FESTIVAL FEATURES | Briefs
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All-male Aussie troupe Briefs have been blending up a boundary-pushing cocktail of circus, drag, burlesque and comedy for ten years now. To celebrate this anniversary, Kirstyn Smith caught up with founder Fez Fa’anana to talk risk- taking, not having to answer to anyone and going back to the future
Mixing irreverence, punk politics and queerness, Briefs have been a haven for alt. cabaret seekers for ten evocative years. What began in Brisbane in 2008 as a party outlet between friends, designed to let off steam and test-drive new acts, began to evolve pretty quickly as demand for their celebration of freelance alternative performers grew. Soon the Briefs team were showing up at festivals across Australia, often on nothing more than a wing and a prayer.
Fez Fa’anana, the founder of Briefs Factory (the creative collective behind Briefs as well as the producer of other acts), had been getting invites to Scotland for years, but, in his words, ‘we understood the magnitude of the Edinburgh Fringe’. Nevertheless, in 2011, they appeared here for the i rst time, very last-minute and bolstered by a group of pals chipping in to help with lighting and music. ‘It was very much put together with a bit of sticky tape and hope,’ Fa’anana explains. ‘I ran into somebody who managed to get us a time slot: half past midnight at the Gilded Balloon Wine Bar. That killer time slot was our i rst taste of Edinburgh.’
a place to party, unbothered about taking a lighthearted approach to proceedings. Of course, disorganised is now the last word you’d use to describe Briefs. What’s helped them over the years is their i erce independence: they don’t receive any core funding from anyone.
‘This has its benei ts,’ says Fa’anana. ‘While it makes everything we do very high-pressured, it also gives us full ownership; we don’t answer to any funding bodies. So our territorial and creative brief is completely independent.’ It was important to Fa’anana that Briefs didn’t rush into bringing their brand to the Fringe. Having heard many times of Australian groups who’d been so eager to get to Scotland that they relied on half-formed ideas that saw them never return, they knew what not to do. On top of everything, Fa’anna believes it’s their risk taking that’s helped them to survive.
‘We’re constantly taking i nancial risks, we’re taking creative risks, we’re taking touring risks, we’re taking risks on cast. The state of funding and touring has never been something that’s solid, and we really wanted to make a collective that had a foundation that could move whether or not we got support.’
Ten years, though, is a long time for a company to survive after starting out just looking for Yana Alana (pictured left), aka Sarah Ward, is one of the acts Briefs is producing in Edinburgh
26 THE LIST FESTIVAL 8–15 Aug 2018