Man lays egg on stage. Is this art?

There are things you see at fringe festivals that you couldn’t possibly see anywhere else, and some things that you will remember for the rest of your life.

Performance art where individual audience members suckle the bosom of a new mother. A performer secreting an egg inside him then laying it as the performance finale. Twenty-four hours of non-stop humming.

I’ve seen all of this – and more – at the Melbourne Fringe Festival over the years. Is any of this art? Is it any good? Does it even matter?

Cam Venn in Charles Horse Lays an Egg at the 2018 Melbourne Fringe Festival.

It’s never been more important to discover new things and open ourselves up to challenging ideas. Melbourne’s artists have had the toughest run of any in the country, unable to gather to make work or to earn income in any substantive way throughout the pandemic.

It’s been three years since there was an in-person Melbourne Fringe Festival at scale. Our audiences have been lacking artistic stimuli in the flesh – art that makes us see the world through new eyes, that builds our empathy, increases our curiosity and that stimulates our emotions.

For 40 years, the Melbourne Fringe Festival’s job has been to help this city to express itself, to amplify new ways of thinking and to celebrate difference.

There are plenty of cultural institutions bringing old art by dead white guys to this city. The reality is that this is where the majority of funds are directed – into big buildings, conservative ideas and safe art that preferences the pedestrian and plays to the middle of the road.

It’s a challenge well-known by Melbourne’s living artists – who make work that is relevant and ground-breaking and which needs to be enabled, amplified and supported right now.

A Recorded Companion by Lily Thomson at the 2020 Fringe.Credit:Celeste Staaf

The Melbourne Fringe Festival began in 1982 as a celebration of this city’s alternative cultures, people and places. Anyone can be part of the Fringe as a place of idea-testing, risk-taking and artistic expression. We say “yes” to pretty much anything – it’s a model of unique inclusion that’s become an undeniably major cultural phenomenon and which creates a space of endless artistic and social welcome, a celebration of uniqueness and of voices from the margins.

The Fringe is about fast-moving collective action, about creating something greater than the sum of its parts and about prioritising bold ideas over perfection, and relevance over virtuosity. It creates a platform for artists to express themselves and to challenge us, art that is relevant to the world as it is changing around us and that will have a unique and lasting impact on audiences.

Pendulum, created by percussive artist Matthias Schack-Arnott and choreographer Lucy Guerin is on this year’s program.

A commitment to radical inclusion and to supporting bold ideas is what’s kept Melbourne’s most interesting artists making work at the Fringe.

Sure, this year’s festival features a rave by a Taiwanese mermaid from the future, a four-hour participatory line-dance marathon, a karaoke event featuring only the songs of Meat Loaf and a performance that takes place in your bathtub at home. It also features new works by Australia’s most renowned contemporary artists: Back to Back Theatre, Lucy Guerin Inc, Polyglot Theatre and dozens more, all side by side in a program of artists taking risks, baring their souls and shifting our mindsets on our main stages, in venues at Trades Hall and in rooms above pubs across the city.

If everyone is included, who gets to decide what’s art, and whose voice is important to be heard? Should our taxes support it just because someone wants to say it?

For generations, curators and cultural gatekeepers have drawn the line about what art matters, what’s appropriate and who’s important. Unsurprisingly, they have tended to choose people who look like them.

The Fringe’s model of radical inclusivity and free expression means providing resourcing, support and profile to artists and artworks that espouse dangerous ideas in unusual ways and which are often at the edge of taste, common acceptance of the norm, and what we might think of as conventional art.

It means the Fringe looks different to any other festival in this city – it’s proudly full of queer people, First Nations artists, deaf and disabled people and those who look at the world in ways we could never have imagined. It’s full of frivolous fun and devastating truths, a safe space for the unsafe and an enormous cultural offering that rewards the bravest audiences who are happy to discover the unexpected together.

It doesn’t really matter if it’s art or not. If the artist says that it’s art, that’s art enough for me. In the end, the thing that matters is self-expression writ large, and that this city can provide a platform for the boldest artists making the bravest work, so we can open ourselves up to discovering new ideas, to rediscovering our city, and ultimately to discovering new things about ourselves.

Simon Abrahams is CEO of the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

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