The number of international shows at Adelaide Fringe will return to pre-pandemic levels in 2023, with a total line-up of more than 1200 events unveiled today – including an opening-weekend show featuring pyrotechnics and percussion in Elder Park and a smorgasbord of performances in a new hub in Victoria Square.
Organisers say the overall number of shows registered so far is a 14 per cent increase on 2022, when COVID-19 restrictions were still affecting live performance.
Interstate and international acts will make up more than 40 per cent of the events, which span comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, visual art, music, interactive shows and a new genre titled “eat & drink”.
“As an open-access arts festival, the program takes a form of its own, driven by the artists and shows that register, and we are so happy that more than 1200 shows have been registered,” said Adelaide Fringe director and CEO Heather Croall.
“It is wonderful to see so many international shows coming back after a couple of years of not being able to have internationals here. It is a bumper program full of old favourites as well as hundreds of new shows.”
A free welcome ceremony will be held at Adelaide Botanic Garden on February 12, the Sunday before the festival officially opens. The opening weekend is expected to see thousands of people flock to Elder Park to see the Australian premiere of French performance art company Les Commandos Percu’s ticketed show Silence!.
Presented by Momentarily & Buxton Walker, who describe it as “a massive pyrotechnic, fireworks and percussion spectacle”, Silence! will be presented over three days at an event also featuring Australian musicians, roving entertainment, and a food and drinks precinct.
Ambassadors back
Next year marks the 10th anniversary of Fringe’s ambassador program, and the three ambassadors for 2023 will be drag artist Kween Kong (who will perform with fellow Ru Paul’s Drag Race Down Under stars in B.A.Bz in the Wonderland Spiegeltent at Hindmarsh Square), British comedian Sarah Millican (presenting a Fringe show at Thebarton Theatre), and US performance artist Penny Arcade.
Penny Arcade: The Art of Becoming will be the headline show in The Pyramid, a 15m-high pyramid-shaped venue that will host burlesque, music, dance and circus acts in new Fringe precinct Fool’s Paradise in Tarntanyangga / Victoria Square.
The hub is being run by Melbourne-based Head First Acrobats, and will present more than 25 shows across The Pyramid and second venue The Vault – a 20m geodesic dome especially designed for circus and physical theatre, where the line-up will include previous Fringe award-winning show GODZ, YUCK Circus and Barbaroi. Fool’s Paradise will also have a bar and food trucks, as well as long-table lunches.
“We started Fool’s Paradise for a multitude of reasons,” says Thomas Gorham, co-founder of both the hub and Head First Acrobats.
“This festival offers so many opportunities, and we’re hoping our site can offer stable financial and working conditions for festival artists after a pretty tough couple of years. Visitors can expect world-class acts within a gorgeous outdoor site with space to enjoy the sunshine, a South Australian wine and connect with the arts scene in Australia’s largest arts festival.”
East End hub Gluttony has a strong line-up of more than 150 shows programmed across 13 performance spaces in Murlawirrapurka / Rymill Park for the 2023 Fringe, including returning favourites such as Velvet Rewired (featuring former Fringe ambassador Marcia Hines), Rouge, Choir of Man, 27 Club, Matt Tarrant and 2022 circus hit The Defiant.
“Coming into 2023, it’s a return to where we were pre-pandemic, but taking a lot of the lessons learned and also the growth that we’ve seen over that period… so there are as many performance spaces and shows as we had before the pandemic, but on the more expanded site that we’ve had since 2020 and 2021,” says Gluttony co-director El Kirschbaum.
“We’re hoping this will be our biggest year yet.”
Among the new shows coming to Gluttony are 50 Odd Years of Crabb (in which journalist and TV presenter Annabel Crabb will share “50 things she’s learned over 50 years, in 50 minutes”), immersive show Speed: The Movie The Play (a re-creation of the 1994 film on a vintage bus, with the audience as characters in the action), Yummy: The Kids Extravaganza (a family-friendly take on the drag/cabaret show Yummy), and Harry Potter-themed musical theatre show Voldemort & The Teenage Hogwarts Musical Parody.
