The Ten Best Things to See at the Sydney Fringe Festival 2015
Expect a silent dinner party, a Giant Dwarf mini-festival and a huge focus on Erko.
The Ten Best Things to See at the Sydney Fringe Festival 2015
Expect a silent dinner party, a Giant Dwarf mini-festival and a huge focus on Erko.
The inner west officially gets all the Fringe fun. After hunkering down in Newtown last year, this year’s Sydney Fringe Festival has its sights set on Erskineville, with the suburb tapped as the home of this year’s official Festival Village, a suburb-wide hub.
The 2015 program includes more than 300 performances across 50 different venues in five different main locales — Newtown, Erskineville, Marrickville, Redfern and Surry Hills. Erskineville's Festival Village will play host to the official opening night party, Fringe Ignite, on September 5, with a prohibition-themed gin bar run by Young Henrys and a 1920s-style speakeasy lounge. Other festival highlights include a day of Indigenous art, music and performance in Redfern; a silent dinner party hosted by internationally renowned artist Honi Ryan at Marrickville Town Hall; a masquerade horror installation (whatever that means) in a warehouse; and a two-week partnership with the Chaser's Giant Dwarf theatre.
Image: Late Night Library at Sydney Fringe.
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You can do away with your internet searching and your book reading; borrow a human instead during Sydney Fringe. In this oral history performance, choose a human and hear them tell you a chapter from their life. From Shane Teehan’s story of Afghanistan imprisonment in a real-life mixed-up spy story to Holly Ladmore’s journey from Olympic track and road racing athlete to cosplay character, you can borrow a ‘human book’ for 20 minutes across libraries within Marrickville Council.
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Hell yes! Get along to the third instalment of the Soul Collective Mixtape series as Australia’s most prominent future-soul, hip hop and electronica groups take over Venue 505 for a night of irresistible groove. Featuring 30/70 (Melbourne), Fortunes (New Zealand), Sydney’s Lana Rita and newly formed electronica/afro-beat supergroup The Cosmodelta, this guaranteed boogie night will have you burning through the soles of your shoes in no time.
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Part of the Giant Dwarf festival-within-a-festival at Sydney Fringe, Free to a Good Home sees comedians Michael Hing (Triple J, Good Game) and Ben Jenkins (The Checkout, Story Club) bring their hilarious podcast series to the stage, inviting a host of guests along as they delve into the weird and wonderful world of Australia’s classifieds. Watch them scour Gumtree, Craigslist, Etsy et al as they discover and discuss, in detail, what people are shamelessly selling or giving away for cheap via the convenient anonymity of the internet.
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Catch Left, winner of the 2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival’s People’s Choice Award, while it’s right here in Sydney. An hour-long spectacle of physical theatre performed by seven acrobats, it explores the joy of building human relationships and community, and the experiences of loss, grief and recovery. This is a heart-warming show by Australian circus company Long Answers to Simple Questions.
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This immersive, site-specific reimagining of Anthony Neilson’s play The Wonderful World of Dissocia will take place at a secret location somewhere in the heart of Sydney (you can register for clues by signing up at [email protected]). Protagonist Lisa Jones is trying to find the lost hour that has tipped the balance of her life, a mission that entails surreal visions, comical and unsettling characters and “the shadow of the Black Dog King”. An impressive team is behind this production presented by The Kings Collective and supported by ATYP, including Matthew Lutton of Malthouse Theatre and Emma Valente of The Rabble, who have mentored director David Harrison. The Kings Collective won the Fringe Award for Excellence in Theatre with their production ofThis Is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan last year and are making a welcome return to the Fringe season.
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Join a host of hilarious women in this comedy event all about bicycles. Now in its fourth year, Pushy Women is an afternoon of laughs organised by writer, comedian and cycling evangelist Catherine Deveny. This edition features Wendy Harmer, Tracey Spicer, Zoe Norton-Lodge, Mariam Veiszadeh, Dee Madigan, Nakkiah Lui and Lady Sings it Better, who will regale with stories of life on (and off) two wheels. And if you weren’t pumped up enough already, you can also participate in a women’s cycle through Marrickville before the show kicks off.
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At a time when journalists in Australia are prohibited from reporting on the goings on at Nauru and the Australian Border Force has threatened to patrol the streets to check Australians’ visa paperwork, here is your chance to hear first-hand the stories of five asylum seekers who have reached our shores and made a new life in Western Sydney. If You Come to Australia was created during a residency at Urban Theatre Projects and is performed by a cast of diverse Australians to protect the identities of those whose stories are being told in this verbatim theatre piece over five nights.
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The roaring ’20s just got a whole lot quieter (but in a cool way) with this exclusive art deco speakeasy style lounge, which will be tucked away inside Erskineville Town Hall during Sydney Fringe. It kind of feels like NSW is on the path to prohibition anyway, so why not embrace it with a cheeky (though still legal) evening drink accompanied by some up-close-and-personal entertainment? Only 18 lucky punters can squeeze into this joint at a time, but it’s the perfect place to stow away with a couple close friends and bear witness to the likes of magician Alex Moffat, get the jitters at Host a Murder Party or relive the music of the 1920s with a series of live sets.
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After one humdinger of a debut year, Young Henrys are bringing back their highly successful celebration of all things inner west Sydney. Small World Festival pairs their beloved craft beer with some of Sydney’s best live bands and the inner west’s most beloved food joints, and this year, Young Henrys have turned it to 11. Locked in for Saturday, September 19, at a new location at Sydney Park, Alexandria, Small Worlds will see Australian rock royalty The Church headline one heck of an Aussie bill that also includes DZ Deathrays, PVT, supergroup Jack Ladder and the Dreamlanders (Jack Ladder, Kirin J. Callinan, Laurence Pike and Donny Benet), PALMS and All Our Exes Live in Texas.
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If you’re bad at dinner table conversation, this event is for you. Honi Ryan is an interdisciplinary artist from the Blue Mountains and has been taking the world by (a very quiet) storm with her Silent Dinner Party performance art project. At this Sydney Fringe incarnation, guests will be treated to a three-course meal prepared by Studio NEON at Marrickville Town Hall. The catch is, you can’t utter a word or sound during the event. You also aren’t allowed to read, write or use your mobile phone. Talking around the table is a global human ritual — this is a social experiment that will shake up social norms for the sake of artistic experience (not to mention delicious food).
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