Our picks for an adventurous Melbourne Fringe experience

This year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival once again offers a smorgasbord of performing arts events. With so many shows on offer, choosing what to see can be a challenge. No doubt, if you had the time and money, you would attend as many events as humanly possible. For most of us, however, the reality of the situation is that we need to make selective decisions. So we ask: Which show will be good? What is this venue like? Who is this artist? And when we are happy with our answers we pick the shows which appear to be high quality.

But we at ArtsHub implore you: forget about your selective decision making. Take the risk. Choose a show that seems completely beyond your comfort zone and personal boundaries. It’s difficult choosing which events to go to, and yet it’s even harder to lose yourself in the forest of avant-garde and amateur performances of Fringe’s programming. But what’s exciting about a Fringe Festival is that it runs on an open access model: any artist or company can register their show. It can be almost impossible to determine a show’s content and quality; you just have to go and experience it. ‘But that’s entirely the point. Fringe is a risk. Fringe is an adventure’, says Richard Watts in his ArtsHub article on the curation of Fringe Festivals.