Melbourne Fringe Festival's full 2026 program lands today, headlined by the landmark 10th season of Deadly Fringe and a major new Fed Square installation from Joel Bray.
Melbourne Fringe Festival is back for three weeks of adventurous, independent performance across the city, running Tuesday 29 September through to Sunday 18 October.
The Festival’s guiding idea for 2026 is a simple one: don’t shy away from the unfamiliar, lean into it.
Organisers describe this year’s Curated Program as a showcase for artists working right at the edge of what their artform can do; a lineup built from international acts reinventing genre conventions, experimental programming for young audiences, and access-led work from d/Deaf and Disabled creators.
Sitting at the heart of it all is the tenth anniversary season of Deadly Fringe.
Festival Creative Director and CEO Danny Delahunty has framed the Curated Program as a space where artists are given room to step outside familiar territory and take audiences somewhere new with them; a spirit he says carries through every strand of the program, from Deadly Fringe and Radical Access to Pulse, Passport, XS and Design Fringe. He points to Joel Bray’s Dhandha/Campfire as the piece that captures that ambition most clearly this year.
Melbourne Fringe Festival 2026
- When: Tuesday 29 September – Sunday 18 October
- Where: Venues across Melbourne, plus
- Fringe Encore: Ballarat from 22–25 October
- Opening Night Gala: Capitol Theatre, 29 September, hosted by Michelle Brasier
- Full program and tickets live now at melbournefringe.com.au
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
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Ten years of Deadly Fringe
Deadly Fringe celebrates its tenth year with what’s shaping up as its most ambitious season yet, built around the work of First Nations artists.
The centrepiece is Dhandha/Campfire, a new large-scale installation from Joel Bray Dance set up at Fed Square, using the idea of the campfire as a meeting point for storytelling, ceremony and connection.
It runs daily and is free to attend, combining a built sculptural fire pit with light, sound and live performance from Bray’s dancers.
It’s a significant homecoming for Bray, whose earlier work biladurang was itself part of Deadly Fringe’s very first season a decade ago.
Also returning to Deadly Fringe are past Festival artists Na Djinang Circus, whose free show Ocker sees a circus troupe build and ride a portable railway line through the streets, with stops planned for Fed Square, Williamstown, Yarraville and Ballarat.
Choreographer Ngioka Bunda-Heath contributes Estuary, a new duet examining dual identity and First Nations ties to Country through the lens of where saltwater meets freshwater.
The season also includes Aunty Annette’s Outblak from Kungari Productions, a stand-up hour built on stories the school curriculum left out, and Weaving the Everywhen, in which Central and Eastern Arrernte artist Georgia Boseley turns a Koorie Heritage Trust gallery into a sculptural installation of ceramics and woven grasses imagining a future shaped by Indigenous knowledge.
Opening night at the Capitol
Fringe’s Opening Night Gala returns to the Capitol Theatre on 29 September, bringing together a run of high-energy performances drawn from across the Festival program. This year’s host is actor, singer, writer and comedian Michelle Brasier.
For a free alternative, ZAP Circus bring CIRCUS FIRE Spectacular! to Prahran Square; an award-winning outdoor show combining acrobatics with fire performance, led by Tarrabelle and Rusty.
Also back is Congress by All the Queens Men, a participatory performance piece built around civic ritual, marking close to a decade since it first premiered at the Festival.
Building access into the art itself
The Radical Access strand pushes artists to treat accessibility as part of the creative process rather than an add-on.
This year’s flagship is Manifesto of Silences by Irene Holub, a Deaf-led reworking of opera that draws on sign language, movement, projection and immersive sound to surface Deaf histories that have historically gone untold.
International work, without the travel
Passport continues to bring acclaimed overseas performance to Melbourne audiences.
Two Canadian works feature this year: Fashion Machine by The Other Guise Theatre Society, in which local kids interview and design for adult volunteers before staging a fashion show with running commentary from the young designers themselves, and SLUGS by Creepy Boys, a genre-blending mix of concert, play, clown act and basement puppet show.
From the UK comes PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD by In Bed With My Brother, winner of both the Edinburgh Fringe First Award and The Stage’s Fringe Five, which tells the story of cult act The Shaggs and interrogates who decides what counts as talent.
Irish artist Luke Casserly presents Distillation, a sensory work built around a scent drawn from an Irish peat bog, reflecting on loss following the closure of Ireland’s peat industry. US artist Gregory Nussen closes out the strand with QFWFQ, a genre-defying solo show inspired by Italo Calvino’s fiction.
Fringe Focus Taiwan adds two Australian premieres to the program: Free UR Head by Very Theatre, a VR dance work (previously selected for the Venice Film Festival) that uses live XR technology to move a room of strangers in sync, and Palingenesis by d_Antidote Productions and Chuang Po-Hsiang, a masked dance work inspired by the phenomenon of rats becoming physically tangled together, used here as a way into ideas of intimacy and trust.
Pulse: artists testing the edges of form
Pulse enters its fourth year as the Festival’s home for artists experimenting with structure and form.
This year’s lineup includes 40-LOVE, an improvised dance work by Dr. Jonathan Homsey performed live to the radio commentary of the 2025 Australian Open Women’s Final, and Exhibit, a hybrid performance-installation from Emma J. Hawkins and Leisa Prowd exploring the experience of being frequently mistaken for one another.
Also in Pulse: a new staging of Clifford Odets’ banned anti-fascist play TILL THE DAY I DIE, performed on the back of a truck at Trades Hall in reference to its original 1936 protest staging; Prime Time from Born in a Taxi, featuring performers aged 4 to 93; NORNIR, a work for cello and movement from Freya Schack-Arnott exploring weaving and restriction; and The Enormous Radio, a large-scale sound installation from Roslyn Oades and Bob Scott built from modified radios and framed as a speculative attempt at communication across species.
Zoë Bastin Dance rounds out the strand with The River, a duet staged outdoors on the banks of the Werribee River at dawn and dusk.
A first-ever regional leg in Ballarat
For the first time, Melbourne Fringe is extending beyond the city with Fringe Encore: Ballarat, running 22–25 October.
The regional program mixes shows exclusive to Ballarat with a selection of standout titles from the Melbourne season, giving audiences outside the city easier access to the Festival highlights.
Planning your Festival
With a Curated Program this dense sitting alongside an equally full Open Program, there’s plenty to work through before picking your run of shows.
If you’re starting with free options, the daily Fed Square campfire at Dhandha/Campfire is an easy entry point, as is Ocker’s roving railway show and the one-night-only CIRCUS FIRE Spectacular! at Prahran Square. For something more site-specific, The River is staged at dawn and dusk on the Werribee River, while Trades Hall hosts both TILL THE DAY I DIE and Congress.
If a trip out of the city appeals, Fringe Encore: Ballarat runs 22–25 October with its own dedicated program alongside metro favourites.
Melbourne Fringe Festival
Melbourne Fringe is Victoria’s longest-running multi-arts festival and one of the largest of its kind in the country, built on an open-access model that welcomes artists of any background or experience level.
Access and inclusion run through the organisation’s programming year-round, from the First Nations-led Deadly Fringe to the access-focused Radical Access strand, alongside broader support for independent artists at every career stage.
Given how widely spread this year’s venues are — Fed Square, the Capitol Theatre, Koorie Heritage Trust, Trades Hall and Prahran Square among them, plus the new Ballarat leg — it’s worth building a shortlist early.
The complete program, including venue details, session times and tickets, went live today.
The full program is live now at melbournefringe.com.au.
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