The EOI process for the Festival Hub is open now via THIS FORM. EOIs close on 19 May at 5pm. If you have any questions, please email [email protected]
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 the Festival Hub at Trades Hall.
Each year Melbourne Fringe programs and manages a variety of spaces in a Festival-run venue that aims to represent a broad range of what the Festival has to offer.
With the range of pop-up performance spaces, great social vibes our community had 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 Hub plays a crucial role as an access point for audiences and artists throughout the Festival. In 2022 we saw a 35% increase in Festival Hub ticket sales as compared to 2019, measured across the various shows in the venue. 2023 was similar with another highly successful year. As well as the multiple performance spaces and little nooks and alcoves for activations, the Festival Hub will house our main box office, will continue to be home of the Club Fringe late night parties, as well as the vibrant Loading Dock Bar, and will play host to other bars, installations, and more hidden throughout the venue (with a building-wide license that allows drinks to be taken into most rooms).
Applications for the Festival Hub open on Wednesday 1 May and close on Sunday 19 May.
We anticipate over 200 applications for the Festival Hub 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 Hub 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. For all these reasons, please keep in mind that there are other great venues around Melbourne that might also suit your needs, and we encourage you to check them out as well. You should be making enquiries now, to ensure you have a backup in case your Hub application isn’t successful. 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~.
If you’re keen on being a part of the action, and think your show would work well within this context – then we want to hear from you!
This year the Festival Hub will be open for 3 x five day blocks
Block 1: Wednesday 2 – Sunday 6 October
Block 2: Wednesday 9 – Sunday 13 October
Block 3: Wednesday 16 – Sunday 20 October
This means that Festival Hub artists can be programmed for one 5 day block, two 5 day blocks (10 days total), or for the entire Festival (15 days total). This takes a little bit of pressure off for the Festival Hub artists and their teams, giving them more down time, allowing for more technical rehearsals, and making a sell-out season that little bit more achievable. In addition this will make things a little easier for our team to support you, as they will have more time to work with you to resolve problems that arise mid-Festival.