The Sydney Fringe Festival is the largest independent arts festival in New South Wales with over 450 events presented in over 70 venues across Greater Sydney each year during September. It encompasses genres such as

stand-up comedy Stand-up comedy is a performance directed to a live audience, where the performer stands on a stage (theatre), stage and delivers humour, humorous and satire, satirical monologues sometimes incorporating physical comedy, physical acts. These ...

music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

theatre Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a Stage (theatre), stage. The performe ...

cabaret Cabaret is a form of theatrical entertainment featuring music song, dance, recitation, or drama. The performance venue might be a pub, casino, hotel, restaurant, or nightclub with a stage for performances. The audience, often dining or drinking, ...

visual arts The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics (art), ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual a ...

, and

burlesque A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects.

. Outside of September, the Sydney Fringe Festival advocate for artists, agitate for change and activate unused space creating new cultural infrastructure and precincts. The Sydney Fringe, began as a curated festival (like the

New York International Fringe Festival The New York International Fringe Festival, or FringeNYC, was a fringe theater festival and one of the largest multi-arts events in North America. It took place over the course of a few weeks in October, spread on more than 20 stages across se ...

) as opposed to an open access "unjuried" festival (the model used by the

Edinburgh Fringe Festival The Edinburgh Festival Fringe (also referred to as the Edinburgh Fringe, the Fringe or the Edinburgh Fringe Festival) is the world's largest performance arts festival, which in 2024 spanned 25 days, sold more than 2.6 million tickets and featur ...

).Sydney Morning Herald 19/12/09 "Newtown gets a cutting-edge fringe"
Accessed 15/2/10 In 2012, festival director Richard Hull implemented the open access festival model. The Sydney Fringe typically operates in a festival precinct encompassing a number of venues in the

Inner West The Inner West of Sydney is an area directly west of the Sydney central business district, New South Wales, Australia. The suburbs that make up the Inner West are predominantly located along the southern shore of Port Jackson (Parramatta River) ...

Sydney CBD The Sydney central business district (CBD) is the historical and main Central business district, commercial centre of Sydney. The CBD is Sydney's city centre, or Sydney City, and the two terms are used interchangeably. Colloquially, the CBD or ...

area, with a few other venues in the wider Sydney area, including Leichhardt, Parramatta, Oxford Street and Hurstville.The Sydney Fringe – FAQs
Accessed 15/2/10 After a two-year hiatus due to

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

the Sydney Fringe Festival returned to Sydney.

Previous Sydney Fringe Festivals

The Sydney Fringe Festival ran from 1994 to 2002 in Bondi, founded by producer Victoria Harbutt and Megan Donnelly who were assisted fantastically by Cathy Carlsson, Sylvia DeAngelis, Gil Summons and Lucia Mastrantone” for four years and Katrina Sedgwick for one year. The Live Bait Festival, a successor to the Sydney Fringe Festival, also operated out of Bondi from 2003 to 2004 and was co-produced by Michael Cohen and Glenn Wright.Sydney Morning Herald 24/1/06 "Something's missing on the edge of the stage"
Accessed 15/2/10

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sydney Fringe Festival Fringe festivals in Australia Festivals in Sydney Newtown, New South Wales 2010 establishments in Australia