Dark Mofo’s new artistic director Chris Twite peeks behind the black curtain
Dark Mofo is perhaps the biggest success story of Australia’s annual large-scale arts festivals, and for the first time since its 2013 debut, the Tasmanian event has a new artistic director.
At Dark Mofo in June, the festival’s creative director Leigh Carmichael will have a shadow in Chris Twite, the newly appointed artistic director who will next year succeed him in leading Tasmania’s midwinter arts jamboree.
“Leigh is the repository of 10 years worth of history of Dark Mofo; there’s no one else that I could stand next to and find out more information from,” Twite says of the director, who has led the festival since its inception in 2013. “I will be there and behind the curtain, but just watching how the machine works, and seeing what the duck is doing above water and below water.”
Given the festival’s hard-earned reputation for showcasing dangerous ideas across the past decade, Twite admits there is an element of trepidation in taking over something that has become so beloved.
“I think you’d be a fool not to worry about f..king it up, because that means you’re not taking it seriously,” he says. “I think fear is important – but ideas are more important.”
Since Dark Mofo began lighting up the longest, blackest nights of Hobart’s winter with its red insignia, Carmichael has both overseen its successes and weathered its various controversies. But the announcement that he will be stepping down from the role after he delivers his 10th program in June triggered a flood of applications from ambitious individuals keen to take up the reins at one of the nation’s most provocative annual arts festivals.
Sydney-based Twite, 41, has been a fixture of the performing arts scene for the past decade, having previously commissioned, curated, produced and promoted programs for Sydney Festival, Falls Festival, Brisbane Festival and the Sydney Opera House, among others.
In an exclusive interview with Review from Melbourne earlier this week, ahead of a trip to Tasmania, the incoming artistic director is vibrating at a high pitch, having successfully kept news of his three-year appointment a secret until now.
“Jobs like this don’t appear,” he says. “Dark Mofo in and of itself is such a rare commodity in the world, and the opportunity to lead one of those groundbreaking, visionary, very different arts festivals – they don’t come up. So when they do come up, it’s something that you take very seriously.”
Of Twite’s forthcoming appointment, Carmichael says, “This is an important moment for the festival, as we aim to secure its long-term viability with new ideas and energy. We believe Chris’s deep experience within the Australian cultural scene will ensure the festival remains artistically vibrant, in an increasingly competitive landscape.”
Though he is a longtime Sydney resident who has spent 19 years working at community radio station FBi – including 15 years as its Tuesday Drive Time host – Twite is well acquainted with Tasmania through his work as a curator at Falls Festival from 2016 to 2020, including its annual Marion Bay show in the state’s southeast.
As well, one of his most recent projects was curating Hobart Current, a partnership between the City of Hobart and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) whose biennial program showcased contemporary artists from the island state and abroad.
Dark Mofo was funded initially by David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), then later through a combination of private and Tasmanian government funding, which is chipping in $7.5m across three years to 2024, the first year of Twite’s directorship.
The absence of events on the Tasmanian cultural calendar during its long, cold winter meant that Carmichael and co had an open playing field and the opportunity to create something from nothing.
The festival’s 2013 debut was small but eventful: at least seven people were taken to hospital after suffering seizures while viewing a strobe-heavy immersive artwork, while the first nude solstice swim at Sandy Bay was initially cancelled after police said swimmers would be in breach of indecency laws.
The state government later intervened to give the swim the green light, and the brisk dip is now a hotly-anticipated annual ritual for about 2000 naked festivalgoers, despite the near-freezing temperatures in the River Derwent.
In relatively short order, the festival went from an oddball oddity to a mainstay of the arts scene and a significant driver of interstate tourism, after it began regularly delivering high quality, large-scale public art, food and music events, as well as “fire, light and noise”, to borrow the organisers’ wording.
Review editor Tim Douglas is a regular Mofo attendee with plenty of dark stories to tell about his southern visits; writing last year, he described the annual event as having “boldly moulded itself in opposition to the state major arts festivals as a bastion of radical, uncompromising programming and a home for provocative art.”
For those seeking edgier thrills and unusual sounds, Hobart became the place to be each June, as the festival swiftly built a reputation for delivering challenging, absorbing and enveloping artworks and musical performances.
Twite was there early on, too, and has watched with admiration as the festival has evolved. “I have been personally as a punter many times – and so now, to be on the other side of the curtain? Dream come true,” he says.
Back when he checked in to his hotel in Hobart in 2014, he says, he received a puzzled look from the staff when he mentioned he was there to attend Dark Mofo, then in its second year. But when he checked in again the following year, the blank looks had been replaced by a warm welcome, and the same hotel had been lit up in red, like so many buildings in the CBD and along the Salamanca waterfront, as part of festival organisers’ efforts to enlist the support of local businesses.
It worked: accommodation providers love nothing more than the “no vacancy” sign going up, just as concert promoters receive an endorphin rush of affirmation when the coveted words “sold out” are slapped across their posters.
Last year, the festival sold more than 71,000 tickets to 45 performances across 14 days, generating about $3.5m in revenue, with interstate ticket buyers accounting for 65 per cent of sales.
Organisers counted 300,000 general entries to the free and paid events and exhibitions in 2022, while at MyState Bank Arena, a performance by Australian hip-hop artist The Kid Laroi sold more than 5200 tickets, in Dark Mofo’s most successful single ticketed event to date.
This year’s line-up features acts including German-born, British-raised composer Max Richter and Danish electronic musician Trentemoller, as well as an Australian exclusive performance of A Divine Comedy, a large-scale theatrical performance by Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger.
Held at MyState Bank Arena across three shows, A Divine Comedy will feature 17 female performers and “motocross, woodchopping, nudity and bodily fluids”, according to the publicity materials. Early signs suggest the 2023 program is a winner: it was met by a record first day of sales, with more than 40,000 tickets racking up $3.4m in box office revenue.
After settling in Hobart with his girlfriend this week, Twite is looking forward to shadowing Carmichael in June.
Echoing in his mind will be a lesson that was drilled into him by his one-time colleague Jonathan Bielski, the former director of programming at Sydney Opera House, who is now artistic director and chief executive at Auckland Theatre Company.
From Bielski, Twite learnt to reframe his arts work thus: the individuals working within the building are not important, but the work they put on stage is, because it all funnels into what he called “the promise” of the Opera House, as an iconic attraction and significant meeting place that will outlive any single person.
“I think that’s the same for Dark Mofo: it is one of our greatest cultural institutions,” says Twite. “It’s bigger than Leigh, it’s bigger than me; we’re just custodians of that entity. We have to make sure that it lives up to what it should be – and that’s what we will do over the next few years.”
Dark Mofo 2023 will be held at venues across Hobart from June 8 to 22.
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