Abbotsford Convent transforms into a hub of experimental artistry for Melbourne Fringe Festival 2025.
The 2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival at Abbotsford Convent ditches cape-wearing superheroes for real-world action heroes: individuals who understand that transformation comes from connecting, building and showing up.
Melbourne Fringe Festival features six shows this year at Abbotsford Convent in a celebration of dance, installation art, sound experiences and collaborative performance across three weeks of programming that invites audiences to feel, imagine and take meaningful action. The program spans three distinct venues within the historic convent, creating multiple spaces for artistic exploration and community engagement that challenge conventional boundaries between performer and audience.
Melbourne Fringe Festival at Abbotsford Convent
- 30 September to 18 October
- Abbotsford Convent: The Oratory, Magdalen Laundry, Studio 24
- More information here
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
Ngambaa
View this post on Instagram
- 1 to 4 October, 7pm
- The Oratory
- Info here
Choreographer Amelia Jean O’Leary presents a duo dance work exploring Gamilaraay storytelling through the journey of dhinawan emu baawaas sisters. Ngambaa means Mother in Gamilaraay and follows these sisters who return as spirits after passing through fire, time travelling across two generations of yinarrs to offer protection and guidance. Dancers Keia Mcgrady and Danni Cook bring this powerful narrative to life with costume and set design by Maya Anderson, supported by cultural advisors Uncle Ted and Aunt Shell.
Wasteworlds
View this post on Instagram
- Kids workshops: 1 to 3 October, 10am and 12.30pm
- Runway show: 4 October, 12pm, 2pm and 4pm
- Recovery exhibition: 5 October from 11am
- Magdalen Laundry
- Info here
Fast Fashun artists collaborate with Snuff Puppets to create a large-scale interactive installation set in 2125 when clothing waste has conquered the world. Audiences join workshops where little designers and grown-ups explore the sculpture, transform textile trash into fabulous outfits and strut their stuff on the runway. The experience peaks with a six-hour non-stop runway show before concluding with Recovery, offering free exhibition access where visitors can lounge in textile rubble and engage with touch tours or audio descriptions while wearing masks to support immunocompromised community members.
The Shore Remembers
View this post on Instagram
- 7 to 11 October, 12pm to 4pm
- The Oratory
- Free admission
Narrm-based sound artist Olivia Fisher presents a binaural headphone listening experience documenting shoreline rhythms and human environmental impact. Created over 12 months, audiences sit in a recreation of Anthony’s Nose beach on the Mornington Peninsula, listening to sounds of the shifting landscape through time. The 30-minute sonic journey travels from winter solitude through summer crowds, capturing impacts of climate change and the massive 2006 dredging operation that removed 40 million cubic metres of seabed using specialised 3Dio Free Space binaural microphones that mirror natural human hearing.
bodies no bodies
View this post on Instagram
- Exhibition: 7 to 11 October, 12pm to 4pm
- Performance: 7 to 11 October, 8pm to 9pm
- The Oratory
- Info here
Curator Sydney Sydney, co-winner of Blindside Gallery’s Emerging Curator Award 2023, presents performance meeting installation through five trans and gender diverse artists. Zero, Thicky T, James Bot, Foot and plastic messiah each create interconnected works including physical installations remaining in gallery space and live performances activating installations nightly. The ambitious experimental exhibition-meets-performance explores spaces between binaries, spanning facial recognition technology to audio ritual to collaged metamorphosis while inviting audiences to bring their own bodies into the experience.
MacroVerse
View this post on Instagram
- Exhibition: 7 to 11 October, 12pm to 4pm
- Performance: 7 to 11 October, 7pm to 8pm
- The Oratory
- Info here
Electronic music artist Reductionist teams with video artist Aday to deliver a live sonic and visual interpretation of universe evolution from energy stasis field to heat-death dissipation. Reductionist uses battery-powered micro-instruments and micro-virtuosic techniques while Aday creates visuals distorting time and manipulating energy flow perception. Both artists bring years of creative experience as longtime members of Australia’s legendary Clan Analogue collective, providing embodied humanistic focus within infinite space while extending physical selves through technology.
Lung Swara
View this post on Instagram
- 16 to 18 October
- Studio 24
- Info here
World renowned Indonesian artist Cahwati Sugiarto collaborates with celebrated Australian experimental musicians Aviva Endean and Matthias Schack-Arnott in a new musical partnership combining Javanese song and dance with visceral sonic textures. The collaboration works with three elemental musical forces – voice, percussion and wind – creating hypnotic and transformational music. Cahwati Sugiarto draws on encyclopaedic knowledge of Javanese and Balinese song for expansive improvisational forms, with her dance background bringing ritualistic quality to performances alongside Endean’s startling clarinet deconstructions and Schack-Arnott’s percussion with found objects enhanced by electronics.
For more information, head here.
This article was made in partnership with Abbotsford Convent.
