises to explore the genesis of her genius; The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum, a site-specific puppet show presented in the former dormitories of the Abbotsford Convent; the Festival’s web-based digital arts program, Digital Fringe; and an ever-growing Live Art program, which includes seven individual events as well as the Fringe-commissioned flagship, Visible City. The latter event will see 12 artists from around Australia, as well as New Zealand, Indonesia and China, collectively creating new work across artform boundaries every day of the festival, in response to Melbourne itself.

“We are interested in work that’s really pushing boundaries, and we’re really interested in people who are thinking about their relationships with audiences differently, and trying to create work that is not cloistered away somewhere but rather is actually brought out to where people are at. That’s something I’ve always been interested in within my own practise, and I think Live Art is an area that evolving in Australia with a very particular kind of voice; so I’m really excited by the ideas that are coming forward in this field,” Sexton says.

“It’s really difficult to give something a label, and quite rightly there’s a certain amount of resistance or love of that label; I think that’s absolutely fine and quite valid; but I think that labels aside, the area that these Visible City artists are working in, and the kind of work they’re producing, is really interesting because it’s totally about ideas.”

Key to the success of the Melbourne Fringe Festival over the past 27 years has been its status as an open access event, wherein anyone who wishes to participate can do so; but the Festival does exercise some discrete control over the program. The Fringe Hub – four different venues clustered around North Melbourne’s Errol Street, including the Festival Club, which collectively host 54 separate events – is a carefully curated selection of shows programmed by the Festival’s Independent Program Producer, Beau McCafferty, in creation with Sexton.

Sexton, however, dismisses any suggestion that the Melbourne Fringe is being disingenuous by promoting itself as an open access festival, despite the programming of the Fringe Hub that takes place earlier in the year.

“We really believe in the open access structure, and there is an overwhelming trend among venues, programs, festivals, to be curated. It’s considered more sexy, but I think this festival, at this point in proceedings, is most relevant and most appropriate for this city if it is an open access festival,” she says.

“In saying that, we are an open access festival that has a really strong professional development program throughout the year, and that program, combined with a series of curated streams, is about provoking and sending out interesting thoughts into the independent arts community, and asking them to consider different ideas that, from all of our listening and all of our collaboration within the independent scene, we have found to be worthy of attention. A balance between freedom and provocation is what we think is the healthiest approach for our sector.

“That might change. It might be that, by 2025, that really what this city needs is a curated Fringe Festival, but I won’t be around then, I don’t think. But all of our decisions are always based on the principle of listening very closely and understanding really strongly what this independent sector might need, and to our minds, artists need to be endorsed to be artists and decide what is vital on their own terms,” Sexton concludes.

Melbourne Fringe Festival, September 22 – October 10

www.melbournefringe.com.au