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January 20, 2010
It is more or less summer festival time in Adelaide, South Australia. It is ‘Bakhtinian’ party time for Adelaide audiences. All the various festivals--The Fringe, the traditional Arts Festival, and Womadelaide --- are now rolled into one big festival season.
The festival as a platform for presenting culture creates the image of, and repositions, Adelaide as a "creative" city with many voices.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Colonial Mutual Life, Adelaide, 2009
In truth, Adelaide is just part of the global festival circuit and the creative economy. Many of the high art shows, are sourced from the summer festivals in Europe. The Fringe is different as its roots lie in the tradition of the European carnivals of popular culture.
The Fringe:
is used as a platform for the presentation of work, and that means predominantly for new work, for premieres and unearthing new artists who haven’t actually given it a go before, or for professionals, people who have been doing it for years, who run in new work and take their own risks before someone will pick it up and take the risk for them.
The Fringe is mostly a mixture of music, cabaret, circus and art prank and retains the link to grotesque realism and the carnival as a site of resistance to authority, and the place where cultural, and potentially political, change can take place.
Festivals are a forum for the communal gathering of the interests and desires of the communities formed by organisers, performers and audiences
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