Pulse: Talking Risk with Melbourne Fringe Creative Director and CEO Simon Abrahams

In 2024, Dan Giovannoni sat down with Melbourne Fringe Creative Director and CEO Simon Abrahams to discuss Pulse, Melbourne Fringe’s program of radical, risky and ambitious art from leading independent artists, and some of the works in the 2024 Melbourne Fringe Festival. With six of the nine shows in the 2024 Pulse program receiving Green Room Award nominations this week, revisit what Simon had to say about Pulse and the 2024 program.

DG: Nice to be chatting with you, Simon. Today we’re talking about…?

SA: Pulse!

DG: As in legumes?

SA: As in Melbourne Fringe’s program of radical, risky and ambitious art from leading independent artists.

DG: Got it. Risky, you say? In this economy?

SA: Artistic risk taking is at the heart of Pulse. The program exists to showcase leading artists at the very top of their game who are thinking BIG, who are experimenting with form, who are pushing boundaries, who are treading in new terrain. Pulse creates a platform for those artists to experiment, to really be adventurous in a way that they just can’t be anywhere else. And it’s an invitation to curious audiences to follow artists down the rabbit hole of innovation.

DG: Cool cool. So what kind of boundary-pushing are we talking about?

SA: Everything! Form, content, ideas, artistry. Can I tell you about a couple of Pulse projects I am super excited about?

DG: Hit me.

SA: First: Adena Jacobs and her feminist, queer theatre company Fraught Outfit are making Flames Danced In Their Hair But Did Not Burn Them. Adena is an acclaimed opera and theatre director here and internationally, and for the first time she’s working in a completely new form. Flames is a three-channel video artwork about transgression, about the body, about the sexuality of teenagers and what they can and can’t consent to. It’s part documentary, part immersive art film, and it uses ten years of documentation of a cohort of young people who are now in their 20s but first began working with Adena over a decade ago on her controversial production of The Bacchae. The work tracks how the views of these performers have changed over the past decade in the context of huge social changes.

DG: I remember The Bacchae. It was quite radical.

SA: Hugely so. And Flamescontinues in that legacy – these are radical big ideas, explored by an artist who is considered quite radical working in a totally new form. And it couldn’t really happen anywhere else, because there just isn’t another context where a work as bold or as adventurous as this could find its home.

DG: What other risky business has Pulse got for us?

SA: Argh, it’s such a great program it’s hard to pick just one more. Transmission – into the dark is a new participatory outdoor night-time walking artwork (try saying that three times!) by ‘one step at a time like this’, an incredible local Melbourne company who got their start in Melbourne Fringe, gosh, maybe 15 years ago? What interested me about Transmissionis that it’s totally site-specific – it’s made for Hobsons Bay. You start by having an individual experience – it starts when you pick up an old-school transistor radio in someone’s letterbox and then you go on an adventure through Newport, out on the streets, taking in surprising spaces and places – but then you also come together for a shared, collective experience under the stars. It’s a work that is ultimately about adventure and trust and risk-taking and putting yourself in the hands of artists.

DG: I love the idea of listening to a late-night radio show while stomping the streets and discovering a new neighbourhood.

SA: I don’t think the company has made a work on this scale before, or one that truly brings people together in such a profound way before. It’s going to be great!

DG: I wish we could talk about all eight of the works in Pulse, but alas I’ve hit my word limit. Any thoughts you’d like to leave us with?

SA: Just this: if you look around at this city, there are lots of places where artists can share their work – but I would argue that there is nowhere that artists can take as big a risk as in Pulse. If audiences want to see artists with nothing to lose, going for broke, they’ll find them in Pulse.

DG: And what if they want legumes?

SA: Peas stop asking me that.

DG: Understood. Thanks for your time.

Green Room Award Nominations for 2024 Pulse Events

Finucane & Smith’s Global Smash Club

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION DESIGN (CABARET)

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE (CABARET)

Body of Knowledge

OUTSTANDING WORK (CONTEMPORARY AND EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE)

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE (CONTEMPORARY AND EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE)

OUTSTANDING DESIGN (CONTEMPORARY AND EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE)

OUTSTANDING WORK BY OR FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES (CONTEMPORARY AND EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE)

Transmission Transmission – into the dark

OUTSTANDING TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT (CONTEMPORARY AND EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE)

Temple of Desire

OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHY (DANCE)

Four Sites (Muddy)

OUTSTANDING DESIGN – SOUND (DANCE)

OUTSTANDING PERFORMER(S) (DANCE)

OUTSTANDING CREATION (DANCE)

Bad Boy

OUTSTANDING PERFORMER (INDEPENDENT THEATRE)

OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN (INDEPENDENT THEATRE)