The Adelaide Fringe proudly touts itself as the biggest arts festival in Australia, but one veteran performer says the festival's become too big, and she won't be back.
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00:00For Kate Lawrence, circus has been her life.
00:05The performer is still reeling from cancelling her Adelaide Fringe show due to poor ticket
00:10sales for the second time.
00:12If it's not financially viable for me to run a show and pay my cast, then the show doesn't
00:19happen.
00:20After 19 years, she's quitting the Fringe at a time when the event is booming.
00:25It's sold more than a million tickets two years in a row, but some performers are asking
00:30if the Fringe is too big now, leaving local shows lost in the crowd.
00:35Whether it was just a matter of competition, there were too many shows to choose from and
00:41I know that flicking through the Adelaide Fringe Guide or hitting that website, it's
00:45a completely overwhelming experience.
00:47The Fringe director knows it's a tough sell.
00:49The cost of putting on shows is definitely going up and we saw that this year and last
00:54year and we don't see any change on the horizon.
00:59She says the Fringe does what it can to help artists sell tickets, but there are no guarantees.
01:05There's always going to be shows that do really well and shows that don't do so well.
01:11Shows that often do well are big name comedy acts.
01:14They have access to the kind of marketing spend that me as an independent producer just
01:18doesn't have.
01:19But creating a separate comedy festival offering isn't a popular solution.
01:24A lot of that comedy audience wouldn't come to Fringe and they'd just, I don't know, we're
01:30certainly not in the mindset that we're about blocking genres.
01:35And agent Andrew Taylor says there's no space on the comedy circuit.
01:39All the comedy festivals in Australia now basically run back to back and it starts in
01:43Perth in January and if we count in New Zealand, it finishes in New Zealand in May.
01:47Instead, Kate Lawrence is heading to a new Fringe.
01:50A lot of artists have started using festivals like Cabaret Fringe and Feast Festival.
01:57New stages for seasoned performers.