Revealed: The one jawdropping experience you must do at Brisbane Festival this year
With dance, drama, music and a reimagined fireworks prelude, this year’s Brisbane Festival is going to be one to remember - and there’s one jewel in the crown you don’t want to miss.
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My first question was – will there be anyone dancing naked inside a giant bubble?
I thought it was fair to ask since that’s what Townsville’s acclaimed company Dancenorth Australia gave us at last year’s Brisbane Festival, although it was a bit deeper than it sounds.
RED, which was presented in a warehouse at North Shore, Hamilton, was one of the big hits of Brisbane Festival 2021.
It was an evocative, provocative “happening” with the dancers grappling with the fact that the giant plastic bubble they were performing in was deflating throughout the show.
It packed them in so, rather sensibly, Brisbane Festival artistic director Louise Bezzina quickly moved to book the company for this year’s Brisbane Festival, which is on from September 2 to 24.
Dancenorth Australia’s artistic director Kyle Page is excited and says this year’s offering, Wayfinder, which had a preview in Townsville recently and will be on at Brisbane Powerhouse is September, is a different beast.
“And no, there will be no giant bubble and we don’t think the clothes are coming off this time,” Page says. “But it will be a very electric performance and one that will shake people up in the most wonderful way.”
Directed by Page and his partner Amber Haines it will feature a soundscape by three- time Grammy-nominated Australian band Hiatus Kaiyote and sound artist Byron J. Scullin, who will create “a soaring composition evoking pleasure and possibility”. Luminous orbs that act as speakers will be interspersed throughout the audience.
Japanese born artist Hiromi Tango is designing the production and creating the costumes, although costumes may not be the right word. “I’m not a costume designer,” Tango says. “I work on visual design.”
The hero images released to promote the show depict a dancer entangled from the shoulders up in Tango’s colourful woollen art woven with the help of community workshops in Townsville.
“So they are wearing your art on stage, in a sense?” I suggest.
“I don’t wish to reveal too much,” Tango replies. “They are beyond wearing it. It’s almost as if our hearts and brains had exploded.”
Known for her joyful, heart-expanding work, Tango is exploring the idea of finding one’s way in the world despite the rigours of Covid and other challenges.
Page says that “every aspect of the visual design has come from Hiromi’s imagination”.
“They are wearing her art, dancing with the art, creating a kinetic extension of the art,” Page says, adding that there is about 65km of wool woven into the show.
That’s just one of the treats in store for a festival that has navigated the pandemic in the most wonderful way. Faced with the rigours of lockdowns and restrictions these past two years, Bezzina reimagined Brisbane Festival, mining the rich ore of local talent in an era when international guests couldn’t come.
Brisbane Festival was a beacon of hope for the world of the arts during the pandemic. Bezzina is slowly opening up Brisbane Festival to the world again and recently flew to Europe on the hunt for shows to bring to Brisbane.
There is some limited international participation this year including UK artist Luke Jerram’s installation The Planet Series, which is on at West Village and, among others, the Australian premiere of Italian Dario Fo’s play Mistero Buffo, the story of a Deliveroo Driver, which will run at Metro Arts.
“I’m truly proud of what we have achieved,” Bezzina tells me on the eve of her overseas jaunt.
“In 2020 we had to throw the whole festival out and start again and joyous things came out of that. We connected to our community in a new way.”
Brilliant touches like Street Serenades, which, at the height of the pandemic, brought short, pop-up performances to all of the city’s 190 suburbs, was a masterstroke.
That program has morphed into a more traditional form this year with Brisbane Serenades, but it is still essentially a community project with performances around the city.
Bezzina has the knack of presenting down-to-earth attractions for everyday folk while also challenging and inspiring with works such as Wayfinder.
She is refining the festival as she goes and has made one really big change this year by beginning, instead of ending, with Riverfire.
Now presented by Australian Retirement Trust, it will feature five bargeloads of fireworks (three in the river’s town reach and two in the South Brisbane reach), with two bridges involved. The Story Bridge will feature a full display including a pyrotechnic waterfall and the Goodwill Bridge will also be used, with eight buildings in the CBD lighting up. About six tonnes of fireworks will go up in smoke.
Once that sets the stage, the festival will be off and running with an opening night concert, presented by The Courier-Mail, in the South Bank Piazza featuring Jessica Mauboy with the BOQ Festival Garden hub opening nearby for the duration.
