Drag Queens, Comedy and Acrobatics: Melbourne Fringe Gets a Ballarat Encore

Melbourne Fringe Festival returns in late September with more than 450 shows spanning theatre, circus, comedy, cabaret and more across 20 jam-packed days. But this year, the festival is stretching beyond Melbourne, with its first ever encore weekend in Ballarat.

Running from October 22 to October 25, Fringe Encore: Ballarat offers highlights from the Melbourne program alongside several works commissioned or created especially for the city.

Fringe’s acting creative director and CEO Danny Delahunty says bringing the festival to a different regional town is in the spirit of the festival’s official theme for this year: “Turn towards the heat”.

“For us, that means to find something unexpected, to find that show that you don’t yet know that you need to see and dive into it,” he says.  

It’s important to extend that ethos of discovery beyond Melbourne’s borders. After successful regional weekends during previous festivals, this year will mark the first time Fringe heads to Ballarat.

“We’ve been doing this Fringe Encore idea for a few years with Geelong, and it’s given us a proof of concept for how it could work to represent some of the best work that's happening in Melbourne,” Delahunty says.

“We wanted to add that up into something much bigger.”

Ballarat’s exclusive offerings include Degustation, a circus-meets-cuisine experience created by One Fell Swoop Circus in collaboration with Shu Restaurant chef Shu Liu. Set within the historic Ballarat Mining Exchange, guests will be seated around the stage and treated to a five-course Sichuan-inspired menu, accompanied by world-class acrobatics. 

“It’s not dinner followed by circus,” Delahunty says. “Each course and each selection of the circus responds to a shared sensory language happening in the food. So, we’ve got flavour, weight, heat, breath, timing, texture and touch all colliding together.”

At the other end of the artistic spectrum – or, as Delahunty puts it, “the same end of the chaos spectrum” – is drag parody Fountain Lakes: Y2K. Starring Drag Race Down Under star Art Simone alongside Jemima Handful and Thomas Jaspers, who also writes and directs, the ’90s-set show lovingly sends up one of Australia’s favourite sitcoms. 

Another Ballarat exclusive is Hero Complex by comedian Sammy J, returning to the festival a decade after he premiered the show at the 2016 Melbourne Fringe Festival, where it won Best Comedy. This one-night-only event will be the only opportunity to see the show during this year’s festival.

Venues across Ballarat will be running back-to-back sessions throughout the night, so audiences can move between shows and discover standout work from the Melbourne season across the city. Delahunty says activating Ballarat’s venues is a key part of the Encore program: “We want to make sure that Fringe is literally bringing the streets of Ballarat alive.”

The streets will also become part of the festival with Ocker by Na Djinang Circus, a Melbourne-based First Nations circus company. A roving contemporary circus work, Ocker sees performers construct a portable railway track piece by piece as they move through the streets, building a train in real time. The performance will tour different suburbs across Melbourne before finishing in Ballarat. 

With a broad range of shows on offer, Delahunty encourages audiences to explore the line-up and find something that catches their interest. “We’re trying to program across every single taste, every genre, style and potential audience member,” he says. “There should be something for everyone in that program.”

Broadsheet is a proud media partner of Melbourne Fringe Festival. Discover the full Fringe Encore: Ballarat program here.