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."

Top 10 Shows of 2024

Another year gone, another year of extraordinary theatre created and performed in Melbourne. I only managed to get to 111 shows (the shame!), due to being out of the country for four months, but as I have been doing for over a decade, I must compile a top ten list.

I say this every year but it's something that deserves repeating every year: sometimes the show that you remember for a long time after, is not the big splashy extravagant piece with recognisable names and a huge budget, but the one that was on for four nights with ten people in the audience. Support your independent theatre makers and venues - some can cost you as little as $20 and can be the most original, inspiring and thought-provoking performances you might see.

There's already plenty to get excited about in 2025, so I urge you to take a risk, seek something new, unknown and different in the new year.

And here are my top ten shows of 2024:

The Crying Room: Exhumed review

A crying room is a small, soundproof room in theatres and churches where a person can visit if they are feeling emotional but want to continue to be part of the experience via one-way glass and live audio feed without disturbing the rest of the audience. In The Crying Room: Exhumed, performer Marcus McKenzie brings this place to the forefront where he tempts us to spend time in our own private chambers, and to call on and welcome the tears. The show is an extension to the 2020 online zoom production of The Crying Room, conceived during lockdown and had McKenzie dealing with the death of his brother.

As we are ushered into the space, our attention falls on McKenzie writhing and contorting himself up a flight of stairs. Along the hall are closed doors leading to rooms that have been renamed the dying room, the wrying room and the purifying room, which has a red light and bubbling sound emanating from inside. Shortly after McKenzie has disappeared from sight, a blindfolded figure with a black robe and holding incense enters from a room and leads us the rest of the way. From here, McKenzie and his team of creatives put on a show with powerful imagery and highly effective design as he examines his own trauma and grief to losing his sibling.

I'm Ready To Talk Now review (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

Oliver Ayres has packed a lot into twenty-minutes with I’m Ready To Talk Now, but this well-considered immersive show for one person at a time patiently and intelligently explores his journey of being diagnosed, and living, with a chronic medical condition.

The performance starts with us sitting on a chair and facing a white screen. We put on a pair of headphones, and we begin to hear Ayres' voice as he explains how he relates to his illness and the empathy (or lack of he extends to others), frustration, anger and loneliness he encounters. Ayres’ monologue is obviously rehearsed but his natural pauses and uses of 'like' and 'umm' gives the impression of this recording being off-the-cuff and authentic. It genuinely feels like he is unburdening himself with these thoughts and opening himself up to us.

The Hotline review (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

The Honeytrap excel in creating experiences that leaves its audience confronting their own biases or blindspots. I still vividly recall its immersive site specific one person at a time production of The Maze, where I followed a young woman as she walked home late at night and listened to her thoughts via a set of headphones. That was seven years ago but such was the effect it had on me. In 2023, The Honeytrap presents its new show The Hotline, as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, which shifts its focus from the dangers women face of being attacked or killed by a man, to the dangers women face of being attacked or killed by their own body.

Participants dial a 1800 number on their phone and in a choose your own adventure style, they navigate through the frustrations and hypocrisy of getting reproductive healthcare and support. For amendments to the Therapeutic Goods Act, Press 1. For access to ECP Press 2. The first thing I note is how convincingly creator Kasey Gambling has made this experience. The sound design by Josie Steele, from the ringing of the phone, the slightly muffled / static sound of the operator and the background jazz music that plays is incredibly authentic, and slightly triggering for anyone who has ever been put on hold or had to go through an automated service before.

Hamish Annan is having an outpouring of emotions with Access (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

A person has about 400 emotional experiences per day stemming from 27 basic emotions. In Access, performance artist Hamish Annan invites his audience to be faced with six of these as they sit across from him in a room and are asked to select one of the designated emotions: aggression, happiness, lust, fear, grief, or disgust. Once they've announced it, Annan takes on that feeling for as long as the attendee remains seated. Annan has performed Access across New Zealand and won the New Zealand Fringe Touring Award, and for the first time, he is bringing his show to Australia as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. It's quite a journey for a show that began amidst the pandemic lockdowns.



