The development and staging of Circus Trick Tease is a good example of how a company and a festival interact. According to Malia Walsh, one of Circus Trick Tease’s principals, ‘someone from Strut & Fret [the Garden of Unearthly Delights’ organisers] had seen our show and thought it would work beautifully in the Garden’. After a meeting, they were offered a four-week show.

As arts companies often do, Circus Trick Tease formed in a bar. The diminutive Walsh met strong-man Shannon McGurgan and ‘he picked me up and played catch with me’. Walsh’s background was in ballet, but she found she enjoyed the different artistic vista of circus. ‘We all come from vastly different backgrounds: Shannon was a nurse to start with, and Farhad, being from Iran, was into trad circus.’

Despite their success, Circus Trick Tease struggled to make a dollar. ‘Doing a Fringe show doesn’t help the bank balance in any way, shape or form,’ Walsh remarks ruefully. But the social and artistic aspects help make up for this.

‘Not only did we do our shows over there, we got countless other shows out of being there—by the end of the festival I had done forty-eight shows altogether: we did a corporate thing, we did cabaret spots, we did spots for Bank SA.’

If Circus Trick Tease is in many ways typical of a Fringe show, the Garden of Unearthly Delights has much in common with other parts of the surprisingly small and insular Australian festivals scene. It’s a small industry with an in-group feel. The Garden shares much of its staff, infrastructure and indeed content with a circuit of similar festivals; staff often move from festival to festival and the same faces pop up at different events.

Will Todd is one of those itinerant workers. The production manager for the Garden of Unearthly Delights, he can also be found working behind the scenes at many other arts festivals around the country. ‘In the last twelve months I’ve worked on the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Comedy Festival, Adelaide Fringe and the Garden of Unearthly Delights, Melbourne Writers Festival, I’ve worked for Circus Oz and Melbourne Fringe,’ he told me. ‘So you just jump between them and try to balance.’ Todd loves the variety. ‘I’ve tried doing nine to five jobs, at the same job, and I go spare.’

The scale of the production task involved in setting up something like the Garden is impressive—similar to a medium-sized outdoor rock festival in size, but running for five weeks instead of a single day. ‘A production manager is the person who takes people’s ideas and makes the logistics of it happen. In some ways it takes beautiful, fanciful ideas and destroys dreams,’ he quips, before adding that his role is to take those ideas and find ‘a practical way of doing it that fits the budget or criteria that you have to work with. ‘There’s obviously the technical side—sound, lights and that sort of thing—and there’s a lot of different people who have to be dealt with. Hopefully if everything goes well nobody knows you exist.’

Although the Garden of Unearthly Delights is one of the best-attended parts of the Adelaide Fringe, the broader festival is larger still. As the Adelaide Fringe’s Artistic Director Christie Anthoney explains, when measured by the sheer number of artists and acts performing, it’s the largest festival in Australia. ‘Your average festival has about thirty to fifty shows, usually hand selected by a director. At the Fringe this year we have 530 shows … we sold about a quarter of a million tickets.’

There’s a lot of risk. The average audience for a session at Adelaide Fringe hovers just above double figures. As Anthoney told me, ‘The Fringe is used as a platform for the presentation of work, and that means predominantly for new work, for premieres and unearthing new artists who haven’t actually given it a go before, or for professionals, people who have been doing it for years, who run in new work and take their own risks before someone will pick it up and take the risk for them.’

Why do artists do it? And why do people come? For come they do: many shows at Adelaide Fringe sell out their entire season, and many more quickly build good audiences after strong early shows.

The reasons they do it: firstly, Adelaide is still a fantastic festival city because of its size … it’s a city where you just can’t miss it and you feel like you’re in a like-minded group of people. I’ll probably regret saying this but there’s almost a gathering kind of pilgrimage aspect of making the journey to Adelaide during the fringe, and that’s important, it’s still got that vibe to it.

The second reason is audiences. Adelaide has a reputation for hungry audiences … they pay money to go and see fresh stuff.

Thirdly, it’s this thing about promoters and artists getting picked up for other shows … we’ve had several shows go straight from Adelaide Fringe into the Sydney Festival or Perth Festival.

Anthoney has started a program called Honeypot, which brings festival directors and venue bookers to Adelaide to see and hopefully buy shows.