Here you’ll find all the information you need about our Festival Hubs, check out the links below for specific information, or read this page for a full overview
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Festival Hub is a Melbourne Fringe managed collection of venue spaces located in Carlton that aims to represent a broad range of what the Festival has to offer.
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You’ve got an idea for a show, great! You’ve started to pull together an amazing team of creative minds to help you on your journey, perfect! Now you’re looking for a centrally located professionally run venue to support you on your journey… Welcome to our Festival Hubs.
With the range of pop-up performance spaces, great social vibes our community has come to expect, and exciting breadth and depth of events in the program, we are working with you to create a top-notch Festival experience for artists and audience alike.
The Festival Hubs play a crucial role as an access point for audiences and artists throughout the Festival. On any given night there are around 40 events taking place across the venues.
Trades Hall is also turned into a festival wonderland with little nooks and alcoves for activations, our main box office, Club Fringe late night parties, and the vibrant Loading Dock Bar, and more hidden throughout the venue (with a building-wide license that allows drinks to be taken into most rooms).
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Applications for the Festival Hub will open in on the 24th March — and close on the 10th April 2025.
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We anticipate over 200 applications for our Festival Hubs this year, but we will only be able to program 80-100 of these. We have a dedicated focus on representing the breadth of the Festival within our programming, and sometimes pretty amazing works aren’t programmed in the space because we’re looking for variety as much as we are looking for excellence.
In addition to this, often a show will apply to the Hubs that would do much better in a different venue that has more flexible programming and scheduling, more traditional facilities, dedicated green rooms, or specific technical equipment.
We encourage all artists to check out our 2024 Independent Venues EOIs resource, and make enquiries as a backup in case your Festival Hub application is unsuccessful. Melbourne Fringe can provide advice on alternative venues to shows that were not able to be programmed into the Hub and individual show feedback may be provided on request.
The Festival Hub is a subsidised space for artists, this means that the hard costs of running the venue are significantly higher than what we can recover in venue hire rates. Melbourne Fringe have always considered providing a dynamic and exclusively “Fringe" venue as a crucially important service to the sector as well as a significant part of the ~vibes~.
Check out our What It Costs section for more information
Festival Hub will be open from Tuesday 30th October - Sunday October 19th