Theatre collective Pony Cam are planning on going nowhere fast with Burnout Paradise (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

We've been told that success comes when you put in the hard work. But how much hard work is necessary? And what happens when you keep putting in the work but it feels like you're never getting closer to achieving your dream and that you have been constantly pushing a rock up a hill, or maybe running on a treadmill? Ensemble theatre company Pony Cam are here to interrogate just that with a brand new Melbourne Fringe Festival show, Burnout Paradise.

Over the course of 55 minutes, Hugo Williams, Ava Campbell, Claire Bird, Dominic Weintraub and William Strom mount four treadmills as they go through the feelings and process of the euphoric optimism that comes before burnout. With what has occurred over the last few years, no one knows this better than those in the performing arts industry, where optimism and burnout are very much entwined. "The two are closely related for us. Like siblings, maybe," the collective says. "Trying to make work as a team, we’re juggling a lot. Between the five of us, we have 14 part-time jobs, we make 5 – 10 shows a year, and on top of that we’re all trying to become better, calmer, healthier people."

Grim review (Melbourne International Comedy Festival)

Goodness. What a devilish delight that Grim is. Ellen Grimshaw plays Grim, an alien who gets pushed off their Mum's spaceship on their way to Data Collection Headquarters in Hollywood, landing in a Pepsi ad audition in Carlton. What? Yup. It's extremely ridiculous but if you accept it and move on, you get to really enjoy the performance by Grimshaw, the absurd humour and the chance to consider what the cost of always trying to please people can be.

Grimshaw is superb in this role. She completely gives herself over to Grim with the stuttering voice, the physicality and the outlandish red costume with accompanying wig. The alien language that she creates might sound like a bunch of nonsense but it genuinely feels like she's gone and made a specific noise for its equivalent English word, and whether she has or not is beside the point as it is still works on that level.

BATSHIT review (Melb Fringe)

Leah Shelton's grandmother spent three months at Heathcote Hospital mental institution simply because she wanted to leave her husband. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic and listed with having various symptoms of "hysteria". In BATSHIT, Shelton digs deeper into her grandmother's incarnation as well as the scores of women through history who have been labelled crazy, hysterical or a nutjob (to name a few). It's a uniquely Leah Shelton show with plenty of surprises and awakenings along the way.

If anyone knows how to make an entrance, it is Shelton. Wearing a flowing emerald green gown and gloves and looking like she has just walked out of a hairdresser with her blonde bob, she is the perfect combination of a Hollywood starlet and a Stepford wife - apart from the gag in her mouth and an extended limb. It's a skill that Shelton utilises throughout the show, where she can simultaneously entertain while having a mood of disquiet permeating in the space.

Leah Shelton has gone completely BATSHIT for Melbourne Fringe

Acclaimed performer Leah Shelton returns to Melbourne Fringe with her third solo show, BATSHIT, in which she explores the history of female madness. While it brings to light how mental health was - and still is - utilised to control women, the main source of inspiration comes from a more personal connection, Shelton's grandmother, Gwen.

"My grandmother was incarcerated at the Heathcote Hospital mental institution in Perth, and she was given a cocktail of drugs and ECT treatments without her consent for basically wanting to leave her husband. This was in the 1960s, but the pathologisation of women is still a real problem today," Shelton tells me. "Women are often framed as hysterical, irrational, mentally ill in a court of law as a way of undermining their credibility or they are seen to be imagining symptoms in a medical system. They're also twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression, anxiety, panic disorder, phobias, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, eating disorders and PTSD, and seven times more likely to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, so it’s fair to say it’s a long-standing systemic problem."

JSMR - Melbourne Fringe Festival interview

There's a new thrill-seeking pass-time that's been happening worldwide over the last few years. Causing tingles to run through the back of someone's head and down their spine, it's a sensation that only be achieved from the intimacy of watching someone whispering into a microphone, or slowly brushing their hair or even crinkling wrapping paper. Yes, we are talking about the the world of autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR. As part of this year's Melbourne Fringe Festival, performer Jessica Stanley is delving into the ASMR world with her show JSMR. 

