Melbourne Fringe Festival is hitting the road, bringing a stack of shows to Ballarat for Fringe Encore from 22–25 October.
The regional offshoot of Victoria’s longest-running multi-arts festival will take over several venues across the city with three exclusive headline events and a bunch of encore favourites from the metro season. It’s designed to give Ballarat audiences the full Fringe experience without the trip down the freeway.
Topping the bill is the world premiere of Degustation at the Ballarat Mining Exchange, a collaboration between contemporary circus company One Fell Swoop and chef Shu Liu.
Fringe Encore: Ballarat
- 22–25 October
- Various venues across Ballarat
- Tickets and full program at melbournefringe.com.au
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
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The show pairs five courses of fine dining with ambitious circus performed by six acrobats. Over at Civic Hall, RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under star Art Simone leads the cast of Fountain Lakes: Y2K alongside Thomas Jaspers and Jemima Handful, with the camp-drag parody running for four nights exclusively in Ballarat. 2025 Melbourne Fringe Living Legend award-winner Sammy J also brings Hero Complex to Civic Hall for a single performance.
Na Djinang Circus will bring free roving circus show Ocker to Ballarat’s streets, fresh from its Deadly Fringe premiere in Melbourne. The show features a portable railway track built in real time as performers tear through town.
Federation University hosts a run of shows including Elaine Crombie’s Grief, Love and Lead Balloons, James Ward’s Harold Holt: The Man, The Myth, The Pool (built around a replica of the Harold Holt Swim Centre) and Conk’s delightfully literal Man Sings The Same Song Over and Over Again for an Hour. The Ballarat Mechanics Institute rounds things out with four shows across two spaces, including Kelly Harris’ Yellow Fever: An Original Musical Cabaret, Darby James’ Little Squirt (winner of best cabaret at Melbourne Fringe in 2023) and Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin’s Dune But Worse, arriving just in time for the release of Part III.
For more information, head here.
