Fringe festivals can offer crucial artistic development – so why don’t more get it right?
Sitting in the back garden of a house at a secret location in North Adelaide, Australia, I was reminded that a crucial consideration for work presented at any fringe must be the opportunities for its onward artistic evolution.
Back in 2023 at the Adelaide Fringe, I watched a show called Strange Chaos, performed late at night in a car park behind an old furniture shop. This time, two years later, I sat in a back garden watching how this show – created by punk rock anarchist clown Mitch Jones and circus artist Masha Terentieva, and performed with Chloe Fazikas – had developed.
The stakes were high. What I had seen back in 2023 might best be described as a true fringe experience that etched itself on my mind. Not simply because of the show’s fusion of sideshow stunts, which certainly made an impression, but also due to Jones’ fusion of anarchic clowning with a powerful theatrical narrative about loneliness and being an outsider.
I wrote at the time how I felt some of the sideshow stunts hindered the arc of the storytelling, “leaving the work feeling fragmented”. I was, therefore, excited to return and see how Jones had developed his show, now with additional support from Creative Australia and the Adelaide Fringe Fund – an impressive scheme overseen by the fringe to support artists to present work. Revisiting a show and watching how something evolves is crucial for both artists and audiences. But this, sadly, seems to happen less when the focus of fringe festivals across the globe is becoming more about selling tour-ready works than enabling experimentation.
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This time around, Strange Chaos is in a newfound space where it is not at risk of getting evicted – it later emerged that the 2023 incarnation did not have permission to play in the car park it had occupied – but still has a spirit of danger and anarchy.
Strange Chaos’ evolution demonstrates the importance of trial and error at the fringe and of artists being given the right environment for such experimentation to exist. The show’s success comes from something that, on the surface, appears to be apparent simplicity. However, its delivery is highly complex. It also offers one of the great finales at this fringe (or any other) where an audience begins the show on a traffic island and dances together on the stage by the end. Delivering this requires considerable skill, something that only comes from a confidence built through lived experiences and studying past masters of an art form.
Contemporary clowning is one of the fastest-growing art forms at Adelaide, and, this year, playing alongside Jones are shows from some of the genre’s finest performers, such as Polish clown Piotr Sikora, who brings the returning show Furiozo: Man Looking for Trouble, and Australian Garry Starr, whose latest show, Classic Penguins, also ran in Edinburgh last year.
Another exciting name to watch in clowning is the emerging Canadian clown and ballerina Lauren Brady. This year, she is using a visit to the Adelaide Fringe to present her show SWAN?, a dark and clever fusion of ballet and clowning that offers an unforgettable take on Swan Lake. She has developed the show by playing various fringes, culminating in success at Adelaide.
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However, in a fringe economy that’s becoming increasingly commercial and unaffordable, where opportunities for development that once existed are now diminished, Brady’s journey is becoming alarmingly rare. Without continued and affordable platforms for shows to be revised and revisited within a fringe environment, where audiences are encouraged to be a part of this process and to keep coming back, we risk a culture of abandonment that will rob us of great theatre.
The evolution of any work or practice comes through the playing of it. No audiences anywhere offer up such an eclectic mix of honest reactions (at times brutally so) than those at a fringe.
This is why the role of fringe festivals in the development of new work and performer practice has long been of significant value. Meanwhile, as the volume of clowning shows increases annually at fringes everywhere, is it not time that the art form is recognised with its own section at all fringe programmes?
Its cross-cultural themes can sometimes make it difficult for these participants to know where best to categorise their work, but there is a driving need for it to receive proper recognition. This is of intrinsic value to the artistic growth, development and exploration that fringe festivals should consistently be seeking to offer creatives.
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