ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY
Are you an artist, group or crew ready to take on a bold challenge? We invite you to participate in an exciting opportunity at the 2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival!
We’re seeking artists to contribute to a ground-breaking project alongside programming for a unique premiere event at Melbourne Fringe. This project, which is still under wraps, promises to be a joyful, inclusive and interactive experience with a focus on community participation and active movement.
Without revealing too much, imagine a space where performance, culture, and community intersect. Attendees will engage in an interactive experience that explores movement. It’s an opportunity to create something truly memorable right in the heart of Melbourne CBD.
Duration and timing of your event/performance idea is flexible, whether it be 30 minutes or a 4+ hour durational work, we are open to your ideas. As a guide, the outdoor venue will be open between 12pm-7pm Monday to Sunday. This venue will have access to a significant public audience through a prominent installation in the CBD, ensuring maximum visibility and impact. From concept through to delivery, the Melbourne Fringe team, as well as the creative team at the heart of the public installation, will be on hand to support the success of these commissioned works that sit within an exciting and diverse artistic program. There are 3 commissions available.
We’re open to fresh, innovative ideas that can be explicitly adapted for an outdoor venue and premiered during the festival dates (30 September-19 October 2025). We welcome ideas for any works with a focus on movement that engage with a public audience, not just structured shows. We encourage applications from First Nations artists and people who are thinking about expanded performance within public space. We are open to artists at all levels of practice, emerging to established.
KEY INFORMATION
Funding details If successful, you will receive:
- $2,500 cash from the Fringe Fund to produce, present and market your event;
- Festival registration fee waiver for the event
- Use of an expertly curated and designed outdoor venue and concept that will premiere as part of the 2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival. The successful works will feature at an eye-catching performance space, serving as the centrepiece of the Festival.
Not included in the funding offer (i.e. there is no additional funding, you will need to budget the following items as part of your project budget):
- The team will work with you on determining what is needed for your event and reasonable costs associated with delivery. Additional venue staffing; including a tech operator (lighting, sound, and/or AV), and any Front of House or other operational staff required (such as Security, Ticketing, Bar, etc).
- Any production hire required for equipment needed to realise your event vision.
- All other presentation costs, including performer fees, artist insurances, marketing costs, etc.
Ticketing As part of the venue, our goal is to keep events for the public free (or at a very low cost to participate). The public nature of the outdoor venue lends itself best to audience accessibility and engagement. However, we can work with the selected artists on the possibility of ticketing the performance if it is necessary to the proposed work.
Eligibility This opportunity is for artists at all levels of experience with a lead artist based in Victoria. It must be a new idea (at least in the context of a one-off outdoor work) that will be premiered during the 2025 Festival.
How to apply Please click on this link to access the application form.
Applications close at midnight on Sunday 18 May, 2025.
Timeline As you will need to register your event in the Melbourne Fringe Festival, we will ensure that the selected commissions are notified in the last week of May, prior to registrations closing on June 6, 2025.
If using online application form isn’t accessible for you, please get in touch so we can better understand how to best accommodate your access needs. We can accept applications submitted as text documents, video or audio files and are also happy to work with you on other accessible application processes. Please email artists@melbournefringe.com.au to start a conversation.
CONTEXT AND EXPECTATIONS FOR FUNDED ARTISTS
Receiving support through the Fringe Fund isn’t quite the same as a grant, but it isn’t quite the same as having your work bought by a curated Festival – it falls somewhere in-between. That’s because we’ve raised money from trusts, foundations, government bodies and private donors, and we’ll need your help to ensure certain deliverables are met so we can acquit those funds. It’s the circle of (funding) life.
If you’re successful in your application, you will be asked to sign a contract that requires an understanding of the expectations that we will have from you as a Fringe Fund artist, which are:
- You will self-produce a professional, high-quality event.
