Moreland’s creatives let loose during Melbourne Fringe Festival
Moreland will flex its creative muscle during Melbourne Fringe, with performers to show off weird and wonderful shows featuring free cured meats, shopping centre nightmares and bringing gum to a knife fight. Here’s where to get your art fix this month.
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Art types have long called Melbourne’s inner north home and many are letting loose with some of the wildest shows yet seen at the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Moreland’s performers have outdone themselves with shows to include Australians preparing an island nation for extinction, sci-fi poetry and the horror of being stuck in Chadstone.
Here is what to expect from the wackiest local performers in the festival, which kicks off on Thursday.
September 12 to 17 at the Rattlesnake Saloon.
Spend a week in the life of a nonna looking back at her migration and life, while her grandson shares his experiences of coming out.
Samuel Dariol’s personal show is a feast literally and figuratively.
“We sit with her while she shares stories about the war, leaving Italy and setting up a life in Australia that didn’t seem to live up to the ideal of the ‘Lucky Country’,” he said.
“La Nonna is officially the only show at Melbourne Fringe with a salami sponsor.
Puopolo Smallgoods are providing enough salami to feed our entire audience. Every. Single. Night.”
September 12 to 29 at Fringe Hub Trades Hall Meeting Room.
Brunswick’s Harley Hefford wrote the sketch show that looks into the affects of consumerism.
“The show is about eight people getting trapped in Chadstone shopping centre,” he said.
“At first, they’re worried for their safety, but they quickly realise they have everything they need.
“In fact, it really isn’t too different to how life was when they weren’t trapped in Chadstone.”
“The messages and the awareness raising is there, but also a whole host of extremely fun characters, such as our ‘coolhunters,’ our version of the Barefoot Investor, Starbucks worshippers, a particularly trusting David Jones employee and a mild-mannered man named Gregory who works at NAB and enjoys karaoke.”
September 9 to 15 at the Butterfly Club.
Personal stories of coming out and what could have been swirl around Sunanda Sachatrakul (Brunswick East) as she questions everything while acting as a range of characters.
Because you are behind a mask, you can allow yourself to be so much more vulnerable,” she said.
“All these characters may seem absurd but every one of them is a part of me.”
September 12 to 20 at Fringe Hub Trades Hall Old Council Chambers.
It is the year 2097 and Kigali, Rwanda is the world’s most populated city.
Christopher White of Oak Park takes the audience inside a dreamland.
“It’s a cultural mix of cosmopolitan influence, infinite technological possibilities, and total lack of crime present a veneer of peace that hides a more sinister reality,” he said.
“KIGALI2097 is a sci-fi spoken word journey into this future.”
Featuring an immersive soundscape and projections, this series of searing poetry vignettes peers into the foreign and familiar soul of a megacity.
KIGALI2097 is a satirical and dramatic cyberfunk presentation combining thematic elements of cyberpunk, afrofuturism, and Blaxploitation.
September 12 to 14 at Brunswick Mechanics Institute.
Deaf artist Chelle Destefano will welcome the audience into her world as she recounts her life growing up all while creating sculptures of Auslan movements to hold conversations.
“I thought about visual representations of movements to sound and vibration and an idea started to form in my mind, how can I make movements visual in a sculpture sense?” she said.
READ MORE ABOUT THE AUSLAN MOVEMENT
BRINGING SOME GUM TO A KNIFE FIGHT
September 12 to 20 at Fringe Hub Trades Hall Old Council Chambers.
Jordan Prosser of Coburg and Sam Burns-Warr act as Australian scientists sent to educate the soon to be extinct residents of the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu in this too-real satire.
“Naturally, things don’t go to plan — and the presentation quickly devolves into a drug-fuelled, surreal romp through the politics and pitfalls of extinction, evolution, and climate change,” Prosser said.
“Audiences can expect to see Paul Hogan tourism commercials from the 80s, interactive origami classes, fun and engaging scientific (ish) experiments, the unveiling of the secret to all human happiness, and enough white guilt to fill Trades Hall until it bursts.”