While this has become a recent obsession for people, with millions watching these videos on YouTube, Stanley's fascination with ASMR began during her schooling days and has continued to grow since then. "I remember, in the later years of primary school, I really enjoying when friends borrowed stationery from me – a rubber or pencil, something like that – and I got nice head tingles while they used it," she recalls. "And it has grown from there, where I now love roleplay ASMR videos, where someone is pretending to give you a haircut or check you in to an appointment. I enjoy the specificity and variation, and that they can allow for quite lengthy videos too. I used to really like falling asleep to videos by an artist called Amalzd; I’m pretty sure I stumbled across her YouTube channel by chance and just really enjoyed her voice, accent and roleplay scenarios. I would also recommend ASMR Bakery for someone who wants to watch a whole variety of objects being tapped or played with."

Exit Strategies review

In Exit Strategies, Mish Grigor explores not only various ways of leaving but also the thinking and process behind this, such as when to leave and how to walk away from a situation. This world premiere, a collaboration with APHIDS co-directors Lara Thoms and Eugenia Lim, is an intimate performance that brings the audience into its absurd environment as we question our own philosophies and decisions around exiting.

These exits are comical in description and execution, such as Grigor’s reenactments of sneaking out of a yoga class, but they are often acknowledging a greater social or cultural observation. She has a natural charisma on stage, and it is entertaining to see how she will depart next. She finds the subtleties for each scenario and simultaneously plays it naturally and plays it big. There are some thought-provoking points raised but unfortunately there is not enough substance to sustain it and you wish the show would go further in what it is trying to say. The exits never amount to anything substantial and as it nears its own end, Grigor’s words fail to carry adequate weight or urgency to generate a lasting impact on the issues that are introduced.

Ancient Shrines and Half Truths - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

Presented by Binge Culture, Ancient Shrines and Half Truths is an outdoor audio experience that has participants listening to a narrator as they uncover the unheard and the forgotten history that surrounds them, in this instance, Werribee. Armed with an iPhone, headphones and an app, the tour is divided into four parts, with each part becoming more and more immersive and interactive until you reach its joyous conclusion.

From discovering the secret voices in post boxes, the animals that live by my feet and haggling for a coffee with a tree, every pit stop throughout draws me into a silly world that is treated with a sincerity and respect. By doing so, I start to see things that I would not have noticed before. At one point I am told that in order to blend in with the locals I should walk with a hand on my hip and the other swinging while I walk. No sooner do I adapt to this specific way of moving, that I witness a man coming towards me, walking just like me. We share a nod and smile and I wonder as he continues on his way if he was a local or a plant, but I guess I'll never know.

Seduction - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Get ready for a sweet sweet seduction 
with Gold Satino's new site-specific immersive show, aptly titled, Seduction. Presented as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, this critically acclaimed theatre collective returns with another intimate offering that allows audiences to unearth the secrets that are in our streets and observe life from the perspectives of people we've never met before, whose stories are as much a mystery to us as they are to themselves.

In Seduction, two women navigate the world, the violence of making performance and the seduction of art, friendship, and how their feminisms are different and yet the same. This show for nine audience members at a time is described as a 'drive-in/drive by performance of excruciating intimacy set in a landscape of bleak urban grandeur', and can easily be considered as a nightmarish dream of contradictions and confirmations. "You will be seduced. No, not really, well maybe," Gold Satino's creative director and Seduction co-writer and director Davina Wright tells me. "A lot of things happen. Most of it is in the back of a car. But there's no participation. The audience is safe to watch, see, experience and dream with us. God that got corny quickly."

