Curiosity is a spark. Melbourne Fringe Festival is where it catches alight. This year, Melbourne Fringe Festival is challenging Melbournians to Turn Towards the Heat when the Festival returns from 29 September to 18 October 2026.
Amid a cultural moment where answers are anticipated before you’ve even finished asking the question, Fringe invites us to sit with the unknown. The Festival is where artists are at their most audacious, and it’s that risk-taking that generates the creative heat the Festival is known for. Where you feel heat this Festival, don’t step away from it. Turn towards it. Let it warm you, sharpen your attention, and deepen your curiosity.
This year’s Curated Program spotlights artists at the forefront of contemporary practice; it showcases international trendsetters and genre-exploders remaking artforms for the here and now. It includes a groundbreaking program of experimental work for children and d/Deaf and Disabled makers leading bold new approaches to access. And at the centre of the program: the landmark 10th season of Deadly Fringe.
“The Curated Program is where curiosity becomes creative risk; where artists move beyond familiar forms, inviting audiences to turn towards the heat and follow them somewhere unexpected,” said Creative Director & CEO Danny Delahunty. “This sense of possibility runs through Deadly Fringe, Radical Access, Pulse, Passport, XS and Design Fringe, each creating space for bold work to take shape on its own terms.”
“At the centre of this year’s Curated Program is Dhandha/Campfire, where Joel Bray’s new work embraces light, sound, sculpture and performance as a vehicle for gathering, ceremony and shared experience.”
“Joel’s breakout work biladurang emerged through the first Deadly Fringe season; his return with a work of such scale and ambition for the milestone tenth year speaks powerfully to what the Melbourne Fringe Curated Program can make possible. This is the creative heat of Fringe: artists venturing beyond the familiar, and a city willing to move closer,” said Delahunty.
For the first time, Melbourne Fringe Festival will also hold an Encore season in Ballarat from 22 – 25 October, featuring regional-exclusive events alongside a selection of popular shows from the 2026 metro Melbourne season.
THE CURATORIAL SHAPE OF THIS YEAR’S FESTIVAL:
The Festival kicks off with the Opening Night Gala on 29 September. The now infamous spectacle at the Capitol Theatre brings together the Festival’s boldest and brightest with high-voltage performances and standouts from across the program to launch the 2026 Festival. In 2026, it’s hosted by the award-winning actor, singer, writer and comedian Michelle Brasier.
There are plenty of free activities to participate in this Festival including CIRCUS FIRE Spectacular! by ZAP CIRCUS at Prahran Square. An internationally awarded circus show featuring energetic feats of acrobatics and fire. Tarrabelle and Rusty from ZAP Circus bring their electrifying show to Melbourne for a free outdoor evening of entertainment.
Almost ten years after its premiere, Congress by All the Queens Men returns to the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Congress is presented as a ritualised performance experience; providing opportunity and audience to those that may not be represented by the contemporary political systems.
MAKING WORK RADICALLY ACCESSIBLE:
Radical Access is a program that challenges artists to bring access into their art making and practice, to make radically accessible work. This year, a bold, Deaf-lead work, Manifesto of Silences by Irene Holub reimagines opera blending sign language, movement, projection and immersive sound to bring silenced Deaf histories to life.
PASSPORT BRINGING WORLD-CLASS PERFORMANCES TO MELBOURNE:
The Passport program brings world-class performance to Melbourne without the jet lag. Hailing from Canada, Fashion Machine by The Other Guise Theatre Society trains local kids to interview, design for, and remake the outfits of brave audience volunteers live, before showcasing the results in a kid-commented fashion show.
Also from Canada, SLUGS by the award-winning Creepy Boys (S.E. Grummett & Sam Kruger) is an electro-punk concert, play, clown show and basement puppet nightmare rolled into one. Winning two of the most sought-after awards at Edinburgh Fringe, the Fringe First Award and The Stage’s Fringe Five, PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD by In Bed With My Brother from the UK is a three-act show about the best worst band of all time, The Shaggs. The quintessential outsider band, and the question of who gets to decide whether you’re a legend or a loser.
Joining them is Distillation by Luke Casserly from Ireland. A multi-sensory performance built from a unique perfume of the Irish Midlands bog, exploring loss and connection to place in the wake of Ireland’s peat harvesting industry closure. To round out the Passport program is QFWFQ by Gregory Nussen from the USA. A surrealist, award-winning solo show inspired by Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, this razor-sharp, absurdly funny and deeply personal show breaks all genres and has no fourth wall.
AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE OF LEADING TAIWANESE ART:
Since 2020, Fringe Focus Taiwan has seen world-class Taiwanese artists perform in Melbourne Fringe. In 2026, there are two Australian premieres.
Free UR Head by Very Theatre is a Venice Film Festival-selected VR dance experience that uses real-time XR technology to synchronise a room full of strangers in shared, unrehearsed movement.
Palingenesis by d_Antidote Productions and Chuang Po-Hsiang is inspired by the Rat King phenomenon where creatures become so entangled they can never separate, three masked dancers morph through and around each other exploring intimacy, trust and transformation.
PULSE – AN EXPERIMENTATION WITH FORM:
In its fourth year the Pulse program showcases Australia’s boldest contemporary performance makers experimenting with form through creative risk-taking. This year Dr. Jonathan Homsey presents 40-LOVE – an improvised dance fusing Vogue and Krump, set to the radio broadcast of the 2025 Australian Open Women’s Final.
Exhibit by Emma J. Hawkins and Leisa Prowd is a part-performance, part-installation encounter in which two women – often mistaken for one another – lean into the chaos of being seen, mis-seen and underestimated. TILL THE DAY I DIE by Katie Sfetkidis and Mark Wilson is a new production of Clifford Odets’ once-banned anti-fascist play, staged on the back of a truck at Trades Hall in the same spirit as the original 1936 protest performances.
Born in a Taxi presents Prime Time, an intergenerational work featuring a cast aged 4 to 93 that challenges assumptions about age and ageing. NORNIR by Freya Schack-Arnott is a multi-disciplinary work in which live cello, resonating strings and movement interweave in a web of shimmering vibration. Informed by stories of weaving, binding and restricting (transformation), Nornir will explore and reshape our relationship to the cello, the body and to sound.
The Enormous Radio by Roslyn Oades and Bob Scott is a large-scale immersive audio installation of hacked, repurposed radios that speculate on the possibility of interspecies communication. Zoë Bastin Dance presents The River in a site-responsive dance duet performed at dawn and dusk on the banks of the Werribee River, exploring love as a force of attraction, erosion and change.
10 YEARS OF DEADLY FRINGE:
Deadly Fringe showcases bold and moving First Nations art through powerful new commissions. At the core of the program sits Dhandha/Campfire by Joel Bray Dance, a major new participatory installation at Fed Square drawing on the campfire as a place of gathering, storytelling, ceremony and ritual.
The work fuses light, sound and sculpture with daily performance rituals. A radical act of invitation from one of Australia’s most celebrated choreographers, Dhandha/Campfire invites Melburnians to gather around a sculptural Fed Square campfire with Joel Bray Dancers, DJs and strangers alike. It’s free and open daily.
Other Festival Alumni joining the 10th season of Deadly Fringe include Na Djinang Circus and Ngioka Bunda-Heath. Ocker by Na Djinang Circus is a free roving circus show that tears through the city’s streets on a portable railway track built in real time, dragging audiences along for the ride. Ocker will pop up at Fed Square, Williamstown, Yarraville and Ballarat.
Estuary by Ngioka Bunda-Heath is a duet at the meeting point of saltwater and freshwater, choreographer Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s new work explores dual identity and First Nations connection to land, sky and waterways.
Alongside these works, Melbourne Fringe presents Aunty Annette’s Outblak by Kungari Productions. A sharp, fearless and laugh-out-loud line-up comedy show, in which Aunty Annette shares stories from a life spent breaking barriers that they didn’t teach you at school.
At Koorie Heritage Trust, Georgia Boseley presents Weaving the Everywhen. Central and Eastern Arrernte artist Georgia Boseley transforms a Koorie Heritage Trust gallery space into an immersive sculptural landscape of scarred ceramic vessels and woven grasses to imagine an Indigenous deep future.
The 2026 Melbourne Fringe Festival returns 29 September – 18 October, with Fringe Encore: Ballarat taking place from 22 – 25 October. For more information and full program, visit: www.melbournefringe.com.au for details.
Images: Joel Bray – image by Tamara Scott and Davey Simmons | Congress by All The Queens Men (2017) – photo by Gregory Lorenzutti | ZAP Circus – photo by Ultimate Imagery | SLUGS by Creepy Boys – photo by Bokah Media | Free UR Head – photo by LIN Chun-Yung | Born in a Taxi presents Prime Time – photo by Carla Gottgens | Estuary – photo by James Henry