Upswing arts, a Not For Profit organisation created by Felicia O'Brien,  presented Emerald City at The Melbourne Meat Market for Melbourne Fringe 2016.

 Emerald City was a diverse and dynamic performance hub showcasing the talents of a wide range of artists including: circus, singers, dancers, musicians, painters, sculptors and more! These artists transformed the Meat Market in North Melbourne into a veritable hot bed of unexpected pleasure! In 2016 we kicked off this awesome new venture with the generous support of our Pozible crowdfunders, The Circalicious performers, Showtech Entertainment ,The City of Melbourne and our amazing volunteers. We managed 138 shows in 2.5 weeks and saw an incredible 6000 people through the doors.

Not to mention the excellent array of artists in Circalicious who were able to try out new acts in front of an audience and for a lot of them get in front of an audience for the very first time. In 2016 we had 35 circus artists perform in 8 Circalicious shows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-kkEYGnqRc

Upswing Arts is super excited to bring back Emerald City to Melbourne Fringe this year!  But as we are still only on our 2nd season we still need a bit of a "leg up". 

Of course as with all things when you get to the second round  the budget goes up..... and up..... like watching a beautiful majestic hot air balloon rise into the sky......With this in mind we applied for some funding for this year but unfortunatly were not lucky enough to win the Australian arts funding lottery this time. 

And so... here we are again, MAKING IT HAPPEN!  

Wouldnt you LOVE  to help out again, secure yourself some tickets for a night out and make the magic return at Emerald City  in 2017?!

What WE would LOVE is to see your smiling faces down at Emerald City in September!!!

After our initial season in 2016 we put our heads together and determined what would be the most important factor to increase the outcome for the artists coming to our venue would to be able to have more technical support. The pressing  answer to this  is more  EQUIPMENT, and more TECHNICIANS.

STAFF was a biggie from our side,  more people to run the shows and manage the building ! 

So here's our goal's this year-

The Basic goal-  $7500 

Which we will spend on wages for Staff, and the hire cost of extra tech equipment.

The Wishing well-  $10,000

We're setting our pozible goal lower, but  if we hit this target of $10,000 we can also pay for extra advertising to help bring in more audiences, and update our website to keep everyone tuned in to the Emerald City Events and shows!

Our overall budget is quite dominated by the hire of the Meat Market.... we'd really love to reach our goal to make all the other parts of running the venue and supporting the artists a bit smoother.....

What's challenging about running a venue with 5 performance spaces you ask? Hmmmmm....

Lets start with the Project Manager Flee........... last years imput = 880hrs,  78% of those hours voluntary. You've got to love it to do it they say! You've got to love getting people out of the training and rehearsal rooms and onto a Stage Flee says!

Managing the audiences and ticketing...... which was supported last year by some amazing volunteers, our box office manager and Front of House volunteers put in 6hrs a day for 2.5 weeks....... amazing. We were so grateful! We would love to pay some of these people the wages they deserve!

Resources- whilst we have access to all of the technical  equipment at the Meat Market, we really need just a wee bit extra to make it work , accross all the stages- hence the need to hire some. Working out what we can access financially this year in our budget is a hearty challenge.

Sheer availability of time, and energy!

We're squashing quite a lot of awesome into a short period of time, and when we're running on a skeleton crew to make ends meet this means a LOT of hours for our main staff. Having that little bit extra to hire a few more people makes for less tired, more enthusiastic crew!

I could go on....... but you get the gist of it!!