Adelaide Fringe festival aims to be streets ahead of the rest

Adelaide Fringe director Heather Croall has plans to make her 2017 event bigger, brighter, noisier and more colourful.

Artist Lisa King with her David Bowie mural. Picture: Russell Millard

Adelaide Fringe director Heather Croall has plans to make her 2017 event bigger, brighter, noisier and more colourful than ever, as she transforms the festival city into a hub for street art.

Next year’s event, to be launched this morning, will run from February 17 to March 19 and include more than 1160 events at 400 venues, from riverbanks to disused buildings and the ever-popular Garden of Unearthly ­Delights.

The Adelaide Fringe is the largest arts festival in Australia, and Ms Croall said it was still expanding despite increasing competition. Since 2010, ticket sales have grown from 220,000 a year to 600,000 last year.

“The Fringe Festival phenomena is taking over the world and almost every city has a fringe now,” Ms Croall said.

“What’s so wonderful for Australia is that Adelaide is right up there, second to Edinburgh. There will be cities … trying to knock us off our perch and we’ll be doing our best to get stronger.”

She said standout events included an immersive production of the Welsh film Trainspotting that debuted at Edinburgh, a ­Leonard Cohen tribute show, the return of electro-physical circusBarbuand Limbo’s acrobatic cabaret show Blanc de Blanc.

Another highlight is expected to be Street Art Explosion, where artists including Britain-based Jimmy C, who created the David Bowie mural in Brixton, will paint massive artworks on city and suburban buildings.

Lisa King, who began painting murals two years ago and is used to going large — up to 35 metres to be precise — will create a massive piece in Adelaide’s south.

Earlier this year she painted David Bowie on the side of the Maid and Magpie Hotel on the city’s edge as a nod to Jimmy C’s mural, which became a shrine after the singer died. “I had a girl with a bird signed off and ­approved, but then Bowie passed away ... I thought maybe there’d be this universal trend and people would paint them all over the world but it didn’t happen,” King said. “It was a timing thing.”

The sites have been pinpointed on a map to allow people to watch the artists working up high in cherry pickers.

King will also host an artist’s talk on women in the male-­dominated street art industry during the Fringe. “Women are still getting used to the scissor lifts or boom lifts, because it’s quite a tradie thing,” King said.