The Ten Best Things to See at the Sydney Fringe Festival 2013

Some of the world's fringe festivals go for curation, featuring the cream of the crop of local and touring indie talent. Others open their doors wider, allowing for the truly weird, unexpected or unconnected a chance to step under the spotlight and make a lasting impression. The Sydney Fringe Festival falls mainly into the latter camp, with its bewildering and Bible-thick program containing the wonderful, the luckless and every inflection in-between.

The independent festival has grown into the city's largest alternative arts event, spanning most of September and including the media of visual arts, film, digital arts, theatre, music, comedy, musical theatre, circus/physical theatre, dance, cabaret, books, kids and family shows, poetry, food and wine and things just plain 'other'. The festival is spread out over five 'creative villages' mainly centring around the Inner West, and this year welcomes a new festival hub, Emerald City garden bar. Located in the Seymour Centre courtyard — in front of a key Fringe venue and a popular spot during summer's Courtyard Sessions — the late-night garden bar will give the sprawling festival a social heart, in the vein of the Sydney Festival's Festival Garden or Adelaide Fringe's famed Garden of Earthly Delights.

Also among the new venues is Eliza's Juke Joint (at the old 5 Eliza festival bar); the Dendy Cinema car park, which will host the Artcore Guerilla Artfair; and the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre, transformed into Camp Super Happy Sunshine Fun, a thing that we're assured is for adults (yay!). Comedy will continue to be based in the Factory Theatre, while Marrickville will also lead in the live music stakes, with artists such as Abby Dobson in the Camelot Lounge.

"We have discovered hundreds of hidden gems within the city, not only focusing on a terrific arts program but opening up to artisan food, crafts and sub-cultures," says Sydney Fringe Festival spokesperson Kerri Glasscock. "We have unlocked the city and invite you all to join us in celebrating the wonderful world that is Sydney’s fringe."

In the Night Garden at Tortuga Studios

Tortuga Studio's In the Night Garden has been a strong mark on our cultural calendar across its brief existence. From a promising 2011 debut to an enthusiastic 2012 follow-up, it has taken the laneway intersection behind St Peter's Tortuga Studios and filled it with luminescent art of all descriptions. The night has featured realtime projection, heads aglow, a mushroom-like tree of lamps, live binding and live painting. This year, Tortuga is adding writers to the mix. Visitors will be able to settle into an overlapping mashup of writers' workspace, as a single desk switches faces from one set of writers to the next. The word work will be curated by Zoe Adler Bishop, with local wordsmiths Tabula Rasa (long-time, critical denizens of the Sydney arts scene and fresh off a recent relaunch) adding their keyboard-pounding power into the back-lane lineup.

13 September, 6.30pm; Tortuga Studios, 31 Princes Highway, St Peters; free

2SER History of... at Emerald City

Don't know your music history? Want to? One of the most public-spirited sidelines of this year's Fringe Festival will be the 2SER-fronted series of musical evenings at new festival hub Emerald City Garden Bar. Stepping in for former festival focus 5 Eliza, this new venue brings the Fringe to the Seymour Centre courtyard, offering weekend DJs and free Friday night Fringe teaser nights to whet your appetite for the week to come. In the History of.. series, two hours across three September Thursdays will feature 2SER presenters and friends to shepherd you through key DJs, Motown and Afro-Caribbean beats. The series comes with evenings of Hip Hop (12 September), Funk & Soul (19 September) and Rhythm Out of Afrika (26 September) at 7pm.

Emerald City Garden Bar at the Seymour Centre Courtyard; free

Jude the Obscure at PACT Fringe

Conventional wisdom is that Fringe is your chance to see something truly, deeply weird that would never get a sniff of the main stage but might remind you of the brilliant range of human endeavour. The show to see, in that case, is Jude the Obscure, in which writer/performer Alice Williams plays Australian comedian Judith Lucy (see uncanny resemblance above), in space, in the the future, doing a catalogue of "little known material" from her oeuvre. Because Judith has been accepted into Mars One, of course. Jude the Obscure is on at PACT, which has curated its own lineup of seven Fringe shows, and, as usual, you can be guaranteed that any show you see there is compelling in its own, offbeat way. Among the picks are Animorphed by Applespiel's Simon Binns, in which he reflects on beloved childhood series Animorphs and whether his favourite character was a racist stereotype, and The Defence, a cerebral-fun look at August Strindberg and misogyny within the rehearsal room.

