Updated
The rewards of putting on a Fringe show come with a worryingly heavy financial burden for many South Australian performers.
This month's annual event will showcase a huge 1,223 events, featuring about 6,000 artists at 442 venues.
Almost half of those artists and shows come from South Australia, and they face an uphill battle to at least break even.
Former professional musical performer David Gauci has put on a Fringe show for several years, funded from his own coffers.
Last year his Fringe show cost him $34,000, but will jump to about $39,000 this year as he flies out renowned Broadway composer John Bucchino to play the season of his latest offering Its Only Life.
The financial pressures quite literally make for sleepless nights.
"I wake up at 3:00am, I get up, I'll then sit down and start emailing or going on creating mail outs or organising mail outs, writing lists," he said.
Gauci funds his annual Fringe show through his work as music coordinator with Cardijn College in Noarlunga Downs. Finding the money is anything but easy.
"There's a lot of sacrifice and you forget about the idea of saving — there is no such thing as saving," Gauci admitted.
"You call upon friends too, for favours. You max out your credit cards significantly."
It is a story circus performer and producer Kate Lawrence knows only too well.
Cirque Nocturne lost a substantial amount of money when it performed at entertainment hub Gluttony last year. The show was also self-funded.
"It was basically a year's worth of savings, so most people save for a year, they buy a car or they put a deposit on a house. I do a Fringe show," she said.
She is banking on performing again at Gluttony this year to help turn around the bottom line.
The Adelaide Fringe does what it can to help performers, which includes marketing and public relations advice.
Director and chief executive Heather Croall said budgeting was another key area the organisation tried to help performers with.
"We'll say to people when you are looking how to set your ticket price, do a budget that doesn't expect that you'll sell more than 40 per cent of your season," she said.
She said the Fringe had also moved to lessen the 'inside charges' on tickets, effectively giving more money back to shows.
This year's Fringe is a step into the unknown for first time theatre producer Andrew Trimmings, who is staging A Paper Tale: The Adelaide Office Live in a city office building.
"The economics may not work out for us, but we're just happy to do something different," he said.
Trimmings admitted to taking a more risky approach by spending more on advertising, which is making a difference.
Kate Lawrence said her job of selling the Cirque Nocturne show would be made easier if Adelaide audiences changed their perceptions of local acts.
"[The mentality is] a locally produced act wouldn't be as good as a comparable show from interstate or overseas, and I don't think that's the case at all," she said.
Gauci thinks the problem goes beyond that and believes the telephone-book size of the Fringe program has just become too much.
"I'm of the opinion that we should have two festivals, I've often said this. We should have a comedy festival and we should have a Fringe festival," he said.
"There is a lot of comedy that comes over and they are big ticket names with big production, big producers working behind them."
The Adelaide Fringe begins on Friday, February 16.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, carnivals-and-festivals, comedy-humour, performance-art, adelaide-5000, sa
First posted