With almost 460 events across Melbourne and regional Victoria, narrowing down the Melbourne Fringe program is no easy task. But Creative Director and CEO Danny Delahunty has a few works he believes capture what the festival is about in 2026 – from interactive First Nations-led performances and a Deaf-led opera to queer dance, political theatre, and some seriously experimental circus.
For Delahunty, the appeal isn’t necessarily about picking the biggest or most polished shows. It’s about work that takes risks, brings unexpected ideas into the mix, and demonstrates the breadth of independent art being made in Victoria and beyond.
What to see at Melbourne Fringe 2026 – quick links
Dhandha/Campfire
The central work of the 2026 Melbourne Fringe, this major interactive installation from Joel Bray Dance is taking over Fed Square for the duration of the festival. The public is invited to visit at any time of day, to observe and explore a space transformed by sculpture, light and sound.
Each day at sunset, a dance performance activates the space, leading visitors through a quiet ritual to usher in dusk. The experience also explodes into a party across three evenings of the festival (29 September, 8 October and 15 October) with DJs and dancers heating up the night.
For Delahunty, its strength lies in its ability to create a communal experience rather than simply presenting something for an audience to watch.
‘It’s about gathering, it’s about ceremony, it’s about shared experience,’ he says. ‘It’s around seeing what happens when a city makes time for ritual, for movement and for each other.’
Dhandha/Campfire is happening daily at Fed Square from 29 September to 18 October.
Ocker
This roving show from First Nations company Na Djinang Circus will be taking over public spaces throughout the Fringe, tearing through the streets on a portable railway track constructed in real time.
Combining acrobatics and live music in absurd acts of endurance, this unexpected spectacle will turn everyday life on its head as a modern day hunting party chews up Aussie culture and spews it out onto the streets.
Ocker will be popping up around Melbourne between 8 and 18 October, and around Ballarat on 14 and 25 October.
Manifesto of Silences
What happens when an art form is rebuilt from the ground up, with radical accessibility in mind? Created by three of Melbourne’s most established Deaf artists, Manifesto of Silences asks what opera might look like when it is created from a Deaf perspective.
The Deaf-led work combines sign language opera, movement, projection and immersive sound, using Auslan poetry and Visual Vernacular (an expressive means of Auslan storytelling) to explore Deaf identity, language and the historical forces that have shaped them.
ArtsHub: Deaf artists lead the way at this year’s Melbourne Fringe
For Delahunty, it exemplifies the thinking behind Melbourne Fringe’s Radical Access program: rather than adapting an existing work to make it accessible, the work’s approach to access is embedded in its creative foundations.
The result is intended for both sign-language users and non-signers, with visual storytelling, movement and facial expression carrying meaning alongside sound and projection.
Manifesto of Silences plays at Arts House, North Melbourne, from 6 to 11 October.
40-LOVE
What happens when the audio description of a tennis match becomes choreography?
That’s the starting point for Jonathan Homsey’s 40-LOVE, an improvised dance performance set to the audio description of the 2025 Australian Open Women’s Final between Madison Keys and Aryna Sabalenka.
Inspired by the dance techniques of the streets and queer clubs, the work turns a familiar sporting spectacle into something entirely unexpected.
It’s a natural fit for Pulse, Melbourne Fringe’s program dedicated to experimental and form-pushing work.
‘It’s a performance about agency. It’s about choice. It’s about the urgent necessity of having fun, and it is going to be something like you’ve never seen before,’ says Delahunty.
40-LOVE is playing at Dancehouse, Carlton North, from 7 to 10 October.
Till The Day I Die
An anti-fascist short play from 1935 gets a new life and a decidedly unconventional staging at Melbourne Fringe, 90 years after it was banned in Australia.
Veteran Fringe artists Katie Sfetkidis and Mark Wilson are bringing together professional actors, artists, activists and trade unionists for a new production of Clifford Odets’ commentary on the rise of the Nazi regime, staged on a flatbed truck in the carpark at Trades Hall.
For Delahunty, the production exemplifies the kind of politically engaged, historically resonant work that can find a home at Fringe.
‘In 1936, a group of artist activists from Melbourne’s New Theatre refused to accept the ban, and they performed the work on the back of a truck, guerrilla theatre style. You just had to know where it was, and it would arrive,’ Delahunty explains.
