There aren’t many culture writers in Australia who are discovering the Adelaide Fringe for the first time. So with 17 years of career under my belt, I’m windswept with a bit of self-shaming as I stroll down Rundle Street. I haven’t seen streets this alive since I was walking around Lower Manhattan last summer.
The biggest arts festival in the Southern Hemisphere (by a country mile) began in 1960 and has been unfolding like a never-ending story since. The festival has its staples, the regulars have their favourites, and so continues one of the greatest trails of creativity you’ll find anywhere in the world.
Just how big of a deal is Adelaide Fringe?
Its reputation is no exaggeration. Adelaide Fringe is regarded as the second most famous next to the iconic Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland. There’s plenty of reasons why this is, besting other Fringe festivals in bigger cities simply because South Australia’s boutique capital is perfectly equipped for such an event.
Adelaide has long been known as Australia’s city of festivals (a playful atonement for the rather dull, more recognisable moniker: City of Churches. And for the first few months of each year, this small city in South Adelaide becomes the coolest place in the world.
In terms of immersion, excitement and edginess, the only other festival in Australia that sits on this level is Dark Mofo, Hobart’s flame-licked and often controversial winter solstice arts festival.
The way Adelaide is structured perfectly lends itself to the Fringe festival. Take Sydney and Melbourne for example. Fantastic festivals in their own right, but you can go out in either city and not even hear a peep from the hordes of people filing between shows.
You can’t ignore Adelaide Fringe. And you want a festival like this to be aggressive and in-your face, to slap you with its multifactor, multi-genre showiness and aggressively pull you deep inside a world of pure escapism.
I guess that’s the best way to describe the Adelaide Fringe: Escapism. Day-to-night escapism too, with shows from the late-morning until around midnight, delivered by the world’s most creative minds who descend upon this wine-obsessed city with new ideas, some of which are evolutions of Adelaide Fringe favourites that have been running for years.
And that’s the part I like most about it. It feels like you’ve been dropped into an ongoing, intergenerational flow of communal creativity from all sorts of comedians, magicians, acrobats, musicians, drag queens, cabaret performers, thinkers and foodies. Just about anyone who thinks outside of the box is scattered around Adelaide at various venues, the two main ones being The Garden of Unearthly Delights and Gluttony.
The Garden vs Gluttony
I reach the leafy end of rundle street and see a crowd gathering around some street performers. Not your typical act either, but a funny, engaging and interactive pair of Vietnamese artists trailing around with slapstick humour on a penny farthing. Each time I return to the crowd there’s a new entertaining act sitting in the centre of Adelaide Fringe’s toughest choice: The Garden, or Gluttony.
I’m only down in Adelaide for two days of the festival so stay comfortably on the surface of all the chaos. Immediately I regret not taking a week off work once a fellow travel writer tells me about all the satellite venues that usually sport the more experimental, off-kilter shows. I’m getting the mainstream version of Adelaide Fringe, which is completely fine, since “mainstream” here is still decidedly alternative everywhere else.
Entering The Garden
And so my first night is spent entirely in The Garden, a cartoonish cavern of carny delights that carves out a massive section of the botanical garden, just a few streets away from the epic Dale Chiuly glass exhibition.
This section of the park is pop-up bars galore while the back section is a hyper-bright, multicoloured immersion into the kind of classic carnival schtick you’d have seen in classic Hollywood movies. Rides are everywhere, there’s an oversized Ferris Wheel and a broad strip of classic carny games, with staff dressing (and acting) appropriately.
A comedian trying to usher people into a tiny tent for quick-fire stand-up shows throws me a zinger about my tarot card-covered outfit (I like to dress for the occasion) but I’m too focused on the big, bright Spiegeltent to react.
The tent is one of many show-stuffed venues scattered around the park. And tonight, it’s home to La Ronde from Fringe icons Strut & Fret. And yeah, there’s a slight formula here: a tiny, angular stage and jaw-dropping acts no average human could possibly imagine themselves doing. This ain’t LIMBO, however, and La Ronde plays a more poppy, sophisticated vaudevillian as incredibly agile performers take to the stage with their various acts.
It’s all here. Magic, acrobats, slapstick humour, dazzling aerial tricks elevated by smart visuals and spectacular lighting. This one leans heavier on crowd participation, and the typical Fringe crowd is more than up to task.
And it’s that unmistakable “Vegas cadence” that drives each act, steadily building and getting more intense and impressive by the second. This quiet-to-loud approach is what has made Las Vegas the Entertainment Capital of the World and it’s a nice treat being transported over to The Strip for an hour-or-so.
The second, and more devilish, highlight for me tonight is BITE in the charmingly casual Vagabond tent. An R18+ rating seem entirely appropriate for the raunchy 11pm cabaret, where alt-circus play well with the BDSM theme and dancers give heady nods to European erotic arthouse cinema. I’ve seen more explicit at Dark Mofo, but this sits up there with one of the most pleasantly unrestrained shows I’ve seen in Australia. An impressive feat of costume design and imagination.
Gluttony
If The Garden is hinged on the wonderful world of travelling carnivals with more adult shows, Gluttony skews a bit more family friendly with a heavy focus on Adelaide’s best food stalls. It’s chalk and cheese here, presenting two mega-venues that are similar in format but so significantly different that giving yourself over toe Adelaide Fringe really is a choose-your-own-adventure novel.
And it feels like you’re in one too. Gluttony is a food and wine festival with hidden doors leading into world’s curated by these beautifully creative minds. Tables set up by the lake are papered in plates taken from Adelaide’s multicultural food scene, from Indian kebabs to Turkish, Italian and Japanese. Over a petite Monet-like bridge is Champagne island, a pop-up bar where Moet is an obvious sponsor.
As far as the action: the highlight is The LadyBoys of Bangkok , a genuinely funny and playful cabaret party with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
All the performers come direct from Thailand, packing the glitzy Octagon tent with poppy dance numbers that flirt between playful and straight up raunchy. The costuming is a highlight, recalling a bombastic Vegas residency with big, shiny things and flirty choreography.
It’s a big, extravagant dance party as well. Which seems to be a running theme when I hop across four different Gluttony shows. These are all big, fun musical numbers from top-tier, cruise-style entertainment from the barbershop quartet-like 60 Four Living in the 70s (if cruise ship entertainment was this good, I’d be on a Carnival ship in a second) to The History of Hip Hop.
Adelaide is the centre of the world
Come late-February and March, Adelaide seems to be the centere of the world. Fringe successfully transforms the boutique city into an achingly hip, boundlessly creative city where everyone is in a lively mood and the weekend parties last well past midnight. As I stroll back up Rundle Street to the uber-convenient Crowne Plaza Adelaide, an IHG Hotel, I remind myself why Adelaide has fast become one of my favourite cities in Australia.
And if I can fall absolutely head over heels for Adelaide Fringe in just two nights, I couldn’t even imagine what it’s like throwing yourself at the festival each week as it pops up for yet another year of staggering entertainment.
How the hell did I not experience this sooner?
To keep track of all the Adelaide Fringe shows that’ll be touring Australia this year, including the award-winning Lady Boys of Bangkok and La Ronde head on over to the official website.
Adelaide Fringe runs for just a few more days, after that, you’ll have to start planning your visit for late February to late March.
The writer flew to Adelaide as a guest of Adelaide Fringe.