This means: the Fringe Fund support will help your event proceed, but you (or your team!) are responsible for all elements of the production, including:
- managing a creative project plan and schedule that will ensure your project is delivered as a fully realised work, not a work-in-progress
- budgeting for costs responsibly, ensuring you have put aside funds for the Fringe participation fees as applicable and access service costs;
- producing the event to a high standard of delivery, and completing administration tasks such as registering the event, etc;
- marketing your event; and
- sourcing any additional funding required through sponsorship, partnerships or grants.
This is quite different to having your work purchased for presentation by a festival that pays an upfront fee, then takes care of all the producing on your behalf!
- You will work collaboratively with Melbourne Fringe.
This means: Melbourne Fringe is a key stakeholder in the event, unlike a standard grant where the funder just wants an acquittal report at the end. Because we have a vested interest in the success of your work as well as the Civic Commission project this fits within, we may ask you to collaborate with Melbourne Fringe in certain ways while working on your project. We won’t encroach on your artistic vision, but we might offer support including:
- dramaturgical advice to help you position the work for a Melbourne Fringe audience;
- advice or feedback for your budget, to help you work towards financial success; or
- inclusion in marketing or publicity opportunities; or
- suggesting the scale of your project might require you to allocate funds towards a producer, production manager or designer to help you achieve your creative vision.
To support you in this way, we will ask that you:
- collaborate with the Melbourne Fringe & the Civic Commission artist’s team around creative development of the project, and share your project timeline, budget and marketing plan (once they’re ready to share of course!);
- attend occasional meetings to discuss the work’s progress and how we can better support you;
- be open and available to listen to our feedback, built on many years of experience.
We don’t require a share of the work’s intellectual property, but we do ask for permission to film or photograph the event for marketing, promotional and archival purposes. We also ask that you keep us updated on any future seasons of the work, and always credit Melbourne Fringe as an original funder.
APPLICATION & SELECTION PROCESS
As part of your application, you will be asked to provide a creative pitch of your project, as well as a description of the audience’s experience at your event (maximum 200 words each). We want to know who you are and who you plan to work with on the project, and how these funds might be used.
In selecting the successful project(s) we will consider the following criteria:
- Concept: We want to know, does your project put forward exciting ideas and creative thinking? Does it respond to the provocation of ideas around movement and community participation at an outdoor venue?
- Capacity: do you have the skills and the team to present what you want to achieve? Will you be able to deliver a high-quality outcome for your project? Do you have a good understanding of outdoor public performance?
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What are the Festival Dates this year?
Your project must take place at some point during, and as part of, the 2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival, which will be 30 September to 19 October this year.
Who owns the work?
The artist owns the work. Melbourne Fringe just has the right to premiere the work as part of the 2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival, and to capture images and/or video of the work for documentation, acquittal and marketing purposes; but the work belongs to the artist.
Can I apply to tour or remount an existing work?
Unfortunately not, as the funds for this stream are committed to commissioning new works – however, we’re definitely open to ideas if how you might redevelop an existing work in a new or exciting way. If you have done a development before, or perhaps a work-in-progress showing or season – that’s OK! As long as, hand on heart, you can say this is the premiere, it’ll probably be fine. If you’re unsure of whether your new ideas would make it a “new work” or not, please just get in touch!
Why do you ask demographic questions as part of the application process?
We have a commitment to ensuring that events Melbourne Fringe funds collectively represent the breadth of Melbourne’s diverse communities, and we have specific quotas and targets of funding allocations towards our communities of focus, which include artists who are: First Nations, People of Colour, culturally and linguistically diverse people, Deaf, Disabled, and LGBTQIA+ people with a separate quota to specifically support transgender artists. Assigning quotas to our funding allocations ensures that we are properly representing lead artists from these communities.
Do you have a question that we haven’t answered in this Information Pack? We’d love to chat to you! Please email jasmine@melbournefringe.com.au or call our office on (03) 9660 9600 (or via the National Relay Service) to have a chat.
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