‘It was deemed more important for people to learn about the atrocities that were happening in Germany than it was for the censorship that the Australian government placed on that particular play. Ninety years later, Mark and Katie are wanting to revisit that within the context of contemporary arts practice.’
An urgent work for for a world that is seeing fascism and censorship rising on a global scale, and a particularly fitting work for a festival whose relationship with Trades Hall stretches beyond simply using the building as a venue.
Till The Day I Die plays at Trades Hall, Carlton, from 1 to 4 October.
Exhibit
What does it mean to be visible, and who gets to be seen?
Lisa Proud and Emma J Hawkins explore those questions through circus, dance and physical theatre in Exhibit, becoming both curator and specimen as they hone in on their experiences as short-statured middle-aged women (who often get mistaken for one another, to their great amusement).
A work that doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into established categories, this is exactly the kind of unusual creative proposition that you’d struggle to find within more conventional presenting structures.
Exhibit plays at La Mama Courthouse, Carlton, from 30 September to 4 October.
Philosophy of the World
Melbourne Fringe’s Passport program brings exciting international work to Melbourne that sits outside the conventional touring circuits, and Delahunty is perhaps most excited about this Edinburgh Fringe sensation from UK collective In Bed With My Brother.
Philosophy of the World takes its name from the only studio album ever released by The Shaggs – ‘which is both celebrated as one of the most influential works of the proto-punk movement, and also one of the worst albums of all time,’ he says.
‘It follows the path that a song by The Shags might follow. This is a a work that emerges as this kind of feral feminist detonation of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s noise, mime, gabber beats [and] glorious anarchy.’
But bringing international artists to Melbourne isn’t simply about giving audiences something they can’t otherwise see, Delahunty says. It is also about exposing local artists to different ways of making and thinking about independent performance.
‘It’s about bringing that work here and putting it in conversation with our sector,’ he says.
Philosophy of the World plays at Festival Hub: Meat Market, North Melbourne, from 29 September to 3 October.
Fashion Machine
Equal parts playful and high risk, this interactive performance from Canada’s The Other Guise Theatre Company could see you consenting to handing over the clothes off your body to a local child, in order to be cut up and remade into a totally new outfit in time for an unconventional fashion show.
A new breed of performance art, Fashion Machine asks where the boundaries between audience and artist might sit.
It’s another Passport selection that Delahunty sees as representative of Fringe’s appetite for work that takes a genuine creative risk.
Fashion Machine is playing one show only at Bunjil Place Studio, Narre Warren, on 3 October.
Briefs: The Works
The Briefs brigade has developed an international reputation for their deliciously queer collision of contemporary circus, drag, burlesque and cabaret with attitude.
Founded in Brisbane in 2008, this little company that could has earned acclaim across the globe. But Melbourne Fringe remains an important platform to provide infrastructure for collectives like this. Briefs may be more established, but this crew remains fiercely independent, and their liberating performances spark essential joy in audiences who’ve seen them zero times or a hundred times.
Briefs: The Works plays at Spiegel Haus Melbourne from 23 September to 18 October.
Fountain Lakes Y2K
Delahunty’s top picks aren’t confined to Melbourne. It’s time to crack open the Tia Mia because, playing exclusively as part of Melbourne Fringe’s regional program, Fountain Lakes Y2K will have its Victorian premiere in Ballarat.
The foxy ladies behind the sell-out smash-hit Fountain Lakes In Lockdown are back with another outrageous drag parody play. This time they’re not only paying homage to the most iconic comedic characters Australian television has ever produced – they’re also throwing it back to the era of butterfly clips and low-rise jeans.
Fountain Lakes Y2K stars Art Simone (Drag Race Down Under vs The World), Thomas Jaspers and Jemima Handful, and plays Civic Hall Ballarat from 22 to 25 October.
Degustation
Delahunty also points to Degustation, a five-course circus and dining experience, as another great reason for Melburnians to hop on the V-Line and explore how Ballarat responds to a Melbourne Fringe provocation.
This brand new spectacle from One Fell Swoop Circus and chef Shu Liu of SHU Restaurant is also exclusive to the Fringe Encore program.
Degustation plays at Ballarat Mining Exchange from 22 to 25 October.
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