Viva La Revolucion

When you ever think the Melbourne independent performance art industry is up against it, think of Revolt. The multi-spaced performance super-venue and production company, based in Flemington's Younghusband Factory since 2010, have over 200 individual performances lined up for the 2012 Melbourne Fringe Festival. For Co-founder Ryan Hodge, their “ultra-diverse” program, featuring puppetry, dance, cabaret and more, slots into a perpetual timetable of artistic innovation.

“We're just knuckling down at the moment to get all the stages up and ready to go,” Hodge says. “We're running, essentially, four Fringe-promoted venues, and then we've got our main room space and then we've got gallery installations, visual installations and projection/multimedia stuff.” To date, they've staged over 2,000 shows, and haven't even been running two years. That's pushing a big gear.

Winning the Fringe's Best Venue award in 2011 was nice recognition, but doesn't change much for Hodge, or the multitude of artists involved. “I feel like a lot of cities will throw a Fringe festival and go, 'cool, we've supported independent theatre, that's enough for this year', same [with the] Comedy Festival… our whole business model is to be constant with it.”

Revolt is about giving broad technical, spatial, and structural support, year-round, to independent performance artists. “We built a plan to make sure that we can facilitate ticketing, core marketing, all tech… We'll go through budgets with people, we'll make sure it's viable, we'll make sure they're recycling sets and not going out to Bunnings and buying stuff. We haven't charged for that. It's more like, 'ok, you need it, so we'll help you out'. It's the money side of things that kind of squashes ideas and also just wastes time.

“I suppose there are a couple of other organisations that are similar to [Revolt], but they're more like an art-based approach. You're talking about the Tetris Studio guys up in Brunswick and Substation out west. They've all got the same initiative, but not the live production focus.”

For Hodge, many other potential live art venues, like bars and clubs, are driven by the bottom line and end up killing off the ventures they intend to support. “They just care about numbers and booze,” he argues, “and that has destroyed Brisbane and Sydney in the last 15 years. It's ridiculous. They never actually take a moment to go, 'oh, hang on, maybe we're not occupying people's imaginations enough'. What you've gotta do is nurture what everyone needs and give it in over-abundance. Oh man, I could go on. We're very passionate.”

This year's Fringe is an important cog for Revolt, but it's not the whole machine. Its other projects and artists will tap away as usual. One is a puppeteer prop-maker who is Artistic Director of zombie shooting game, Patient Zero, and another is “the most incredible armourer,” who has worked previously on Lord Of The Rings. “And they're two guys I found in a pub having a beer,” Hodge says.

Like they'll do during Fringe, Revolt are working overtime towards a shift in mentality and a 24-hour, arts-supportive city. “There's no point in [artists] doing 250% and the person running the whole ship's doing fuck-all. You've gotta surround yourself with really passionate people. We're all for Fringe, but we do it all year round. It's a never-ending learning cycle. People's ideas are just mindblowing.”

WHEN &WHERE: Head to www.revoltproductions.com for a full list of