4-14 September; PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, 107 Railway Parade, Erskineville; tickets $25/20/15.

Make Way for Winter

This is a sketch comedy show themed around Game of Thrones. What more do you need to know? The hilarity latent in the Seven Kingdoms and at the Red Wedding finally revealed. Everyone as well as Tyrion bringing the funny. The White Walkers twerking, probably. This show comes from Sydney University's home of comedy, Project 52 (which we named one of Sydney's best alternative comedy rooms), and is an offshoot of their weekly sketch night, Make Way for Ducklings. Book early, GoT fans.

12-14 September; The Fusebox at The Factory; tickets $15

Mad Mex Tequila Masterclass

Tequila is distilled from agave nectar, and, like champagne, it's only really Tequila if its drawn from some specific parts of Mexico. If you can't tell Jalisco from mescal, then early starters in the Sydney taco wars Mad Mex are eager to steer you down the smart path when it comes to downing this Mesoamerican delicacy. They're running two free Tequila Masterclasses in their King Street store, which should leave you ready to mix a better margarita and feel at home sorting out Hornitos from Patron.

12 and 19 September; Mad Mex, Newtown; free, but you'll need to register via [email protected] or (02) 8197 3077

Green Mohair Suits at 5 Eliza's Juke Joint

With the Seymour Centre's Emerald City Garden Bar taking over Festival hub duties from 5 Eliza, this former library and current Fringe headquarters gets reborn as 5 Eliza's Juke Joint. The Joint fahsions itself in the style of Mississipi delta blues, with one of the standout appearances at this haven of Southern sound being local country/bluegrass band the Green Mohair Suits. The group has gone from friends turned bandmates to playing backup to Josh Pyke at Beck Hansen's Song Reader fundraiser last year at the Standard. They'll be joining other Joint luminaries, including the Cope Street Parade, the Hoo Haas and Mic Conway and Liz Frencham.

19 September, 7pm; Eliza's Juke Joint, 5 Eliza St, Newtown; tickets $15.

Bushpig

Bushpig was called "hands-down the most intriguing show to surface in this year’s [Adelaide Fringe]" by theatre guide Heckler — high praise indeed. Like many Fringe Fest events, its a one-person show, but writer/performer Hannah Malarski, a NIDA playwriting grad, makes hers stand out. Her range and vivid characterisations bring to life an eccentric small town of characters, centred around Aunt Vivian and her missing child.

10-13 September; Sound Lounge, Seymour Centre; tickets $20/15.

2013 - When We Were Idiots Walking Tour

The year is 2113, you are about to embark on a walking tour that dissects the consumerism, ignorance and individualism of 2013. Well, sort of. It's not really 2113, but this comedic tour of our fair city, led by a penguin (writer/performer Xavier Toby) pokes fun at the rampant idiocy of contemporary living and the possible implications of living in an age of overconsumption and intolerance. The mixture of comedy, activism, archaeology and strolling is a rare one that prompted Artshub to call When We Were Idiots "interactive theatre at its energetic best".

6-15 September, departing 6.30pm daily as well as 2.30pm on weekends; meet at The Pie Tin, Newtown; tickets $15/10.

Camp Super Happy Sunshine Fun

We're called Concrete Playground; how could we not endorse a bit of childhood regression? Camp Super Happy Sunshine Fun is setting up at Newtown Neighbourhood Centre to help you shed the baggage of adulthood and get silly with games, arts and crafts, a 'Potato Olympics' and friendship circles. Camp director Maya Sebestyen has actually worked at US summer camps, so authenticity is a given.

6, 20, 21, 27 and 28 September, 8pm; Newtown Neighbourhood Centre; tickets $15.

Artcore Guerilla Artfair

Art in the car park is nothing new in Sydney these days. Oversize art fairs aren't sitting too far away on the cultural horizon, either. But while the looming Sydney Contemporary will work at the pricier end of the scale, and the bounty of Alaska Projects comes with a modicum of urban spelunking, the Fringe's annual art market spread sits conveniently just off King Street. Artcore Guerilla Artfair is situated in the Newtown Dendy's cavernous car park, bringing together art by 30 local artists. It's guerilla by price as well as by name, with its art starting around $5.

All day 12 September 12; behind the Dendy Cinemas Newtown, 16-28 Lennox St; free

By Zacha Rosen and Rima Sabina Aouf.