how venues
Chrisoulla Georgiou
THE BUTTERFLY CLUB
Around seven years ago, Tom Dickins started out
at The Butterfly Club as a performer. He is now its
Publicity and Media Manager. Talking with Dickins, you can easily tell that he is genuinely excited
about the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Before the
interview even begins, he says, “We’ve got such
a good Fringe season this year. I’m so excited.”
And he kept that enthusiasm all throughout the
interview.
“We’re quite an interesting venue, in that, obviously we do our own programming, so our Artistic
Director took a large amount of applications and
then curated our program accordingly,” he says.
“We provide free rehearsal space for all of our
performers, so a lot of them have already been
here quite frequently to rehearse their shows
and to get a feel for the space ’cause we’re quite
the quirky space. We’ve got the Theatre upstairs
which is more of a black box traditional theatre.
And then we’ve got the space that you’re in right
now, which is a very … multifunctional space.”
The venue is swamped by a rather remarkable,
but interesting display of kitsch that seem to fill up
the walls. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to clutter
the space, so that you are able to move freely
around the venue. With around 150 productions
being held at The Butterfly Club annually, it offers
incredible assistance to performers.
“So we’re involved in supporting any of the local
artists through their rehearsal process,” Dickins continues. “And then my position is to assist
with their promotional activities as well – not just
promote the program as a whole, but also work
with each of the artists on how to try and get any
attraction within the media throughout their season, which from what I can tell is quite a unique
thing for a venue to provide.”
Dickins appears to really enjoy being involved in
the Melbourne Fringe Festival, as he explains that
“The Fringe is a pretty magical time to be a part
of the Melbourne arts scene. We’re lucky enough
in this venue to present and see interesting and
varied work across cabaret, burlesque, music,
comedy, theatre all year round.
“But we live in this little arts bubble and there are
other arts bubbles like us around town, but it’s so
nice to see all of the, I guess the community links
being made between different pockets of the artist
world. So venues like ours can be presenting
work but then a venue two doors down that never
has … a performance in it can suddenly turn their
storage closet into a performance space or you
could be taken in an elevator up to the 30th floor
and suddenly there’s a living statue next to you.
The whole city comes alive during the Festival.
“We’ve only been in the heart of the CBD for the
last two years so it’s really nice for us to see every
space around us become activated, and also for
audiences that don’t necessarily come here on a
weekly basis to discover what it is that we do.”
Running events during the Melbourne Fringe
Festival appears to be a big task. Dickins says
that “Over three weeks we’ve got 11 different
shows which make up a total of 55 productions
that will happen here … so that’s a lot to deal with
and, you know, from a programming point of view,
from a tech point of view, from a promotion point
of view, it’s everything that we do in higher saturation and higher stakes.”
One of the regular comedy events being run
at The Butterfly Club is ‘Chevrons’, “where the
emphasis is on comedians trying out new material,” says Dickins. This runs on Thursdays and
Fridays.
Another regular comedy event is ‘Friday Night
Comedy’ (‘FNC’), which is “quite technological in
its focus,” says Dickins. “Audiences are encouraged to use their mobile phones and live vote on
things that are projected or to use their phones to
suggest different topics for improvisation.”
One of the events that The Butterfly Club ran
during the Melbourne Fringe Festival is ‘The
Ronin’. It “is a one-man long-form improvisation,”
says Dickins. “My understanding is that … it’s a
particular form of improvisation that’s originated
overseas and this is the first time it’s really being
tried in Australia.”
Another popular event was ‘Reception: The Musical’. “Her (Bethany Simons, nominated twice
for the Green