By Joel Dignam

Image by Jonathan vdk

2006 was the last year of the Fringe being a biennial event. Fifteen years old, I went to the opening night party and had a wild time, dancing with strangers, playing hackey sack, being groped in Rymill Park by a bearded, drunken man. Things were simpler then: the Garden took up a fraction of Rundle Park, Rundle Street could be traversed, and the crowd was pleasantly void of young teenagers looking to get plastered.
I have consistently attended the opening night of the Adelaide Fringe and have felt a growing sense of unease. When, in 2008, a friend of mine was attacked by a bunch of jocks, I felt concerned, not just because blood was coming out of his head, but because I knew the same thing wouldn’t have happened a few years ago. As well as escorting him to the first aid tent and mustering appropriate sympathy, I found myself asking a question that I have only previously found myself asking of recreational handball and Peter Garrett: has the Adelaide Fringe lost its way?
2010 is the 50th anniversary of both the Adelaide Festival and the Adelaide Fringe. The former festival was born of a dinner attended by many well-respected businessmen who desired to overcome the tyranny of distance and bring Adelaide the culture that East Coasters already enjoyed. The Adelaide Fringe was born, one might infer, of a hazy midnight conference between two aspiring artists, bitter that the Festival Board had not seen fit to include as an exhibition their avant-garde assemblages of old appliances. That is, it would be an opportunity for local and smaller-scale artists to share their work with their world.
I think we can thus safely say that the Fringe has been consistently living up to its original intention. It is now the world’s second largest Fringe Festival, no doubt due to the fact that anybody who desires can be part of it simply by paying a registration fee. The quantity of shows on these days is close to astonishing. The diversity is alarming, and things such as the Opening Night Party and the Garden of Unearthly Delights have become ritual delights during Adelaide’s short-lived festival season.
However, it is inevitable that as any niche interest becomes popular enough to join the mainstream, its character changes. While the crowded opening night party this year still featured many of Adelaide’s colourful cast of characters, their effect was diluted by the hordes of aspirant underagers, grateful for a smokescreen for their drunkeness. Friends of mine, for whom this night was clearly not conceptually different from any other, invited me to join them in nearby bars. The Fringe is more popular than ever and this is a good thing. Though I can’t help but feel that it is a shame that the Fringe has responded to the character of the dilettantes, and not the other way around.

Enter Format Festival. Format is to the Fringe what the Fringe is to the Adelaide Festival and currently has that luxuriously un-notable state that used to define the Fringe.

I love Format. Last year I went on a street art walking tour, which drew upon the collective knowledge of its participants to document Adelaide’s impressive yet little-known street art. Wandering afterwards through the building that was the hub of Format, I delighted not only in the art installations and the rooms ironically named after Australian bigots, but in the feeling of comradeship and community – the wacky sense that I had as much to give this festival as it had to give me. At one point I found myself behind the bar and compelled to serve drinks to the milling crowd. I didn’t object, as these licensed sales are a key component of the festival’s funding.
In writing this article, I was able to speak to Chloe Langford, Visual Arts co-Coordinator for the 2010 Format Festival. While emphasizing Format’s gratitude to the Fringe, which has supported its development, Chloe nonetheless made it clear that she saw Format as filling a vacuum. From humble beginnings as a three day zine fair within the Fringe, this year, Format runs for only a week less than the Fringe itself. As an artist-run, DIY festival, it gives space to emerging artists and otherwise homeless projects. While the Fringe arguably does this too, Format does it without the $300 price tag that the Fringe requires of every registrant. Promoting not just freedom of expression and collective appreciation of grass roots art creation, Format is also a fledgling example of a potentially superior way of running an arts festival. Its democratic participatory culture means that the separation between organiser, curator and artist is much smaller than in a big scale festival such as the Fringe or the Adelaide Festival.
Perhaps the most concerning aspect of this year’s Fringe is the introduction of the ‘Fringe Club’, a space open only to artists and Fringe volunteers. This seems to me like something Orwellian, akin to the pigs of Animal Farm granting only themselves access to Jones’ house, all the while claiming to consider other animals as equals. One rainy Friday, I entered undercover, posing as a poorly dressed, underfed uni journalist. Having run past the guards and ingratiated myself amongst the Fringe’s upper crust, I was treated to a night’s entertainment featuring a condom-throwing cabaret performer, a short, culinary play spoken in what sounded like Simlish, and a contemporary dance performance using a concerningly unsustainable amount of glad wrap. Gathering the neglected condoms for later applications in inflation, I felt that, just perhaps, things were right with Adelaide’s festival world.
The Fringe can’t have lost its way, simply because the Fringe has no way. Putatively, the Fringe doesn’t have a 12-year plan and responds anew each year to the demands of the year that has been and the one ahead. Attempts to suggest that the Fringe has strayed smack of ’sour grapes’, an unwillingness to accept that the Fringe is nought but what it is, and, while it can’t be everything for everyone, it can be many things to many people. Being part of the mob at the opening night party, I was very aware that many people there had ideas about what the Fringe meant that were very different to mine. But I was confident that we were united in looking for little other than good, clean, fun.
That said, I don’t feel that the Fringe is any longer quintessentially Adelaidean. For me, the genius of Adelaide is in its small-town community juxtaposed with as much cosmopolitan and cultural life as befits a state capital. The Fringe is now less and less like Dairy Bell, and more and more like Cibo: a reproducible, convenient enterprise that no longer reflects the nature of its hometown. Format, on the other hand, is organic. The Adelaide-based Format collective is open to contributors and volunteers, and their contribution to Adelaide life extends beyond the festival season, to exhibitions, subversive wheat-pastes, and who knows what else.
I know that next year the Fringe will be bigger, that the Garden will be in the same place and still have grossly expensive drinks, and that, if I want to be part of it, I need to part with three hundred of my greasy dollars. And, while it will be substantially the same, I don’t know what will have happened to its essence. But Format? I don’t know. It’ll be in a different place, it may be at a different time. Maybe I won’t meet the friend of an ex-girlfriend out the front and act on his suggestion that I upload my photos of Neapolitan street-art to flickr for his perusal. I don’t know what to expect. But nor should I.