Adelaide Fringe festival is scrambling to determine how the sudden closure of South Australia’s borders to Melbourne residents may affect dozens of its shows.
The festival, the second largest open-access arts festival in the world after the Edinburgh Fringe and the largest in the southern hemisphere, is scheduled to open on 19 February and run for four weeks.
South Australia’s police commissioner, Grant Stevens, announced that the state’s border would close to all residents of the greater Melbourne area at midnight on Wednesday, after more cases of Covid-19 linked to Melbourne Airport’s Holiday Inn cluster were identified.
A statement released by the Adelaide Fringe director and CEO, Heather Croall, on Thursday said the festival was closely monitoring the South Australian government’s unfolding border restrictions and providing support to the events and artists due to commence their seasons shortly in Adelaide.
“We are in contact with artists and venues and making them aware that they need to closely monitor the border closure advice,” she said.
“Over 80% of our program is made up of South Australian artists and many artists travelling from interstate for Fringe have already arrived.
“We understand many travelled last night prior to the border closing and at this stage we are waiting to see how many artists may be affected by the current situation.”
A decision had been made earlier to cancel the Fringe Club due to Covid-19 restrictions.
The disruption to the festival comes just over a week afterPerth’s Fringe World was forced to cancel hundreds of shows staged across more than 150 venues midway through the month-long festival, after a quarantine hotel security guard in Western Australia tested positive for Covid-19.
Almost two million people across Perth and southern Western Australia entered a strict five-day lockdown on 1 February.
Some Fringe World events were rescheduled for the festival, which was supposed to conclude this weekend. As many as 26,000 tickets had to be refunded or redated over the five-day lockdown.
