The Melbourne Fringe continues its support and promotion of diverse individual expression and creative freedom through the newest addition to Melbourne’s longest-running arts festival line-up.
The program, Critical Mass, has come into being through a partnering between Brunswick Mechanics Institute, Siteworks and Testing Grounds – creating a space where for the duration of the fringe festival a surge of artists will deliver ambitious, urgent and transformative art.
Critical Mass has been formed in order to explore some of the big questions about art – how art can be both collectively moving and individually empowering, move people collectively and evoke change through unity.
The themes of the fifty–plus artist exhibitions and performances range from the encouragement of cross-generational connection to idealised beauty. However, within all these works lie the sense that we are stronger together en masse than we are divided and that collectively we have the power to shift the pressures of those against us.
The program includes poets and spoken word artists, a section of dance, movement and music works, lock-ins, a 24 hour humming assembly, a show shining a light on queer anxiety and an ambitious, exciting immersive theatrical experience – La Fiesta del Barrio.
Additionally, Siteworks will for just over a week be transformed into a traditional Latin plaza teeming with Barrio inhabitants preparing for their yearly fiesta.
The culmination and keynote of the program will be the Critical Mass Rally which will take place at 3pm on the 22nd of September. Critical Mass artists will take to the streets of Brunswick together to participate in a live art happening, physically converging to unite and experiment with new languages for change.
Critical Mass promises to be a transformative, ambitious and experimental gathering of young creatives in the middle of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, providing an introspective and collective moment of interruption which is sure to be worth seeing.
Read more about Critical Mass and book tickets here.
