Kara Jung: There’s something oddly exciting about a return to a simple grassroots festival with emerging artists
New Year’s Day will not bring an end to the challenges COVID-19 inflicted on the arts or Adelaide’s festival season but those challenges could bring a reimagining, writes Kara Jung.
Opinion
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Each year, something really special happens in Adelaide from February through to mid-March.
The city becomes a hive of art, music and culinary treats. More than ever, there’s laughter in the laneways, more life in the city streets. There’s dancing and eating, sweat and stage lights, noise and late summer nights.
Every March, for as long as I can remember, I – and for the past eight years, my young children too – head to Botanic Park on at least one of the days of the March long weekend.
We climb trees, get henna tattoos and spend a ridiculous amount of money on a sun hat or an umbrella as we grapple with either mud or hayfever to dance the day and night away to the sounds of world music beats.
The WOMADelaide festival, where artists fly in from around the world, is one of our calendar highlights. And for much of the month leading up to and throughout March, there’s the fabulous Fringe, where acts and audiences from around the country and the world descend on our city for the best festival on the planet.
These are events that will struggle to adapt to the changed conditions. What will a world music festival look like with no world music?
We keep bemoaning 2020 as the year it all got locked up.
And while that’s true, a scarier truth is that it won’t magically return to normal on January 1, 2021.
Our festivals next year won’t look anything like they did before the pandemic broke.
Slews of tours, concerts and festivals have been cancelled or postponed. And even if our state and its people manage to continue to keep the virus at bay, we won’t be partying like it’s 2019 in 2021.
The Royal Adelaide Show was due to open the gates this Friday. Instead, the Ferris wheel stands motionless at the Wayville Showground and organisers grapple with a multimillion-dollar black hole. Artists across the globe have lost their incomes as people retreated to their homes and we can safely assume travel bans will still affect much of the globe even when the clock ticks past midnight on New Year’s Eve.
People optimistically say we could see a vaccine by mid to late 2021. In May, our nation’s chief medical officer said large-scale gatherings such as “big music festivals” would not be held before the development of a vaccine.
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So prepare for a very different kind of party in 2021 and beyond.
The Fringe has vowed to push on but even they are conceding the best party on the planet will look much more like the Fringe of 60 years ago – the sidekick open-access festival that celebrated local talent in cheap venues on our city-fringe.
Registrations for our beloved Fringe opened yesterday but don’t think for a moment that it will be business as usual.
The southeast Field Days – a huge regional event that provides millions to the local economy – didn’t go ahead this year and it won’t be back next year either.
In fact, many predict that a staggering number of events on our social calendars won’t be back before 2023. Some are gone forever.
It is easy to feel blue, to be overwhelmed by the truth of all that has been lost.
But there’s something oddly exciting about a return to a simple grassroots festival, with emerging artists, about looking to our local communities and supporting what remains.
After all, one of the greatest joys of the Fringe was to see it go from sidekick to superstar.
With record ticket sales, big venues and a record number of performers, perhaps there’s a small silver lining in all this anguish.
We get to see the Fringe and other festivals reimagined. It can all be small again with a bright, bold future – and a whole new generation can see it grow and flourish.
I for one will be buying tickets. And if we all did that, well, that’s a small light at the end of this dark tunnel.