The Ten Best Things to See and Do at Sydney Fringe 2012

The 2012 Sydney Fringe Festival encompasses the full mix of commercial, community and creative output bubbling up from around the edges of the city's arts scene. This year's incarnation even sees Fringe artists staking out the airport to lure arriving tourists into explore the scattershot geography of this year's spread: laid out from Marrickville, Newtown, across the CBD, east Sydney, Chatswood, Rookwood and Parramatta.

This swathe of so much emerging and newly-established talent can be tough to sort through. As it happens, Concrete Playground has put together this guide to help you come to grips with this year's program of alternative arts.

1. Fringe on the Streets

The Fringe is getting out on the streets this year. It kicks off on the streets of Newtown with an opening night Free for All in Newtown Square (in front of the Hub Theatre), featuring headliners Itch-E & Scratch-E from 5pm on September 7. Bookending the month's activities is a closing night fiesta in the form of a suburb wide progressive party suggesting you test your celebratory stamina, taking you from Five Eliza, through the Sly Fox to the Factory Theatre closing party and on to the late night antics at Marrickville Bowling Club. This is far from the only attempt to get you to hit the pavement: Guided Fringe by Bicycle gets you around the best of the arts scene on Thursday nights, while the Pop Up Festival gives you some performance on the move and Decoration Wars gives you a whirl around made-over Enmore businesses.

2. Life in Minature

It's the year for culture in close confines, with Brook Andrews' Travelling Colony at the Sydney Festival this year, and former Australia Council digital maven Fee Plumley funding her ambitious plan to bring arts to the country at large by kickstarting a bus. With this already in the works, Serena Chalker and Quindell Orton have brought their show and its caravan across to Sydney from the Perth Fringe. For dance act Life in Miniature, Chalker and Orton’s invites an audience of five to shuffle into said caravan’s interior while the two players dance around them. Not small enough? Umbrella Theatre’s show Captain My Captain also brings an even tinier puppetry space to the some of the Fringe’s outdoor venues.

3. In the Night Garden

Last year's night garden at the back of St Peters' Tortuga Studios was one of the surprise finds of the 2011 Fringe. Returning after last year’s inaugural luminescent growth, In the Night Garden will make this back lane (roughly settled between Penguin Plays Rough and Mays Lane) into a low-key, glowing avenue of art. You can also wander down an iridescent May’s Lane to check out the Off the Wall light projections near St Peter’s station for most of the festival, curated by nearby I Heart Gallery.

4. Sydney Underground Film Festival

The Sydney Underground Film Festival is an honest-to-God fringe festivity — an intelligently curated counter-culture weekend of weird, wack and unearthed cinephilia. The SUFF  team pitches itself as "the purveyors of provocation, dissent and civil disobedience". And rightly so. They've pulled off some crazy-as-hell nights in the past, and this year's program looks just as great. Festival opening night is always excellent — not just great new films but a big party with delicious food and drinks. Francophenia (Or: Don't Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby is) is a hybrid doco/fiction which chronicles James Franco's work in General Hospital and the absurdity of celebrity culture. For politics junkies, there's Wikileaks: Secrets and Lies by UK director Patrick Forbes. And Mr Doodleburger, the murderous, redubbed alter-ego of Home and Away's Alf Stewart, will be unveiling his latest Summer Bay slaughter and doing a live Q&A.

5. Le Gateau Chocolat

This Fringe Festival Sydney will be treated to a generous slice of Gateau when the operatic star of La Soiree returns to Sydney for his solo debut. Delivering moving renditions of songs branching everything from pop-rock and jazz to classical opera and fusing them with his own story, Le Gateau Chocolat manages to make the fact that he is a big Nigerian dude (one with a law degree, no less) dressed as a woman seem almost beside the point.It’s rare that a performer dressed in 160 pounds of false eyelashes and ostentatiously frothy tulle will be remembered primarily for mesmerising human stories rendered in an exquisite baritone voice, but Le Gateau Chocolat isn’t your average larger-than-life operatic diva with a penchant for glittery lycra.

6. Fringe Comedy

The Festival is making it easier to pick your way through its packed comedy schedule by offering a series of compendium nights where you can get a parade of comedians at each others' elbows to try to lure you to their other shows. Jennifer Wong and Michael Hing headline A Series of Young Asian Comedians Not Doing Asian Jokes, the Fringe Comedy Showcase crams 8 acts into its four weekly nights of laughs, and Barely Legal showcases the comic talents of young stand-ups, former finalists in the Class Clowns competition down in Melbourne.

7. Fringe Music

This year's musical line-up runs the gamut from silent film soundtrack with Stu Hunter's closing compositions to 1927 film Berlin, Marrickville Bowling Club's evening of underground electronic, Brouhaha!, and an Eastside FM takeover of former underground venue 505. Also on the cards, New Weird Australia takes a night of experimental tunes at Five Eliza, a little Tim Freedman and the Sonic Mayhem Orchestra perform Miles Davis performing Gershwin.

8. Fringe Theatre

If the cramped theatre of Life in Miniature is a little too intimate, this year’s fringe is also running theatre across less crowded stages. 1980+ watches the lives of Chinese students in Australia bifurcate as some stay here and some return home in this english-subtitled, Mandarin production. Eclective Productions restage Philip Ridley's Pitchfork Disney, Erskineville performance space PACT program dance, luminescence and blood disorders, Gandhari offers up the Mahabharata in an hour and story teller Candy Royale helps take over the Rattler. In the Fringe's burlesque sideline, Esque will dress the form up in pretty words, while Bogan-Ville Burlesque does its level best to dress it down.

9. Mystery Bus

The bicycle-free fringe tour on wheels returns for another year of busman's holidays around Sydney's grand festival of alternative arts. Mystery Bus invites you to board their omnibus at the Enmore Theatre before they whisk you away into a night of mystery and, inevitably, arts. The bus lays out (mostly) cryptic clues about its final destination on their fringe page, inviting you to guess about the evening's terminus. The adventures are listed as XXX (8 September), Editor's Choice (14 and 15 September), Cinematic Slap (20 September), Carnie Delight (22 September), Roll Em Girls (23 September), Dirty Diva (27 September) and Blind Tiger (September 29). Sharp-eyed attendees who know their local arts can probably work their cross-referencing magic against programs and listings to guess the destination. But really, wouldn't you rather be surprised?

10. Surprises

When you land at the Fringe, you never knows how stunning, embarrassing or enigmatic its acts will be. Half the fun of turning up is finding gems in strange places: discovery is all. Will the Bard be better reinterpreted by Bard to the Bone or a steampunk Tempest? Will sometime radio star Anna Salleh lure you successfully to Brazil, or will understanding art finally leave you laughing? Perhaps you'll find an artistic match touring the Fringe's fringes in exotic Double Bay for Blue Beat Jazz, Chatswood for Urban Screen Shorts, Fringe Arts at the Forum in Leichhardt or another dose of dance in Annandale at Platform Shorts. There's only one way to find out, really.

Leading image by Newtown Graffiti. Sydney Underground Film Festival by Lauren Carroll Harris. Le Gateau Chocolat by Hannah Ongley.