Dark Fringe and Emergency Dollhouse

Media release – Dark Fringe and Emergency Dollhouse, 15 March 2023

Dark Fringe and Emergency Dollhouse

1. DARK FRINGE

During Midwinter in Hobart this year there won’t just be the MONA-driven, government-funded Dark Mofo festival but also the Dark Fringe, in the spirit of the Edinburgh Fringe.

The Dark Fringe will also extend for an extra weekend, capturing the 23-25 June, which doesn’t overlap any other national Fringe event or festivals such as Rising in Melbourne or Vivid in Sydney.

2. THE EMERGENCY DOLLHOUSE, 9-25 June 2023, Hobart,

17 days in a state of immersion

More than an escape room.  More than a theatre show.  More real than any digital world could be.  You’ll be triaged like a hospital, but then your journey truly begins.

The heart of Dark Fringe 2023 is The Emergency Dollhouse, a one-hour immersive experience set in an incomparable multi-level Georgian building in the heart of Hobart’s CBD that will only be available for another five months, prior to redevelopment of the site by the Hong Kong owner.

“The world makes madwomen. The least you can do is be truly exposed.”

You can’t just be a voyeur. You must participate. Unless you don’t belong to the world.

The Emergency Dollhouse is a one-of-a-kind activation taking visitor immersion to the next level. It’s a one-hour journey into new territories of audience interaction. It’s also a rare exploration of gender and ‘the feminine’ with fresh, crazy eyes, fashionista & furious, laughing and beautifully, rightly absurd, without a desire for any predictable sensationalism.

Hobart breaks the yoke. With Dark Mofo there’s been a typical, perennial rejection of highly talented local artists in favour of prepackaged overseas and interstate options. This pattern is in spite of millions received in public funds, state and federal.

With The Emergency Dollhouse local talent, Sabio & Male are set to change the imbalance for the mid winter period. Other artists and musicians from across Tasmania and Melbourne are also bringing their own music and activation to different projects for Dark Fringe. This benefits both creators and audiences – similar to the Edinburgh Fringe.

The design artist, Sabio, has created award-winning costumes, sets and other work that has appeared in the Sydney Opera House and many other venues. Sabio has also been commissioned for Marina Abramovic exhibitions and for film & TV projects such as The Nightingale, The Kettering Incident, Rosehaven and many other productions. David Male has received directing awards in New York and national digital awards in Australia. He’s also a regular live performer in Hobart and Melbourne.

Each year, in mid-winter, Hobart’s winter festival attracts over 300,000 repeat state-based visitors to Tasmania’s capital city. More than 25,000 visitors are from interstate, Melbourne, Sydney and beyond.

Demand: Interstate visitors stay for several days, a long-weekend or a week. Often they can’t get tickets to every show they want to see. Hotels & Airbnbs are all booked out. There’s an appetite for compelling events.

The Emergency Dollhouse – the catalyst and beginning of Dark Fringe – runs over 17 consecutive days, concurrent with Dark Mofo while adding an extra Friday and Saturday in late June.

Scale and scope: The Emergency Dollhouse is a next-level original, visceral work with a universality enabling later replication in Australia’s major cities and across the world, from Berlin to N.Y. The dollhouse is an immersive journey into the human condition. Its genre is uncanny, partly Kafkaesque, possibly Alice-in-Wonderlandish; both relatable and confronting. With a unique world design, it’s not set in a traditional theatre.

Synopsis: With style, rage and humour two of the most profound feminine archetypes will confront you and each other. The genre-bending tour de force takes you on a journey you’ll have never ridden before. It’s a wild thing, imbued with extraordinary costumes, beautiful materiality and luxury crucifixes, blazing with the spirit of artists from Dorothea Tanning to Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim, it seduces visitors to interact, crawl through parts on their hands and knees and delight in the unexpected.

Sabio & Male shape a startling experience that maps a world taken over by masquerades, hidden agendas, and the characters of two women torn asunder by their extraordinary circumstances; Dolly and the Holy Mother.

The art of it:
Demolishing borders between the uncanny and fabulism, off-kilter contemporary and gothic darkness, the grotesque and the sanitised, The Emergency Dollhouse fills 800m2 of four levels & basements in a style of immersion that goes well beyond the work of Rone.art (Melb), meowwolf (Las Vegas) or Punchdrunk (UK).

The business case
Rone.art has recently sold over $5.5 million worth of ticket sales for his ‘immersive’ artwork, Time at Flinders St., Melbourne. This can be seen as a reflection of validation for the demand of ‘immersive’ experiences in the current market. Time allows for 100 visitors per hour and The Emergency Dollhouse is based on the same flow of 100 people per hour (coincidently; due to very different reasons and rationale).

The  Emergency Dollhouse work requires 9 live performers and 2 people in retail who appear as if they’re performers in the Dollhouse. We are currently in negotiation with some ‘name’ performers with national profiles.

The Emergency Dollhouse is a multi-artform work, covering visual design, sets and costumes, performers, choreography, scripts, sound design, projection mapping and support roles. It captures audience immersion at a deep level. The technical expertise is available locally to deliver the work in the timeframe available.