September 21 to 29 at Fringe Hub Trades Hall Evatt Room
Bring the bathers along as Brunswick’s Oliver Coleman makes a splash with the show that saw him nominated as best newcomer at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Earlier this year.
“It’s a wet and wild ride featuring bizarre characters, ludicrous props and lots of jokes. It’s a delightful hour of joyful chaos,” he said.
“I’ll be onstage the whole time. Except for the bit where I leave the room for a little while and the audience is left wondering whether or not I’m going to come back and finish the show.
“I don’t want to spoil anything so I won’t tell you whether or not I do come back. To be honest, some nights I do. Some nights I just go and get some dinner.”
September 21 to 29 at Fringe Hub Trades Hall Old Council Chambers.
Lucy Fox (Coburg) discusses her life in a cult and her relationship with faith and how the placebo effect could have altered her life in this comedic cabaret show.
“I’ve written quite a bit of music and the stories are from my life, I was thinking about what is something that is common between them,” she said.
“It was a pretty funny moment when I realised this idea of things happening because you believe something, regardless of whether its true or not.”
September 25 to 28 at Theatre Works.
Superhero Cardigan Coriander-Turner is sent on her toughest mission yet, to rescue her pet snake Trix in this family friendly show, written and directed by Amelia Evans and Brunswick East’s Dan Giovannoni.
“It’s about heroes and sidekicks,” Giovannoni said.
“It’s about friendship, and thinking creatively and being brave.
“Mad as a Cute Snake is a truly unique, utterly bonkers adventure story full of
physical comedy, plenty of giggles and lots of heart.”
September 16 to 22 at the Motley Bauhaus.
Nathan Chapman will solve all the world’s problems in song, or at least the Glenroy resident will try to in his first Fringe appearance.
“(The show) covers the biggest issues: crime, climate change, health, overpopulation, self-acceptance, work stress, ageing, the existence of god, and even how to find a romantic partner,” he said.
“The show is satirising bad ideas and also a parody of the way some public figures promote simplistic solutions to complex problems.”
September 24 to 29 at The Burrow.
Brunswick performer Lily Fish falls through am ambitious show full of physical comedy.
“Jofus is being chased by a wolf. They jump out the window. The whole show is them falling,” Fish said.
“(You can expect) mime, clown, slapstick, tears of laughter.”
September 12 to 20 at Finge Hub Trades Hall Quilt Room
Amelia Newman (Brunswick West) blends poetry, performance and cake eating in her show which discusses childhood sexual assault.
“I wanted to make a play about assault after seeing many mainstream shows that graphically depicted assault, but I felt those productions did not follow through the emotional impact of such violence,” Newman said.
“I know many young women who have had similar experiences and felt that the theatrical representation did not reflect the truth.”
September 17 to 22 at Crowded in the Vaults
Ian McCarthy remembers listening to The Strokes’ seminal debut album Is This It as a teenager and the Brunswick comedian uses that as a launching point for his debut solo show.
“The album has a young style to it and listening back to it I wanted to juxtapose that with trying to move on and grow up a little bit,” he said.
September 18 to 27 at Long Play.
Coburg North director Amy McNickle has created an interactive film exploring human connection.
“Posed as a recruitment event, where the company, Worldline Corporations, are looking for new members to join their team, the audience are put through a simulation of the companies new time travel facilities, and upon the end of the simulation, each member receives a different result based on their personal experience, and find out if they’ve been successful or not,’ she said.
“In a film, you watch a character, in a game, you play a character, at Worldline Corporations, you are the character.”
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September 12 to 22 at Fringe Hub Trades Hall New Council Chambers
Henry isn’t ready for the absurd high stakes world of business in this send up of office culture written and directed by Coburg’s Liam Maguire as part of the Broad Ranges Academic Theatre Society.
It’s a fast-paced, hour-long, satirical rollercoaster of workplace politics, and it’s the first in a series of shows we intend to produce for people who think they hate theatre,” he said.
Melbourne Fringe Festival runs from September 12 to 29.