Melbourne Fringe Festival
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The Melbourne Fringe Festival is an annual alternative arts festival held in Melbourne, Australia. The festival runs for three weeks from late September to early October, usually overlapping with the beginning of the mainstream Melbourne International Arts Festival. It includes a wide variety of art forms, including theatre, comedy, music, performance art, film, and cabaret, and has expanded in recent years to embrace digital art and circus performance as well.
Events are held in venues throughout the city, from bars, clubs and independent theatres to high-profile locations including Federation Square and the Melbourne Museum. Like many Fringe Festivals, the Melbourne Fringe has a "Hub" where the main Box Office, Festival Club and Fringe-run venues are located. This is located at the North Melbourne Town Hall and also includes several nearby venues. While the festival is "open access" and thus not curated, artists must make submissions significantly in advance of the Festival to apply for a Hub venue; securing one is seen as a definite advantage in the competitive festival atmosphere due to greater foot traffic, media attention and publicity.
[edit] History
The Melbourne Fringe was founded in 1983 as an alternative to the Adelaide Fringe event that would coincide with the Moomba festival. Since then the Festival has grown rapidly, and is now one of the largest such festivals in the world, annually including more than 3,000 artists, 200 events and over 170 venues.
For some years the Melbourne Fringe was known as the Melbourne Piccolo Spoleto Fringe Festival, but returned to its original name by the mid 1990s. Since 2005, the Fringe logo has been written as melbOURne FRINGE, to emphasize the fact that the festival is meant to belong to the people of Melbourne, rather than any perceived "cultural elite". As of 2006, the Fringe has signed a sponsorship deal with The Age newspaper, and will be known from 2006 to 2008 as The Age Melbourne Fringe Festival.
In 2006, the Bracks Labor government announced an increase in annual funding for the festival from $200,000 to $300,000. Also in that year, the Melbourne Fringe launched "MyFringe", a membership program similar to Adelaide Fringe's "Fringe Benefits" scheme. It is designed to allow artists and patrons to directly support the Fringe through purchase of a membership which grants discounts with supporting retailers and invitations to special member-only events. In the 2006 Victorian state elections, the Festival surprised many by emailing its members telling them to vote for the labor party and to not support the Greens. It later apologised for politicising the Festival.
