Step Inside the Kingdom of Mushrooms: An Immersive Sensory Adventure (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

A Kingdom of Mushrooms, Five Senses, Infinite Wonder and You. That's the name of the show, and in this immersive participatory experience at Melbourne Fringe Festival, audiences are invited to journey through five distinct installations, each transforming a single sense into a mushroom-fuelled world of discovery.

Jasmin Lefers, one third of Off The Spectrum, felt compelled to translate this small, seemingly simple organism into something so immersive after an introduction to a Dutch pioneer in the world of food and design. "It all started with late-night/early-morning educational sessions over Zoom," she explains. "Aaron, one of the trio involved in putting this together, introduced me to one of the pioneers in food design Marije Vogelzang. From there I put myself through a few courses such as Food & Design Dive. Being in the Netherlands the class times were anything from midnight to 4am. It was bloody incredible. Eye-opening, mind-blowing, and tiring."

"But one question asked during the course was if you could be one food, what would it be?  Maybe it was the late-nights/early-mornings and the sleep deprivation, but mushroom immediately came to mind. I thought about why mushroom, and the more I delved, the more I realised there is nothing a mushroom can't be or do. Medicinal, clothing, decomposing plastics ... the list is endless," she says. "Yes, they are delicious but there is far more to them than simply taste and smell. I wanted to introduce this to people in an approachable, entertaining, and interactive environment. Using what I had learnt and the visions I had, I went off to convince a couple of others that it was a fab idea to bring to life. So to answer your question, I would say that I didn't so much as approach the mushroom as the mushroom approached me."

Turning Retail Routine into Musical Comedy with Checked Out: The Musical (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

Fresh from a musical about group assignments, Josh Connell and Steph Lee are turning their attention to the soul-sucking grind of retail work for this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival. Checked Out: The Musical draws on their own experiences in the service industry to explore the challenges, annoyances, and unexpected absurdities of customer-facing jobs, all set to an engaging, lively soundtrack, while also providing a cracking critique of the wider systems that define modern work culture.

"It has definitely been super fun to turn retail experience into this heightened version of reality," Lee tells me. "But also the work has an element of saying ‘stuff you’ to these corporations that you work for. It feels freeing to release pent-up frustrations through humour and song."

a2 Company on going from Fringe Outsiders to Festival Firestarters (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

Not many Melburnians would have known a2 Company this time last year, but after taking home the Best in Theatre award at the 2024 Melbourne Fringe Festival for Running into the Sun, they’ve become a theatre company on everyone’s lips. Excitement is building as they prepare to return to the festival with their sophomore production, Motion Sickness.

It was an incredible season for the company, capped off by their win for Best Emerging Company. Toby Leman (composer and performer) and Ben Ashby (writer and performer) describe the experience as something like a fevered dream. "It still feels like a fairytale. I don't remember all the details from that night because it all happened so fast!" Leman says.

"Completely agree with Toby!" Ashby adds. "We felt like total outsiders going into last year's fringe. We started with almost nobody in the crowd and it grew steadily through the season from word of mouth. Honestly, it was everything you hope might happen at a fringe festival."

Serving up absurdity, friendship, and existential eggs in Conversations with a Fried Egg (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

In a kitchen where existential eggs meet sharp-tongued rats, Ivy Crago and Maxine Palmerson examine friendship, vulnerability, and the absurdities of everyday life. Presented by Big Dog Theatre, the creators of the upcoming Melbourne Fringe Festival show, Conversations with a Fried Egg, turn the mundane into the deeply meaningful as they bring to the stage a relationship between an optimistic egg and three rats looking for connection.

"Giving an egg an existential voice came straight from lived experience," Crago laughs. "I’m an incredibly existential thinker, and agnostic and optimistic. When creating this, we wanted the audience to have a good time, but also to ponder about the world, in a comedic way. I really loved being able to bring in comedy while making people think big!”

Palmerson nods. “I’ve struggled to let go of the whole chicken-or-egg issue. The only logical answer is that eggs - like snails and a great many other things - are more mystically powerful than we give them credit for. And I’ve never been religious, so this isn’t spiritual advice!”

Crisis Actor review | Arts House

The performance space for Crisis Actor would be pitch black if not for dozens of phones lighting up the room. A cardinal sin in theatre etiquette: a glowing smartphone in the dark. Except here, it’s the point. In this interactive work, audience members are not just permitted, but encouraged to participate and engage with their devices, using them to swipe, click and scroll deeper into the unfolding chaos.

The show begins with the audience gathered around a large, ominously illuminated flower sculpture. Events leading up to a disaster impacting the world are recounted by an anonymous narrator and displayed on four screens surrounding the sculpture. Periodically, the narrator pauses mid-sentence, and options appear on our phones for us to select. These selections then pop up on the screens. They don’t change the story about this Flower Attack, but they help build the illusion of a communal experience, where we feel involved even if we’re not steering the narrative.

Love Machine is turning oversharing into coded confessions (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

Tom Richards is stepping into new territory with Love Machine: his first installation, first hardware build, and first time coding. The project, presented as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, pairs humans with a slightly clunky computer, inviting participants to share, reflect, and explore the nature of intimacy in a digital world. It’s equal parts experiment, theatre, and cheeky curiosity, with a touch of AI.

Richards has faced plenty of hurdles and even a few tears along the way in bringing this project to life. "There were loads of firsts with Love Machine!" he laughs. "Straight out of the gate, coding and hardware. I was relying heavily on AI and LLMs (Large Language Models) while learning Python in parallel."

"Now I know that AI is a bit of a dirty word in the arts industry, and rightfully so, I don’t trust it either, but it has been an interesting process nonetheless," he tells me. "For clarity’s sake, AI did not create this idea, it is not designed by AI, I designed it and I am using AI to achieve things out of my technical range. It's been the biggest obstacle and boon, because the amount of back and forth with AI has been incredibly time consuming, far more than it would have been with a programmer or creative technologist, someone I didn’t really have access to."

Listening Acts review | Melbourne Recital Centre

Chamber Made have long been shaking up Melbourne’s performing arts scene, constantly challenging and surprising audiences with what live art can entail, particularly in the realms of music, sound, and contemporary performance. Their latest project, Listening Acts, was a series of works - some live, some recorded - that reshape how we respond to aural experiences and technology, and how these elements connect to memory and identity. The three live performances in this program each carve out a distinct realm, yet together, they form a fluid, thought-provoking journey through acoustic textures that pushes the boundaries between audience and performance.

Aviva Endean's Tactile Piece for Human Ears is an exquisite meditation on sound and perception. Three binaural dummy heads, equipped with microphones, “hear” audio created via the custom ‘Hear Muffs’ that twist and transform the way we normally process sounds. These altered waves are then streamed directly to each audience member’s Bluetooth headphones. In the opening moments, Endean covers the dummy head’s ears, and the resulting noise feels like I'm rushing through the sky with the wind blowing in my face. It presents an invitation to enter with a clean slate and simply exist in the present as Endean interacts with the heads, generating a variety of sounds.