As Melbourne Fringe gets ready to take over the city this spring, La Mama is joining the festivities with a program of six distinctive works that promise to push boundaries, challenge conventions and entertain in equal measure.
From 29 September to 18 October, La Mama’s theatres will become a home for the unexpected, with a line-up spanning dark comedy, puppetry, performance installation, musical comedy, storytelling and devised theatre. Across La Mama HQ and the Courthouse, audiences can expect plenty of wit, cheek, theatrical invention and perhaps the occasional tear.
The program launches at La Mama HQ with Extraterrestrial’s TRASH WIZARD – a camp, absurdist, post-humanist dark comedy that gradually gives way to tragedy. With puppets thrown into the mix, it promises an unconventional exploration of what it means to be human in a world that seems increasingly strange.
Over at La Mama Courthouse, Emma J Hawkins and Leisa Prowd present EXHIBIT – a work that sits somewhere between performance, installation and a beautifully strange encounter. Here, humans become the display, with audiences drawn into an experience that asks them to consider their own role as observers.
Emma Fawcett’s TOTO’S SONG, presented at HQ, takes a darker comic turn. This new play explores the ways we care for one another, the ways we inevitably fail, and the resilience required to keep moving forward – and, as the description suggests, keep dancing along the way.
At the Courthouse, Emerson Brophy brings PARASOCIAL – a cheeky one-person musical comedy examining the peculiar one-sided relationships we form with people we spend our lives watching. In an age of celebrity culture and social media, the parasocial relationship has become an increasingly familiar phenomenon, making Brophy’s comic take particularly timely.
Ben Grant’s WRONG WAY GROW BACK rounds out the HQ Fringe line-up with darkly funny storytelling centred on a man arriving at the middle of his life and wondering whether there might be a way to find reverse.
Also joining the program is Rollercoaster Theatre’s new devised work RED – a bold reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood. Part fairytale and part reckoning, the production turns a familiar story inside out, interrogating its power structures through an ensemble of 16 professional actors with intellectual disabilities.
Together, these six works reflect the adventurous spirit that has long been central to La Mama’s place in Melbourne’s independent performing arts landscape. They offer audiences the chance to encounter theatre that is playful and provocative, unconventional and unpredictable.
With Trades Hall Hub just around the corner, La Mama is also ideally placed for audiences wanting to make a day or night of Melbourne Fringe. For those looking beyond the familiar, this is one La Mama program worth putting on the Fringe itinerary.
For more information about La Mama’s Melbourne Fringe Festival program, visit: www.lamama.com.au for details.
Images: Trash Wizard (supplied) | Exhibit – photo by Darren Gill | Toto’s Song – photo by Darren Gill | Parasocial – photo by Darren Gill | Wrong Way Grow Back – photo by Darren Gill | RED – photo by Darren Gill