Melbourne Fringe Festival is challenging Melbournians to Turn Towards the Heat when the Festival returns from 29 September to 18 October 2026. Experience a city brimming with fearless independent art from artists across every background and career stage, each of them exploring bold ideas and challenging how we see the world. Find shows on a riverbank, on a stage, in a square, by a campfire.
Spanning intimate one-on-one performances to high-octane spectacles enjoyed with a crowd. With over 450 events and thousands of artists the Festival invites audiences to discover something new and unexpected. Highlights from this year’s Festival include new works from local talent, as well as exciting voices from across the country and around the globe.
The 2026 Festival is full of milestone moments and returns from Fringe alumni. More than 15 years after its previous Melbourne Fringe Season, Briefs: The Works, returns with world-class circus, outrageous drag and unapologetic queer joy from the global cabaret phenomenon, hosted by Fez Faanana as Shivannah. In a 15 year-long community project by artists that have been involved with Melbourne Fringe since 1983, Weekly Ticket Footscray sees David Wells improvise, dance, talk and collaborate with commuters and other artists, carrying his iconic chair at Footscray Station.
With a rich reciprocal touring program, the 2026 Melbourne Fringe Festival brings several interstate and international favourites to Melbourne audiences. Winner of the New Zealand Fringe Touring Award, Dune But Worse is a must-see for anyone awaiting the cinematic release of Part Three in December and for everyone who isn’t. A French-trained Kiwi clown will transport Festival Hub audiences to Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’. In Yellow Fever: An Original Musical Cabaret, (Winner of the Fringe World Touring Award), Kelly Lim Harris shares tragically outrageous stories from her life, dissecting the origins of “Yellow Fever”, and linking them with her own experiences as an Asian performer in the arts industry. Sydney Fringe Touring Award Winner, Let’s Unpack That transports the audience into a musical world full of old home videos, defamatory teenage diary entries and antidepressants of varying quality, featuring new original music by Montaigne (Eurovision, ARIA Award Winner).
Local artist Gerladine Quinn presents the world premiere of Campervan: An Ozploitation Horror Musical, a Gen X horror comedy musical. A nod to an icon of Melbourne, Carrot Man, Hayley Edwards debut’s The Carrot Show is a joyfully absurd new work from the maker of 2025 Festival standout Shitbag, exploring how artists keep making work in an unstable world. 95-year-old Liz Hicklin takes the stage to tell the true story of her relationship with poet Ted Hughes before he met Sylvia Plath – a funny, fierce account of a life spent in the footnotes in Sylvia Plath Stole My Boyfriend.
This October more than 100 venues of all shapes and sizes will roar to life across the city. At Bard’s Apothecary, a comedy built around a replica of the Harold Holt Swim Centre, Harold Holt: The Man, The Myth, The Pool. Trash Wizard at La Mama, written by Charlie Star with Em Tambree is a camp, absurdist post-humanist dark comedy (with puppets!) following two friends on a quest to remember what they are after the extinction of humanity. An original Pasefika spoken word theatre work exploring migration, identity and belonging through humour, grief and slam poetry, Holding the VĀ is written and directed by Fulisia Asalemo Tofete, presented by Pacific Island Creative Arts Australia Inc. Acclaimed First Nations performer Elaine Crombie is back with Elaine Crombie – Grief, Love and Lead Balloons, a sharp-witted new solo show about moving between comedy and drama through a season of grief.
Guest interviewer Frank Woodley joins “public intellectual” Lazlo Steigenberger for an interview that may alter everything you’ve ever thought in Lazlo Steigenberger & Frank Woodley – The Festival of the Entire Universe. In Green, In White performed by Weichen Cui and Jiawen Feng is a contemporary dance duet exploring transformation and shared becoming, sparked by the Legend of the White Snake.
Across two Festival Hubs at Trades Hall in Carlton and Meat Market in North Melbourne, the Festival will host a vast range of genres, artists, and performance spaces, from one night only popups, to seasons that run for the duration of the Festival. The Festival Hubs are places to come together, to stack a schedule for back-to-back performances, to enjoy a drink, a pie and perhaps a cheeky dance at Club Fringe.
Award winning, INFERNO, produced by Kraken Fire, makes it’s Melbourne debut as they fuse danger, seduction and skill showcasing some of Australia’s best fire artists. Linda Catalano and Vicki Dela Amedume bring Off the Hook, a high-energy mash-up of circus, soul, funk and dance, created with Australian Hammond organ trio Cookin’ on 3 Burners. Eighteen Lives (祖宗十八代) by Do Theatre and Fini Liu is a funny, tender theatre work about reincarnation and connection across six eras of Chinese history, performed in Mandarin with English subtitles. Aniconic, choreographed by Shinjita Roy with Harrison Hall, is both a performance and a virtual-reality installation staging the celestial wedding of Shiva and Parvati inside a South Indian temple world
About Melbourne Fringe Festival
Melbourne Fringe Festival invites audiences to discover the unexpected. A bold, audacious program of art and performance across the city and beyond, it’s Victoria’s longest-running multi-arts festival and one of the largest in the country. Proudly open access, Fringe is open to anyone with something to say, bringing voices from the margins to stages across Melbourne. Access and inclusion sit at the Festival’s heart, from First Nations commissioning program Deadly Fringe to reimagining accessible artmaking with Radical Access, alongside programs supporting independent artists at every stage of their practice.
Melbourne Fringe Festival returns 29 September – 18 October 2026, with Fringe Encore: Ballarat taking place from 22–25 October.
The full program is available now at www.melbournefringe.com.au.