Bass Fam Creative, which previously presented Fringe shows Oracle and The Matador, is returning with a new horror-themed theatre experience called Mansion which is described as “a paranormal, torrid love story laced with lust, temptation, nightmares and horror”. “It’s got American Horror Story vibes,” says Kirschbaum.
Sound issue fixed
While the pandemic encouraged a proliferation of outdoor Fringe spaces, one of the challenges was preventing sound from these stages impacting other shows.
Gluttony co-director Daniel Michael says that next year its large outdoor venue (with an audience capacity of 1500) will be known as The Fantail and will face away from the park, with a large buffer wall to provide some shade and sound containment.
Gluttony will also have a redesigned entrance, which is larger and set further into the park so queues don’t spill onto the road.
Across the road in Rundle Park, the Garden of Unearthly Delights will celebrate its 21st anniversary in 2023 with a program that co-producer Michelle Buxton says “introduces a host of hand-picked emerging artists as well as bringing you new works from a galaxy of world-class award-winning stars”.
Its centrepiece is The Party, the latest circus-music show by Strut and Fret, known for slick productions such as Blanc de Blanc and LIMBO. Another major drawcard will be Kaleidoscope, an immersive show by installation artist Keith Courtney (1000 Doors, The House of Mirrors) which premiered at this year’s Rising festival in Melbourne and invites audiences to get lost in a mirror maze full of ever-changing colour, light and sound.
Darkfield – the company behind shipping-container experiences Séance, Flight and Coma – will be back in the Garden with its newest creation, Eulogy, which promises “a surreal, otherworldly journey through a dreamlike, labyrinth hotel that exists entirely in your mind”, while popular shows Smashed: The Brunch Party and A Night at the Musicals with Le Gateau Chocolat and Johnny Woo will return, as will cabaret star Reuben Kaye.
Garden goers can also expect the usual line-up of top comedy acts – including Rove McManus, Sam Simmons, Geraldine Hickey, Cal Wilson, Judith Lucy, Dave Hughes, Tom Gleeson and Wil Anderson – plus a music program that includes the free SA Indigenous music series The Garden Sessions, this time with an all-female line-up.
Key Fringe theatre venue Holden Street Theatres is also looking forward to welcoming back more international shows next year, with artistic director Martha Lott telling InReview its main show will be the UK production Jesus, Jane, Mother & Me, a coming-of-age story by writer Philip Stokes which stars Stokes’ son Jack and won the Holden Street Edinburgh Award 2022.
“It’s a quintessentially Holden Street show,” Lott says.
“There’s amazing content in Australia and South Australia but I think there’s always value in having the doors open to international work coming in and seeing what’s happening around the world… that’s what the audience has come to expect from us.”
While Holden Street Fringe regular Henry Naylor isn’t touring next year, other highlights of the venue’s program will include the award-winning one-woman show Mustard, by Irish company Fishamble, and A Star is Torn, featuring comedian and actor Greg Fleet and Krutika Harale as “two stand-up comics who fall in love, first with the art form and then with each other”.
In all there will be more than 300 Fringe venues presenting shows in 2023, with new spaces ranging from The Yurt and The Chapel at the Migration Museum (programmed by Nick Phillips and Britt Plummer) and Garage International at Crack Kitchen, to a piano garden in Murray Bridge dubbed The Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary.
The Electric Dreams program will return – with a series of events centred around digital technology, immersive storytelling, augmented reality and virtual reality – while the new Eat & Drink genre has been added to the Fringe program to cater for the increasing number of offerings that fall within this category.
Eat & Drink events in 2023 will include the opportunity to join the team at Lou’s Place at Lou Miranda Estate cellar door in the Barossa Valley as they turn the last of the season’s summer tomatoes into sauce, a “Disco Bottomless Brunch” at Sublime Café in Clarence Park, and a “Beer & Dogs” event at Myponga’s Smiling Samoyed Brewery.
The full 2023 Adelaide Fringe program is now online.
This article originally appeared on InDaily.
