Fringe Focus Taiwan 2025 presents three extraordinary works spanning audiences from newborns to 100 senior citizen performers.
Now in its sixth year as a cornerstone of Melbourne Fringe’s Curated Program, Fringe Focus Taiwan continues pushing boundaries with performances that celebrate the full cycle of life through bold contemporary art. This year’s program runs from 30 September to 19 October, featuring Taiwanese artists whose work embodies the 2025 Festival theme Action Heroes by spotlighting groups often overlooked on stages.
Highlights include choreographer Su Wei-Chia’s ambitious project with up to 100 Melbourne participants aged 65+, plus Taiwan’s pioneering baby theatre company creating gentle performances for infants and families. These works demonstrate how heroism exists in every body, from youngest citizens to eldest community members.
Fringe Focus Taiwan 2025
- Free Steps – Swinging Years: 15-18 October, Meat Market Blackwood Box
- Free Steps – Grand Canyon: 1 October Queen Victoria Market, 5 October Fed Square Power Move, 9 October Melbourne Museum
- We Need a Flower: 17-18 October, Artplay
- Program: 30 September – 19 October
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
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Free Steps – Swinging Years brings celebrated choreographer Su Wei-Chia from acclaimed contemporary dance company HORSE to collaborate with Melbourne seniors through three-week residency workshops. Participants share lived experiences through movement that culminates in large-scale public performance, celebrating rhythm and wisdom of ageing bodies while transforming life stories into dance.
Free Steps – Grand Canyon pushes dance beyond traditional stages into public spaces through duets between dancer and paper. Physical movement becomes sculpture while rhythm creates landscape, with the dancer’s body conversing with material across Fed Square, Queen Victoria Market and Melbourne Museum presentations.
Double and Cross Theatre presents We Need a Flower for babies aged 0-2 and families at Artplay. Founded by theatre-maker and mother Tso Han-Chieh, the company pioneered baby theatre in Taiwan through work structured around gravity, bones and future that explores life’s interconnected cycles with tenderness.
Since 2020, Fringe Focus Taiwan has introduced Australian audiences to 16 groundbreaking works across dance, theatre, VR and live art, showcasing Taiwan’s most daring contemporary artists through Ministry of Culture Taiwan support.
For more information, head here.