The 24 Hour Dance Project - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Freya McGrath is letting dance take over her mind, body and soul during the Melbourne Fringe Festival. For 24 hours, McGrath will dance non-stop, only being able to have a break when an audience member volunteers themselves to dance in her place. Until someone taps in, she cannot eat, sleep or rest. The 24 Hour Dance Project is an immersive, participatory dance experience for performer and audiences, and the culmination of a long term project that McGrath has been working on.

"The origin of this idea was a fairly simple one. Last year, I took a subject at university which covered performance artwork and endurance work. We focussed on artists like Marina Abramović and Tehching Hsieh, and my friends and I marvelled at the level of commitment and ideology of these artists," she explains. "It prompted me to think about whether I was capable of creating an endurance work - if so, what would I be willing to push my mental and physical limits for? The answer I came to, at first jokingly, was dance."

Terror Australis - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

Admittedly, I did walk in to Terror Australis not knowing what to expect at all, and I am so glad I did because the delights it unearthed are so much richer if you have no idea what’s to come (so either go see it now, or read on at your own peril). Through a clever mix of cabaret, burlesque, live art, dance and comedy, the show looks at the dark culture of Australia with gobsmacking flair.

The set design is true Australiana with a hills-hoist used for makeshift pole-dancing, resulting in some pretty slick and sexy routines. Added set pieces such as goon bags, knives and dingo masks further enhance the strong feelings of ambiguous national pride, and while these items are enough to infer what performer Leah Shelton may be referencing, watching as these allusions comes to life takes it to a magnificent other level.

Nothing Special - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

We all want to be something special. As children, we are led to believe we can be by our parents and teachers, and while it can be a positive thing, it can also be quite detrimental. Presented as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, Hotel Now's Nothing Special, looks at what happens when people live their lives based on the belief that they are extraordinary, and more talented and important than the average man.

We follow a young girl, Chlorine (Simone French), literally from from the moment she is born. Her mother informs us that she was not supposed to live beyond the age of five, but that's a defeatist attitude so she was forbidden to die. Chlorine's dreams to be different and unique and to leave her mark on the world as an innovator in the arts are explored through various periods of her life, but when this seems unlikely, it is the harsh realities that Chlorine must then contend with.

Onstage Dating - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

The dating game is a hard one to keep up with, let alone win. With online dating apps more or less becoming the most common way in meeting someone, going on a first date and getting to know someone from scratch by face-to-face is a distant memory. In her Melbourne Fringe Festival show, OnStage Dating, Bron Batten is determined to change things, by having a first date with a member of the audience on stage - and the results are priceless.

The show opens in a colourful and attention grabbing way and from then on, we are all putty in Batten’s hands as she recalls memories of bad dates and describes the science behind dating and human interactions. Eventually she pulls out the pre-filled questionnaires from all the participants willing to be her date, and I am surprised by how many there are.

4 + 4 = 4 - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

Presented by The Flying Xamels as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, 4 + 4 = 4 is a surrealist circus experience looking at four different lives, how the co-exist together and individually and who they are finding their way around. Four circus artists with four ropes perform as individuals and as an ensemble as a poignant metaphor on trying to fit in with life and following the right path. 

There is much to take in and analyse in 4 + 4 = 4, as the way these themes are explored can take on different and personal meanings for everyone in the audience. Fortunately the cast are all too aware of this and ensure that the tricks we see on stage are performed in a meditative and dream-like state. When you consider the technical aspects to some of the tricks, to be able to appear that calm actually requires great skill and confidence, which these artists possess to a high degree. 

Undertone - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

Produced by Black Carnation Productions, Undertone is a circus show that - while presenting some impressive tricks and laughs - also explores the relationship between the body and sound. With a live electronic score, it pushes the boundaries of what circus can be, creating a different show at every performance.

There is a strong physical demand throughout Undertone, which the four performers make seem effortless as they jump through the air, climb on each other and fling their bodies across and under tables. Due to the concentration and focus of these tricks, the performers have also included a good dose of clowning throughout. Under the direction of Avan Whaite, this allows them to break the tension so the audience can breathe calmly and invite us to create a bond with them.