Then it’s down to business with a plethora of performances across all genres including some big-ticket items such as a season of the hit show Girl from the North Country starring Lisa McCune. There are so many treats in store it’s hard to know where to start and so many novel events such as Raise the Roof on the final weekend, which will feature artistic happenings on spectacular Brisbane Rooftop venues.
Acclaimed artist Michael Zavros is creating Dionysus Redux on the Lina Rooftop at South Brisbane, which he will turn into a “hedonistic Acropolis caught somewhere between Ancient Athens and contemporary Mykonos”. I have heard that there will be a Delphic Oracle on hand which may spark a bit of extra interest.
While Zavros explores his Greek heritage in a cheeky, rather saucy way, let’s stay with the classical world briefly to look at one of the other treats this year, Dead Puppet Society’s Holding Achilles, a collaboration with leading physical theatre company Legs On The Wall. This is an epic contemporary take on Homer’s Iliad, which is about the Trojan War.
Presented by Brisbane Festival and QPAC (it will be staged in the Playhouse), this is a daring, genre-bending production.
“In this intimate account of the Trojan War, a bloody war story famed for its violence, the hero is a pacifist queer man,” explains writer David Morton of Dead Puppet Society, who points out that it will explore the relationship between the hero Achilles and his friend Patroculus.
The company presented a space opera based on Moby Dick last year with Ishmael, another festival highlight.
Holding Achilles will feature popular indie singer Montaigne performing with a haunting score composed by Tony Buchen and Chris Bear of Brooklyn-based indie rock group Grizzly Bear.
“We have done what we often do with well- known works,” Morton says.
“It’s a reinvention.”
The stage adaptation of Shannon Molloy’s powerful coming-of-age memoir Fourteen is another treat in store as is Sunshine Super Girl, the Evonne Goolagong story brought to the stage. But wait, there’s more.
Brisbane Serenades will fan out across the city with mini festivals and a program of bespoke concerts in smaller, local venues featuring a wide range of artists including some of our leading companies in pared-down performances, outfits such as Camerata, Queensland’s acclaimed chamber orchestra, which featured in Bezzina’s Street Serenades program.
Camerata’s artistic director, violinist Brendan Joyce, says he is looking forward to Brisbane Serenades and that he loved Street Serenades as unexpected as it was.
“I’m not going to pretend that I ever expected to perform on the back of a truck,” Joyce says. “But I did and it was fun. One of the things about Street Serenades was it was just great to be outside. This time we will be performing at the Manly foreshore and we will reduce to a string quintet for that and we will have Irena Lysiuk singing with us. We love being part of the festival. It can be easy to omit or relegate classical music to a dark corner but Louise didn’t do that and we’re very happy to have this evolving relationship with the festival.”
There are too many other shows to mention here but a quick flick through the program will demonstrate a dazzling array across all mediums, with fare for the masses and more refined tastes and plenty of partying.
But what does Louise Bezzina consider the jewel in the crown this year? She answers before I have even finished asking the question.
“Lindy Lee,” she says, with some conviction. Brisbane’s Art Boat, floating art on a barge, was one of the main attractions in its inaugural outing last year. This year Bezzina has staged a coup by engaging artist Lindy Lee to design the experience. Raised and educated in Brisbane, Lee, who now lives in northern New South Wales, is currently working on a $14m outdoor sculptural commission for the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and a seven-figure piece for Queen’s Wharf Brisbane.
Lee is internationally renowned and one of the hottest artists in the country right now so getting her involved is a major coup. The artist herself is in the mood to reclaim her Brisbane roots.
“I’m a born-again Brizzo,” she tells me.
“It’s wonderful. I’m embracing the city I left many years ago, the city that used to be a cultural backwater. Now it’s a cultural capital.” Her work will create a somewhat “celestial” theme under the title The Spheres, which will include a soundscape featuring local Indigenous storyteller Shannon Ruska with a specially commissioned work by Brisbane composer Lawrence English.
The stunning installation Lee has created will reflect the Pythagorean idea that “just as the harp strings cause musical notes to reverberate, moons, stars and the planets also reverberate to create harmonic sounds”.
“The music of the spheres,” she says.
Lee says when she was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s the Brisbane River was a “turgid embarrassment” but now it is embraced and she praises Bezzina’s Art Boat concept which, she says, reminds her of the Warana Festival float she once graced as a nine-year old “Warana princess”.
We agree that Brisbane’s Art Boat is a more sophisticated, contemporary version of a float, remembering that the city’s spring Warana Festival was the early precursor to Brisbane Festival.
“So I have come full circle,” Lee says. “I think that’s why I loved doing this so much.”
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