New York performance artist Penny Arcade has been touring to Australia since 1994. She remembers the Adelaide of her early visits with the type of enthusiasm often reserved for something long disappeared.

“I was beside myself in Australia in the ’90s because there was a real Bohemian culture,” she says. “And especially in Adelaide, you know, where you had this incredible combination of an ultra-conservative, church-dominated right wing and then this really ultra-left [with their efforts at] legalising prostitution and legalising weed.”

This year, Arcade returns to Adelaide Fringe with her experimental, rock ’n’ roll theatre show The Art of Becoming Episode 3: Superstar Interrupted. Part of her evolving 10-episode memoir series, the show combines music, storytelling and video to revisit Arcade’s twenties, when she was pushing cultural boundaries alongside people like Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry and Patti Smith.

The Fringe that Arcade will perform at in 2023 is not the same as the Fringe of her earlier years: “We all know that the Fringe, over the past 25 years, is doing more comedy, doing more circus, doing more burlesque, and less theatre,” she says.

But these changes haven’t blunted her enthusiasm for the festival. This year, she arrives as an official ambassador for Adelaide Fringe. Arcade is joined by drag queen sensation Kween Kong and lauded comedian Sarah Millican in the 2023 ambassador line-up, which marks 10 years of the Fringe ambassador program.

Like the festival, the Fringe’s ambassadors have always been diverse – hailing from across genres and countries and coming together to help the event reach new audiences.

Australian music royalty Marcia Hines, who is preparing to once again front her wildly popular circus, dance and music epic Velvet Rewired at Fringe, says the decision to became an ambassador in 2020 was not difficult.

“I’m proud of… the Australian talent that commits to organising the biggest open-access festival in the southern hemisphere,” she says. “The Fringe festival really supports artists – it was an easy yes.”

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Hines, like Arcade, has been performing in Adelaide since well before the ambassador program began in 2013. She recalls an era when Fringe was a significantly smaller event, but believes its growth only helps the festival fulfil its purpose.

“There is so much talent in Australia,” says Hines. “Adelaide Fringe is the highlight of the festival calendar and gives audiences the chance to see an enormous range of art forms.”

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While Arcade has her roots in theatre and sees the genre’s decreasing representation in the program as a major change for Fringe, she agrees with Hines that the event has maintained its core purpose. As an open-access festival, where inclusion in the program is not governed by programmers or curators, Fringe remains an important bastion of intellectual freedom and artistic expression, Arcade says.

“In the most positive sense, the Fringe represents the open marketplace where… you don’t have to have somebody’s approval to put on your show,” she says.

“If you have a crap show, you can still put it on – that’s your problem. Because it’s not funded and because people pay to put on their own show, you have diversity and it’s democratic.”

This makes Fringe, especially in a cultural climate which Arcade perceives as increasingly censorious, an important crossover point – a place where audiences and artists can be exposed to art that broadens their horizons.  She believes it is one of the last places where people can present a variety of ideas – “even unpopular ideas”.

Comedian, singer and writer Reuben Kaye, who was a Fringe ambassador in 2022, also underlines the event’s open-access nature as its mainstay feature. He sees the addition of larger, more commercial works to the program as a big transformation for the festival, but not one which dilutes its essence.

“Adelaide Fringe still has an air of the garage about it, which is I think one of the best compliments you can get for a Fringe festival, especially in this age of homogenisation,” he says.

“Some of the big shows come in… and that’s for good and bad, because on the one hand they do take up ticket sales, but on the other hand they do bring in more people.

“And you know, it is good ­– because if a couple of older heterosexual Grants and Helens come in to see a Blanc de Blanc and they really enjoy it, and they’re in the Garden, they might suddenly think, ‘What’s on now?’ and wander into The Kaye Hole. They go, ‘We came for this show and we stayed and we suddenly had our minds opened’.

“It’s the magic of the festival.”

Kaye is this year performing two shows at Fringe. In Live and Intimidating he and his band tour through some of his favourite songs between bouts of Kaye’s comedic and intelligent commentary, while in The Kaye Hole he runs a raucous late-night club that he says is both a variety show and a “queer punk protest night”.

He looks towards the future of Fringe with optimism. He and Arcade both highlight the direct relationship Fringe facilitates between them and their audience as an important part of the festival – saying it allows them to express themselves without having to satisfy gatekeepers in institutions like the media.

This is the type of relationship Kaye has also been fostering with his audiences online, and he is heartened to see that Fringe is embracing these new channels for direct connection as well.

“They’re taking steps to partner with TikTok, with social media platforms,” says Kaye.

“I believe in queer anarchy, I believe in the velvet rage and I believe in queer joy, and putting that out there has worked for me. Often the relationship I find with people through social media – not just TikTok, you’re talking Instagram and you’re talking Facebook – not only is it good for sales, if you want to put a monetary thing on it, but also it’s a deeper connection to the audience.

“My shows tend to deal with a lot of serious issues as well as jokes, as well as music. And I think if you’re going to be a performer that deals with those issues, it has to be a dialogue, you have to offer support. And my audience has a dialogue with me and that is often through social media and often it helps me develop more considered material.”

Hines, Kaye and Arcade are all emphatic in predicting Fringe’s future success – pointing to its year-on-year growth and circling back to its fundamental open-access nature as guarantees of its ongoing relevance.

"There is a place for anger in art – the best comedy, the best art comes from anger"

But for each of them, there is also an emotional component to their certainty. Hines brims with excitement at returning with her “joyous production” Velvet Rewired this month, while Arcade speaks of Adelaide and the artistic freedom allowed by Fringe as if it is her second home.

For Kaye, the joy of art is always entwined with something darker. He begins each night of The Kaye Hole by inviting the audience to join in a communal, gathering scream.

“People need to scream,” he says. “There is a palpable sense in the air right now that things are unequal and things are sliding – we’re talking about a climate issue… that is not a possibility, it’s a certainty. You have billionaires now who are hoarding all the wealth.

“I like to think of these things as not depressing, I think of them as anger-making because I think there is productivity and power in anger. There is a place for anger in art – the best comedy, the best art comes from anger, and I think that’s palpable in not just The Kaye Hole, but in a lot of art at the Fringe.”

As a place where artists and audiences can express their most elemental feelings, the Adelaide Fringe seems destined to be timeless.

Penny Arcade: The Art of Becoming Episode 3: ‘Superstar Interrupted’ is showing from February 15-28 at The Pyramid at Fool’s Paradise in Tarntanyangga (Victoria Square). Velvet Rewired will be in the Moa at Gluttony from February 16 – March 3. The Kaye Hole is playing from March 10-18 at The Roundhouse in the Garden of Unearthly Delights, while Reuben Kaye – Live and Intimidating will run from March 6-19, also at The Roundhouse in GOUD.

This story is part of a series of articles being produced with the support of Adelaide Fringe. Read more Fringe stories here.