Download the Community Guidelines here:
Community Guidelines 2021.docx
Melbourne Fringe democratises the arts. Our vision is cultural democracy – empowering anyone to realise their right to creative expression. We support the development and presentation of artworks by, with and for Melbourne’s people, running the annual Melbourne Fringe Festival, the year-round venue Common Rooms at Trades Hall, and a range of arts sector leadership programs. We believe that equitable access to the arts and creative expression are fundamental human rights and vital to a creative, cohesive, optimistic and empathetic society.
Participation in any of Melbourne Fringe’s programs is subject to the two key principles of our Community Guidelines: Freedom of Expression and Supporting Community Safety.
Freedom of artistic expression is vital to our culture, our democracy and our artistic practice, and allowing a diversity of viewpoints opens powerful, difficult and important conversations to take place.
Our work includes open access and uncurated programs of independent work. We create a platform for people to express themselves and support a diversity of viewpoints, artforms and cultures. We remove artistic hierarchies so the people themselves decide what is art and what is of value. Our work transcends conventional viewpoints of talent, content or priority to allow anyone to make and present art. Our participants have a broad range of experience in the arts – from established professional artists to everyday creative people – and demonstrate an equally broad representation of social, cultural and political backgrounds.
We support work that is risky, difficult and political. We may platform work we don’t agree with, we don’t like or we don’t know, because the alternative is to stifle civic participation. We believe it is important to have complex and nuanced conversations and we believe passionate disagreement is an acceptable and sometimes an important outcome, opening our minds to different ways of seeing our world.
No freedom is absolute nor without consequence, and we are committed to creating culturally safe spaces for self-expression in order to champion artistic freedom for all participants.
We particularly celebrate and support minority or marginalised voices, shifting power structures and removing barriers to access, creating a platform for self-empowerment and therefore for social and artistic change. To ensure that Melbourne Fringe’s values of justice and human rights align with our democratic ideals, we actively work to eradicate racism, ableism, ageism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia and any other form of hatred, vilification or discrimination from our community. We do this by celebrating, profiling and nurturing diversity, by privileging marginalised voices, and by supporting artists as they learn. We have identified five communities of focus whose voices we particularly work to amplify: First Peoples, Deaf and disabled people, people of colour, women and nonbinary people, and LGBTQIA+ people. Creating culturally safe spaces allows all participants to take greater artistic risks, because they are presenting work in a context free from violence and vilification.
We know that these two principles will inherently come into conflict. We are committed equally to supporting artists without compromising their individual artistic expression, and to cultural equity, to making change in our sector and to making change in our world. Melbourne Fringe will ultimately make the decision about which works we platform – including works which don’t necessarily share our own values. In making this decision, we will primarily consider, with community consultation where appropriate, whether an artist or an artist’s work contains content or behaviour that is likely to incite in a reasonable person: hatred against, or serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of, a community group because of age, ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, or disability.
There are laws for hate speech and vilification which must be met in all walks of life. At Melbourne Fringe, we believe that live events should be held to a higher standard than these legal minimums, and that although every individual has the right to be heard, Melbourne Fringe maintains the right to decide what content and voices enjoy the support of our platform.
We recognise that some groups are systemically disadvantaged and become the target of vilification. We prioritise the safety of these structurally marginalised groups (particularly our identified communities of focus) over the discomfort of the dominant majority, bearing in mind the intersectional complexities of power dynamics and that there is no one-size-fits-all model. This is complex stuff.
We don’t believe offensiveness should be the guide to what voices should and shouldn’t be heard. History has shown that “offensiveness” arguments have been used to silence minorities or alternative viewpoints, and provocative and challenging art can walk a fine line between stimulating thought and offending someone.
We have to draw a line somewhere, and so these Community Guidelines help us decide our organisation’s ethical position when offence crosses into the realm of compelling hatred, serious contempt or severe ridicule towards a community of people. It takes the question out of the subjective view of a person and puts it into the objective experience of a group of people. We also make a condition of participation in our programs that the Australia Council’s First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts and Children in Art protocols are followed.
Where a participant is creating content that contravenes these Guidelines, we will attempt to assist them to resolve any problematic content, especially where the problems are unintended or misunderstood by the artist. We believe in an education-first approach. A participant is only considered to be knowingly creating or presenting content that contravenes these Guidelines if they have been alerted to a potential breach and have refused, are unwilling or unable to work to address the problem. We cannot cancel an event (i.e we can’t stop an event from happening), but we can withdraw it from our programs and refuse to platform the work – an action we will take in extreme circumstances only, according to the process outlined below.