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THE BUSINESS OF ART | After a year of frustrated touring plans, Erin Fowler is relieved to be bringing solo work EGG back to Adelaide Fringe – the platform where it first drew the attention of local audiences and programmers around the world.
Adelaide Fringe
THE BUSINESS OF ART | From performing as a drummer at age four to preparing to release his first album as a singer-songwriter next year, Nathan May’s musical career has had many variations, but a few key constants have kept it moving forward.
Theatre
THE BUSINESS OF ART | Forced by the pandemic to pause its normally exhaustive international touring schedule, circus company Gravity & Other Myths has been crossing creative borders instead – expanding into new mediums during a period of fertile lateral growth.
Planning for this year’s Mad March events remains on track despite the constantly evolving COVID situation, with both the Adelaide Festival and Fringe reporting strong ticket sales, and the 2022 Fringe official guide hitting the streets today.
InReview
SA arts and culture news in brief: Adelaide Fringe launches 2022 program, SA Screen Awards winners announced, graduate exhibition showcases trends in emerging art, Festival of Orchestra hailed a success, and AGSA makes its collection more accessible.
Adelaide Fringe
THE BUSINESS OF ART | Matt Tarrant has become almost synonymous with the word ‘magician’ in South Australia, but it’s taken more than a surprisingly honest stage presence and mind-bending performances to build his career.
THE BUSINESS OF ART | Dearna Newchurch is on a mission to dissolve the boundaries between science, technology, creativity and community in the South Australian arts industry.
THE BUSINESS OF ART | For choreographer Lewis Major, bringing his contemporary dance company home to South Australia after many lauded years working in Europe is as much an exercise in entrepreneurialism as it is in creativity.
Indigenous artist Mali Isabel has become the youngest ever winner of the Adelaide Fringe poster design competition with a rainbow-coloured magical landscape inspired by the CBD and its key locations.
THE BUSINESS OF ART | The lessons of a lifetime spent working in arts institutions – from the Adelaide Fringe to Restless Dance Theatre – are helping Windmill Theatre Company associate director Sasha Zahra steer home the remount season of Amphibian this week, amid gut-wrenchingly relevant international tragedy.
Adelaide Fringe
THE BUSINESS OF ART: Recently heritage listed and a darling of its community, the architecturally iconic Marion Cultural Centre has made an unexpected leap – building a far-reaching reputation as an arts venue on the back of three busy Fringe seasons.
Theatre
THE BUSINESS OF ART | Adelaide artist Gill Hicks’ live show Still Alive (and Kicking) will this month be streamed for audiences on the other side of the globe, but her journey to the stage has been long and winding. From a creative childhood, via the trauma of the London bombings, Hicks is reconciling her activist and artistic drives with help from a debut Adelaide Fringe season.
Adelaide Fringe
A satirical Fringe show by The Chaser’s Charles Firth and The Shovel’s James Schloeffel will take you on a trip through wild COVID conspiracy theories and show you how to make your own Pete Evans BioCharger.
Adelaide Fringe
Set against the horrors of the anti-gay purges in Chechnya, Patrick Livesey’s Adelaide Fringe show asks difficult questions about the responsibilities we feel for people we’ve never met.
Adelaide Fringe is using a new report analysing the event’s comparative and future economic impact to push for a significant rise in State Government funding – from $2.4 million to $4.4 million a year – to help it rebound from the impact of COVID-19.
Adelaide Fringe 2021 delivered $56.39 million in gross economic impact to the South Australian economy during this year’s festival, according to figures released today.
SA arts and culture news in brief: Adelaide Festival’s 2021 economic impact, the return of a gravity-defying performance at Her Maj, unique contemporary artworks up for auction, local arts sector lists its ‘big-picture’ priorities, the Ern Malley affair brought to life, and Ida Sophia carries the weight of regret.
There is much to miss when the annual Fringe frenzy ends in Adelaide. The disappearance of star ratings is not one of them.
The 2021 Adelaide Fringe has sold a total of 632,667 tickets worth more than $16.4 million, with venues reporting a busy closing weekend and a string of sold-out shows.
Adelaide Fringe
Tracy Crisp takes storytelling to new heights with this poignant solo performance about the way we imbue treasured objects with our memories and the heartbreaking power they wield to help us grieve and, ultimately, heal. ★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Ask a group of people to define what it means to be Australian and you’ll undoubtedly receive a wide range of responses. In Celebrating Australia, the CircoBats performers throw their energies into expressing identity through the joy of human movement. ★★★½
This delightfully thought-provoking, interactive show, conceived by Adelaide star of stage and screen Tilda Cobham-Hervey, is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. Or maybe a bit like something… But actually, no, nothing like it at all… ★★★★
With just five days of Fringe to go, here are some of the four and five-star shows our reviewers recommend – plus an extra special performance you won’t want to miss.
Singer, songwriter and actor Elaine Crombie puts her heart, soul and spirit on the stage in Janet’s Vagrant Love.
