After nineteen days of engaging audiences, the 25th Age Melbourne Fringe Festival has wound up. The army of Festival judges came out of their locked deliberation room and announced the winners of the Fringe Awards covering a wide range of categories.
The awards ceremony took place appropriately at the Festival Club at the North Melbourne Town Hall in front of a full room of artists, festival staff and various hangers-on. Each award winner was welcomed to the stage accompanied by the blaring A-Team theme music over the PA. The winner was invited to make a short speech, but this was controlled by Miss Texas who, armed with a gong, signalled when the speech went on too long. Most of the speeches were in the short to medium range with only one winner explicitly wanting to test the gong, but ran out of material before it was struck.
The Award Winners were as follows:
Best Venue – Caz Reitop’s Dirty Little Secret.
Best Puppet Show – Pure Puppet Palavar.
Best Circus and Circus Oz Development Awards – Shuttlecock.
Best Special Event – Death By Chocolate.
Best School Holiday Event – Tadpole.
Best Cabaret – Yana Alana and Tha Paranas. (Special Comendation to Caity Folwer with Songs of Instability)
Best Visual Arts and Adelaide Fringe Awards – Soo Joo Yoo for “Don’t Be Afraid.
Best Music Event – Dave Graney in “Point Blank”
Best Comedy – Matthew Keneally for Parliament? (Special Comendation to A Record or an OBE)
Best Performance and Adelaide Fringe Awards – Gifted and Talented. (Special Commendations to Antidote and Pimms)
Gasworks Development Award – Aardvark – The Shitt Family Puppet Show.
Village Award – “Adequate Living” segment from Pure Puppet Palavar.
Linden Gallery Award – Glenn Pilkington.
New Dramatist Award – Adam Cass for “I Love You, Bro”.
Community Cultural Award – Crisis and Rhapsody.
Melbourne International Arts Festival Award – Kelly Ryall for composing “Spacemunki”.
Edinburgh Fringe Award – Daniel Rabin for production of “A Smorgasbord of Circus”.
We at Team Squirrel wish to congratulate all the winners and everyone else who put on events for the festival.