Festival
The 2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival offers a rich range of llocal and international shows that affirm the human desire for real connection. By Robert Reid.
2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival
At some point in the past six months we, as a species, broke information. The launch of artificial intelligence across a broad range of digital portals means that mediated communication, though it has always contained multiple fractures, must now be at least suspect. How can we know anything now? In such a time, I wonder if the physical and immediate will emerge as a response to the uncertainty and anxiety of the post-post-truth era.
Melbourne Fringe creative director Simon Abrahams says “yesterday’s ideas won’t solve the challenges of today”, ironically echoing Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 assertion that “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present”. I wonder about that. The dogmas of today are also proving inadequate.
Since the early 1980s, the Melbourne Fringe Festival has been something of an anomaly. For most of its history, it has been without an international festival to be the fringe of. Inspired by the Adelaide Fringe, Melbourne Fringe began as a celebration of creativity and community. Back then, the simple act of making art was considered fringe to society.
Melbourne Fringe has grown to be an important part of the global fringe festival circuit, attracting performers and artists from around the world. This year the festival welcomes Mammalian Diving Reflex, Ontroerend Goed, HIMHERANDIT and several others, each an internationally based company that has developed an audience for itself in Australia. Among the other international acts are artists from South Korea, three productions from Britain and two Taiwanese companies presented as part of the sixth year of the Fringe Focus Taiwan program. It makes me wonder if a festival such as today’s fringe has had to take on some of the work that the old Melbourne International Arts Festival used to do.
The festival offers a broad range of experiences that reflect the tenacity and resilience of independent artists and our need to connect in the real world. The major commission this year – a space for collective community dance, Power Move, at Federation Square – is produced by Linda Catalano’s Quiet Riot. Pulsing Heart from Adelaide presents Voices, a free interactive sound and light installation that will tour the city, Williamstown and Footscray. Works of particular interest by local artists include Tattoo Show by Rawcus, Refined by Lab Kelpie, The Blok! by A Daylight Connection and The Censor by Cas Fumi and Vidya Rajan.
At the Meat Market, Mass Effect by HIMHERANDIT is a dance work that includes participation by local performers. It begins with rhythm, built and made by the bodies of five performers in the space. The room fills with the sound of their squeaking shoes setting a tempo and a pattern. The white and black exercise gear and the repetition of the physical movement, broken by running or stretching, give the whole a gymnastic feel. Cycles and patterns, or rather routines, are established and become more complex as they weave in and out of each other, growing like fractals, mutating like evolution. The patterns approach chaos through the increase of complexity, and the dancers’ bodies become more undisciplined, movements bigger and less controlled, larger but weaker. The dancers become tired, their breathing laboured, grunting and even screaming as if tortured by the forced routine.
In the face of all this activity, I find myself wondering about stillness, slowness and heaviness. As they move, the dancers begin to strip as if they have become too hot, too sodden with the sweat of the exercise. At a signal they are joined by a large group, almost like a party dance circle, that seems to come from everywhere. Eventually everyone onstage is in various stages of nudity – the main five only distinguishable now by how slicked and shiny they are with the sweat of their labour.
It ends with a blackout, which is not very satisfying. Has the mechanistic become the animal? Have the calisthenics become sex? I choose to see it as a return to human connection as simple physical beings, united by labour, away from the poisoned digital world.
In Brunswick East at Our Lady Help of Christians Hall, Puppet Rats present Die! Die! Die! Old People Die!, a new adaptation of Ridiculusmus’s 2018 work. While the original was performed by artistic directors Jon Haynes and David Woods playing ancient versions of themselves, Puppet Rats operate rod puppets of the old people the original evokes. They live the last few of their days together, a throuple of sorts. They dance, they have tea, they reminisce and then one by one they die, leaving the last to mourn. Cheery night out.
The action is performed in front of two laptops, using their built-in cameras to capture and project onto a screen behind. Sometimes it looks like an Instagram filter and at others it has a grainy Blair Witch quality. The three puppets themselves are exquisitely made. The puppeteering is reasonably accomplished and the advanced age of the characters perhaps serves to disguise shaky work. There is a magic to presence that I am reminded of when I try to see the puppets, which are obscured by lighting stands and audience heads. The glimpse of the actual physical object is reduced as it is mediated by the screen, sacrificing effect for broadcast.
Finally, UNWOMAN (the protest) at The Edge in Federation Square is a new durational performance presented by Melbourne’s leading queer feminist post-dramatic theatre company, The Rabble.
Beginning quietly with a single woman at the mic, a local First Nations elder welcomes us, tells us the story of her family and how they are tied to the land and the history of the Wurundjeri. The performance begins and proceeds in the same way. Each speaker takes their place at the mic onstage and on camera, one after the other, waiting respectfully for the previous participant to conclude their time. They state their first name, how many pregnancies they have had or been involved in, and then briefly share their thoughts on it.
The processional nature of this format recalls the generations of parents and children. As a celebration of and meditation on birth, it’s easy to imagine how the dramaturgy of such a work could easily be heteronormative, but The Rabble is smarter than this. There is some queer representation, some trans and even a few cis het men. There is still an overwhelming presence of women who “always knew they wanted kids”, but even these are not unproblematic experiences and the personal tragedies that leaven these lends the experience a sombre and careful tone.
Each speaks their truth, some brief and to the point, some an unburdening of ideas or pain that requires more time. It should be said that due to the recruitment process the participants are weighted towards arts workers, mostly educated and middle class people. It also means there are people I know among the participants. It’s hard not to cry with them as they share their experiences, their hope, their pain, fear and grief.
The Rabble uses pregnancy as a tool to carve out a public space for these people – mostly women – to speak in a way they are usually denied. Here a territory is marked out by subject and it can be a place to express defiance, heartbreak, love. It is the clearest example of why human beings need “theatre” as a space for people to speak their truth to each other in person.
Each of these performances, in its own way, is an act carried out between people in the physical world. Artist and audience breathe the same air and perform the same task – a collective imagining. A fringe festival is a necessary ritual of grass-touching through performance and community. It is a partial antidote to autocracy by public exposure to and celebration of difference.
With so much on at the festival, the challenge for punters is deciding what to see, and for the festival that challenge is how to maintain focus across so many priorities. Maybe Melbourne Fringe needs a fringe festival of its own.
Melbourne Fringe continues until October 19.
ARTS DIARY
DANCE Liveworks Festival
Carriageworks, Gadigal Country/Sydney, October 22-26
INSTALLATION Our Wonderous Planet
Melbourne Museum, Naarm, from October 18
CULTURE Tarnanthi Festival
Art Gallery of South Australia, Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide, until January 18
CERAMICS Under Fire: Clay from the Western Edge
Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre, Whadjuk Noongar Country/Fremantle, until November 2
EXHIBITION The World of Butterflies
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, nipaluna/Hobart, until January 26
LAST CHANCE
MULTIMEDIA Past Echoes
Back to Back Galleries, Awabakal and Worimi Country/Newcastle, until October 19
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 18, 2025 as "Fringe benefits".
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