Fringe: An Exp
Sera Ghaly
Melbourne is renowned for its quirky bohemian
art culture, but the Melbourne Fringe Festival
really stretches those boundaries of what is
quirky, and what is just plain weird. Just as the
name of the festival suggests, the Melbourne
Fringe is about art that is on the fringes - not
your regular art gallery event.
So what exactly is to be expected of the Melbourne Fringe Festival? This question gets
increasingly difficult to answer each year that
the festival runs. Being a Melbourne Fringe
frequenter myself, it has never failed to deliver
on new and innovative art - and never what I
expected. And so that is what to expect of the
Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2014 - the unexpected!
Slutmonster
with open arms.
Jessie has always had an interest in sexuality,
pornography and lowbrow comedy and it shows
in her wacky paintings, far out sculpture exhiThis fancy hipster festival encourages indebitions and without doubt, in Slutmonster and
pendent artists to bring their innovative and diFriends. She says that the Melbourne Fringe
verse art practices (however weird they are) to
is “very encouraging of artists experimenting
the table. The idea is to bring as many different
and taking creative risks”. She had never done
types of artists and audiences to the scene,
theatre before, and wanted to bring her quirky
even those that are on the fringes.
ideas into this new environment and the Fringe
Jesse Ngaio, creator of Slutmonster and Festival was the perfect place to do so.
Friends, exhibited in the Fringe Festival’s 30
The greatest thing about the Melbourne Fringe
year anniversary show in 2012, says that the
Festival is that it is not limited to one brand of
Melbourne Fringe Festival is about taking creart or even one genre. It embraces the multiative risks. She spent nine months creating the
tude of arts whereas other festivals only saw
comedic theatre performance as an alternative
the potential for one – and this multi-arts atto her usual painting artwork.
titude is what allows misfit artists like Jessie
She says “you can spend a week painting, and Ngaio a platform from which to exhibit their
each person might only give it a brief period wacky art. Where all other festivals saw rules,
of attention”, so she approached the Fringe the Melbourne Fringe saw a challenge.
Festival with her wacky idea for a theatrical
comedy production, and low and behold, the
Fringe Festival embraced the quirky proposal
Melbourne is not a conventional kind of city –
we are a city of sex freaks, circus freaks and