Sydney Fringe Festival Will Head to the CBD for the First Time in 2019

Sydney Fringe Festival has today begun to unveil the details of its 2019 program, which will be both its 10th anniversary and its most ambitious to date.

From 1–30 September, the state's largest independent arts festival will head to the CBD for the first time, taking over the three-storey City Tattersalls Club. It'll be transformed into a multi-faceted events and arts space with three theatres, a pop-up basement bar and a multi-level dance party. Held on the closing weekend, Dance All Night will culminate in a Footloose-inspired flash mob (time to schedule a re-watch and start practising your dance moves).

At the other end of the program, on September 7, there'll be a Dance All Day event in Leichhardt, where you can literally do just that — spend the day dancing with some of the country's (and the world's) best dance instructors and performers.

Sydney's CBD is one of the areas impacted by the city's strangling lockout laws, which have contributed to the closure of bars and live music venues. While there have been other efforts to revitalise the area, Sydney Fringe CEO and Festival Director Kerri Glasscock said in a statement that the festival is thrilled to help "bring life back to the streets" and "continu[e] Sydney Fringe's passion for enlivening Sydney's unused spaces and providing audiences unique experiences".

Glasscock has previously criticised and proposed solutions to the government's "onerous red tape" that is "strangling Sydney's creative sectors" in a report released last year entitled An Anthology of Space.

Sydney Fringe Festival's 2018 Fringe Club.

As well as heading to CBD, the festival will also descend on a slew of other postcodes. There'll be more than eight hubs spread across the city, including one in Western Sydney, a new one in Paddington (with events held underneath Oxford Street's Verona Cinemas), an Emerging Artist Hub at Erskineville Town Hall, a Comedy Hub at the Kings Cross Hotel and an excitingly named Circus Hub in Lillyfield run in collaboration with with physical theatre company Legs on The Wall. In Lillyfield, we're promised a "world premiere development season of a new immersive experience" — we'll let you know when more details drop on that.

The full lineup will not be announced until August, but Glasscock is calling it "our most ambitious festival program to date". If it is indeed bigger than last year's festival — which had over 400 shows in more than 60 venues in 21 postcodes — it's going to be huge. Start clearing your calendar for September.

Sydney Fringe Festival will run from September 1–30. The full program will drop in August — we'll let you know when it does.

Top image: Seiya Taguchi.