Touch, in all its forms, is essential to human connection. Gravity & Other Myths’ new Fringe show I Want to Touch You explores this idea in a warm-hearted and thought-provoking performance. ★★★★★
Jazz standards, folk-pop, a touch of rock, and an utterly transformed Kylie Minogue classic – singer Jo Lawry brought some serious class and versatility to her Fringe performances on the weekend. ★★★★
In-between stomping riffs and blistering blues licks, Nathan Cavaleri opened up with his Adelaide Fringe audience about childhood stardom and defeating the demons of a very dark period of his life to return to the stage. ★★★½
This intense monologue about first love and white privilege struggles to overcome a fundamental flaw in its conception. ★★½
Andi Snelling is a multi-talented, highly skilled performer who knows how to use theatricality – and roller skates – to explore what it is to be human. ★★★★★
Grit and dystopia replace glitz and glamour in this close-up and raw physical theatre act by Melbourne-based company After Dark. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
There’s nothing quite as funny as quality humour coming from a straight face, and Adelaide’s own Sam Simmons has it nailed. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Johanna Allen and her crew take their audience on a journey to places exotic, funny and strange this entertaining Fringe show. ★★★★ ½
Yasemin Sabuncu is chronically ill, but refuses to be chill about it in this defiant tale of survival and the power of Keanu Reeves. ★★★ ½
Tex Perkins is known for his Cruel Sea and Beasts of Bourbon catalogue, but a stunning Adelaide Fringe performance with ARIA-award-winning guitarist Matt Walker proves – once again – the musician is not a one-trick pony. ★★★★★
This family-friendly show is a fusion of art and science in which audiences are guaranteed to learn new words while witnessing fun scientific experiments involving fireballs, explosions and a breakfast cereal blower. ★★★★
With mimosas, whip-cracking, a twerk-off, drag, burlesque and an acrobatic routine on a beer keg, Smashed is an hour of frivolity, flirtation and adults-only fun in the Spiegeltent – all before lunch. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Hughman could be the happiest place in the world right now. With unbridled joy, Hugh Sheridan raises the bar, lifts spirits and serves up unadulterated fun. ★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Audiences will most likely know Phil Stack as the bassist for Australian pop rock band Thirsty Merc, but he has stepped out from that success to command a stage of his own. ★★★★ ½
Adelaide Fringe
Cabaret duo Sophie Smyth and Ryan Smedley draw on their own life experiences in an irreverent, award-winning Fringe show that seeks to debunk some of the myths about people with Asperger’s syndrome – including that they’re not funny.
Adelaide Fringe
Rachel Rayner, Science Explainer, fuses physics with theatre and comedy in a glittering journey beyond the edges of the visible spectrum. ★★★★
Fans of Nick Cave, get ready to trade in the piano for some ukuleles as Come Sail Your Ships… Again hits the Grace Emily. ★★★★
An all-female comedy gala featuring fresh stand-up material from some of the nation’s best comedians provides an hour of sheer fun. ★★★★ ½
Adventure Rooms Adelaide plunges players into a nightmarish world inspired by everything horror with the terrifyingly fun new escape room The Abandoned Cabin. ★★★★★
Petit Circus invites young Fringe-goers and their families to step into a kitchen for an evening of chaos, fun and laughter with the new food-inspired circus show Bon Appetit. ★★★
Adelaide Fringe
History rubs shoulders with ghost stories in this unnervingly atmospheric tour of one of Adelaide’s oldest and most macabre structures. ★★★ ½
Adelaide Fringe
Scomo’s Sunday Service, in the tradition of a university revue, is raw, scatological political satire and lots of fun. ★★★★
Arj Barker Comes Clean is the dark, provocative and hilarious inspirational speech you didn’t know you needed. ★★★★
Mary Angley is supreme in this work of surreal fan fiction, conspiracy theories, biting satire and powerpoint. ★★★★ ½
Smart, fun and delightfully brash, comedic couple in life and business Anne Edmonds and Lloyd Langford bring their contrasting flavours of stand-up from the confines of Melbourne’s lockdown to the stage. ★★★ ½
With powerhouse vocals, sexy dance moves and more sequins than an entire season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, this disco inferno will make you itch to shake your groove thing. ★★★★
To freeze or not to freeze: is that the question? It’s hard to know how Erin Fowler ultimately feels about motherhood in this hybrid physical performance. ★★★
Lobethal, Encounter Bay, the Burnside Village Shopping Centre – no stone goes unturned as Peter Goers takes to the stage with an ode to South Australia. ★★★ ½
Hidden in a dark, sprawling basement on Angas Street are four rooms that challenge the senses to imagine the startling possibilities of what the future may plate up. ★★★★★
Artivist Dan Acher literally paints the sky in this stunning, automated version of aurora borealis which is being presented over the lake in Gluttony. ★★★★ ½
