Summersalt Arts Festival: Concert hall moves to centre court

THE Australian Open will not be the only game in town when hordes of visitors begin their tennis pilgrimage to Melbourne next week.

Fwd: Pixel Mountain images

JANUARY in Melbourne is all about the tennis, but that doesn’t mean the cultural capital has all its balls in the one court. Next week the inaugural Summersalt Outdoor Arts Festival gets under way in Southbank: a four-week program of theatre, cabaret, music, children’s activities and grown-up diversions, all within cooee of the Australian Open.

Summersalt has been devised as a kind of cultural glue: a partnership between 14 arts and cultural bodies to attract people to the Southbank arts precinct, an area that can be deadly quiet after sundown or when the theatres are closed. The festival is intended to have enough momentum to carry visitors through to the White Night Melbourne street party on February 21.

New festivals sometimes have the appearance of marketing exercises dreamed up by event planners, but this one has an unlikely source: the Melbourne Recital Centre. Ostensibly a chamber music venue, the MRC has in recent years been an active cultural player, presenting new concert series, building an audience for fine music both within its walls and online, and generating community participation.

The idea for Summersalt grew out of a series of contemporary music concerts, under the banner Garden Party, that was held in a “gravel dust pit” behind the MRC in 2013 and attracted about 7000 people.

“It was incredible how it completely transformed the feeling and atmosphere of that little pocket of Southbank,” says Kirsten Siddle, the MRC’s director of programming, and director of the Summersalt festival.

“It was a huge success and everyone loved it.”

Summersalt is putting into practice what has been talked about for years: the cultural activation of Melbourne’s Southbank precinct.

The area bordered by St Kilda Road and the Yarra is home to about 20 arts, cultural and educational organisations, and its ­theatres could collectively seat 30,000 at the same time. But the area lacks the interesting shops and street life of the CBD’s buzzy laneways, or of inner-city neighbourhoods such as Fitzroy and Prahran.

For years the state government has been working on plans to give the area greater cohesion. Last year the former Coalition government released the Melbourne Arts Precinct Blueprint, intended to develop a “cultural mecca” and a “vibrant, 24-hour destination”.

The first stage in the transformation will be the redevelopment of the former Police Stables adjacent to the Victorian Collage of the Arts as a studio and exhibition space. In addition, Arts Centre Melbourne has revealed concept plans to rejuvenate its site, including a pedestrian plaza and a permanent museum for its nationally significant collection of performing arts memorabilia.

Siddle, who arrived at the MRC seven years ago, says many of Southbank’s cultural venues have rich inner lives but there is little happening outdoors to create a neighbourhood vibe.

“We have had a lot of talk about the development of the precinct,” she says. “In the summer we have the opportunity and ability to do things differently and turn ourselves inside out.”

The Summersalt program includes US indie band Lake Street Dive, appearing at the Testing Grounds vacant lot; the monumental inflatable Exxopolis on the forecourt of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; and Pixel Mountain, a display of digital and acrobatic virtuosity, staged within the “festival hub” of Dodds Street.

There’s even a smartphone app called Sour Times: an interactive tour, developed with Telstra and designers Sandpit, in which visitors retrace the steps of three unfortunate characters including a seagull called Simon.

The MRC has obtained $1 million in state funding to mount Summersalt. (Such is the cycle of grant processing that the venue is reapplying for next year before the first edition gets under way.) The City of Melbourne has chipped in $80,000 a year for three years, and the MRC has raised just over $500,000 in private support.

The MRC has sought the involvement of Tennis Australia, with the rationale that visitors to Melbourne during the Australian Open may want some cultural stimulation apart from the action on centre court.

“Melbourne wants to develop its brand as the arts and sport capital,” Siddle says.

“This is a great opportunity to promote the cultural and artistic life of Melbourne ... We want (visitors’) experiences in Melbourne to be a total package, and they are not always at the tennis.”

Tennis Australia has provided marketing support for Summersalt, including an advertisement in the Australian Open program.

It all points to a turnaround in the MRC’s performance since an uncertain opening six years ago.

The venue — comprising the 1000-seat Elisabeth Murdoch Hall and the 150-seat Salon — opened as the global economy was going into nosedive and as Victoria was reeling from the Black Saturday bushfires. Concerts were culled as revenue was hit, and management attracted negative press.

New management arrived in 2010 with the appointment of businesswoman Kathryn Fagg as chair (in 2013 she was also appointed to the board of the Reserve Bank) and of one of Australia’s most experienced arts administrators, Mary Vallentine, as chief executive.

Within a few years, the MRC was a livelier place. Its component parts started to sing: programming, marketing, development and the financial bottom line.

The most recent annual report, covering the MRC’s fifth anniversary, charts the growth.

Visitor numbers increased to 184,000. Website access doubled, and subscriptions and memberships almost trebled. In a busier concert calendar (511 events last year), the MRC presented 375 Australian ensembles, and international artists of such renown as Jordi Savall and Murray Perahia. The menu is not strictly classical: Paul Kelly, Madeleine Peyroux and Joan as Policewoman also appeared at the venue. The organisation recorded a surplus of $30,405 in 2013-14, on total income of $11.1 million.

Moreover, the MRC is developing new platforms to engage audiences other than those who buy concert tickets.

It has launched a VisiTour smartphone app for self-guided venue tours, and its Share More Music project, supported by the William Buckland Foundation, streams concerts into aged care facilities.

While Summersalt is a collaborative venture, the MRC — ostensibly a concert venue, increasingly a cultural player — is carrying most of the risk. Siddle says Summersalt “is our baby”, and is consistent with the MRC’s objective to generate new audiences and participation in the arts. The partners involved can see its potential.

“In the summer we have the opportunity and ability to do things differently and turn ourselves inside out,” she says. “It’s the time of year when Melbourne’s arts precinct can have a larger role to play. Hopefully we can raise our profile and have some fun with it.”

Summersalt Outdoor Arts Festival is at various venues in Southbank, Melbourne, January 23-February 21.