‘Regions are not a monolith or a monoculture’: helping country storytellers become Part of Fringe
As a former ‘angry high-school dropout’ who found her voice through the arts 20 years ago, creative producer Alysha Herrmann is passionate about a project that is offering other regional storytellers a chance to bring their ideas to life at Adelaide Fringe.
Alysha Herrmann was 18 years old and living in the Riverland when she spotted the flyers that would change her life.
The self-described “disconnected and very angry high-school dropout and teenage parent” had recently returned to school to complete Year 12, and had also become a peer mentor with the local area health network. Nonetheless, she still felt lost – and was highly sceptical about this invitation to “come and try theatre”.
“I thought that sounded like a complete waste of time – I didn’t want anything to do with it,” she says now, laughing at the memory from 20 years ago.
“But I got convinced to go to the very first workshop and it did completely change my life. It was one of those catalysing moments where I walked into that experience not expecting anything… and by the end of the first workshop I had committed to being part of the whole year-long project.”
The project was a collaboration between Riverland Youth Theatre and Adelaide multidisciplinary arts company Vitalstatistix that would culminate in a show about teenage parents, Random Girls, presented in the Riverland and at the 2005 Come Out Festival in Adelaide.
The young participants had to commit to a day a week, with the creative process involving skills-based workshops with experienced artists that included the likes of playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer, film producers Sophie Hyde and Bryan Mason, and director Maude Davey. As well as learning about writing and performance, the teen parents spent hours sharing their personal experiences.
From that first workshop, Herrmann, who had left both school and home at 15, says she was able to see her own story in a way that she never had before.
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“And seeing the mistakes that I’d made, the person that I was, as something that was inherently valuable rather than something that was a disappointment. It was because of the care and effort that those artists put into holding that space for us.”
The experience ultimately led to her forging a career in the arts.
As an independent creative producer, writer and performance-maker, Herrmann has been involved in many projects over the past two decades – from a Country Arts SA-commissioned digital poetry experience responding to the 2022-23 Riverland floods, to the immersive performance Losing Faith in Unicorns, which was presented at the 2017 DreamBIG Children’s Festival. That same year, she won the Arts South Australia Geoff Crowhurst Memorial Ruby Award.
Part of Things’ Poetry on My Porch event in 2024
“I’ve been incredibly lucky to have those pathways and those mentors and opportunities offered, and that’s why I’m so passionate about being able to offer it back now to other generations,” she says.
With the support of a small team of “Riverland champions”, Herrmann founded the initiative Part of Things in Barmera in 2019 to help other regional emerging creatives find pathways into the arts. She says artists in regional Australia are often hampered by a lack of both physical infrastructure, such as theatres, as well as mentors and opportunities to build their skills and practice.
Part of Things secured a community lease on a building in Barmera that provides a space where creative people can get together, share ideas and experiment, with outcomes ranging from SALA exhibitions to poetry events and projection artworks.
The initiative has since expanded into Mount Gambier and Port Lincoln. Herrmann – who works part-time as a teacher and is now based in Peterborough in the state’s mid north – says that although there is no physical hub in those locations, Part of Things encompasses projects that run concurrently across all three regions. Among them is Part of Fringe x Playwright Pals, a three-year project launched this year to help regional storytellers develop and present new original performance work.
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“The vision behind Part of Fringe specifically was very much about performance storytellers and this conversation about what does it look like to tell regional stories. And again, if you don’t have a theatre in your community, how and where are you telling regional stories?”
The project is supported through the Adelaide Fringe Arts Industry Collaboration Program, co-funded by the James and Diana Ramsay Foundation and Arts Unlimited, which aims to create professional development opportunities for emerging SA artists, including by helping them expand their networks. It has also received funding from Country Arts SA and Arts South Australia.
Over the three years, participating playwrights or storytellers from each of the three regions will take part in monthly meetings (online and in person), undertake online masterclasses and workshops, and be offered mentoring and other support. Six of them have been selected to attend the 2025 Adelaide Fringe to talk about and share their new works-in-development at an event at The Mill titled Part of Fringe: in progress experiments.
Herrmann says it is an opportunity for the creatives to immerse themselves in the Fringe, including meeting other artists and potential collaborators, exploring venues, and gaining insight into potential pathways for their work.
“Really, what we’re trying to do is broker those relationships and start those conversations and open those opportunities, and so that’s what the reading at The Mill is all about. It’s open, so anyone can come along and say hello and yarn with our regional writers.”
Participants in Part of Fringe x Playwright Pals range in age from 18 to those in their 50s. Herrmann says that thematically, several of the writers are exploring queer stories, while others are particularly interested in fantasy and speculative fiction.
Letters of the Riverland – projection artwork produced by Part of Things and projected onto the Bonney Theatre in Barmera in 2020
“The way we pitched it was performance works of all kinds, so it could be experimental site performance, it could be spoken-word poetry, it could be a traditional play, it could be immersive.”
It is hoped that one or more of the projects will be ready to present more fleshed-out work-in-progress showings or fully realised developments of a Fringe production in 2026 or 2027.
For Herrmann, who says the Riverland is still “my heart and my home”, it is satisfying to help others forge a career in the arts, just as she did after that first taste of the stage as a teenager. And while collaborators are welcome, she says an important element of Part Of Things is that it gives regional people an opportunity to tell their own stories.
“Our experience from inside of a thing is always different from an experience outside of a thing… so yeah, for us that is part of it.
“It’s really highlighting those regional voices. Beyond the individual stories, there’s this idea that the regions are not a monolith or a monoculture – they’re actually quite different from each other.”
Part of Fringe: in progress experiments will be presented by Part of Things at The Mill on March 21.
This article was produced with the support of Adelaide Fringe. Fringe continues until March 23, and the full program can be found here.
Read more 2025 Adelaide Fringe coverage here on InReview