Turn the lights off and let’s party, says Dark Mofo’s Leigh Carmichael

LEIGH Carmichael wants Hobart to be a Dark City with a cosmic vibe and pulsing night-life. He talks about Mona’s plans for the CBD.

Dark Mofo Creative Director Leigh Carmichael has some dark ideas for Hobart. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

HOBART will be plunged into darkness at this time next year if Leigh Carmichael has his way. For now, Dark Mofo’s creative director is bracing himself for another plunge, the Nude Solstice Swim at Long Beach, Sandy Bay, on Friday.

As he is partly responsible for its existence, Carmichael feels he must join the 2000-plus skinny-dippers registered for the event, but he hates it.

“I don’t swim in the ocean even in summer and I’m not very good with the cold, either. I missed it one year. I just couldn’t face it and I felt really guilty for a long time, like months … So now I do it.”

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In various ways, Carmichael is familiar with the tension between ideas and action. “As soon as people start saying, ‘oh, we can’t do that,’ I gravitate to those ideas because there is always something special,” he says.

Participants gather for Dark Mofo’s nude swim.

The Mike Parr live burial caper in Macquarie St last week? Carmichael’s fingerprints are all over it as surely as David Walsh’s.

Last year’s sacrificial Hermann Nitsch performance with bull carcass and entrails? Bloody fingerprints (and he says the backlash seriously rattled him and Walsh).

Carmichael runs Dark Mofo from DarkLab, an offshoot of Mona funded by Walsh not only as the winter festival’s engine room but a think tank for new projects, the first of which was its plan for public space at Macquarie Point.

When you come out to festivals and you share food, stories and art, that is what makes life worth living. You experience and enjoy something bigger than yourself. I think it’s incredibly important for a city.

On this sparkling winter’s morning at waterfront cafe Brooke Street Larder, it seems incongruous to be talking about Carmichael’s vision for Hobart embracing darkness. But it’s a good place to chat, he reckons — spacious and good acoustics for conversation. Its stunning location at the far end of the floating pier is not exactly a deterrent, either.

Mike Parr is buried under Macquarie St Hobart. Picture: DARK MOFO

Next year, during Dark Mofo, Carmichael would love to see Hobart turn out its lights. Or really dial them down, anyway.

“I was thinking three nights of dark nights,” he says. “So we do some red lights and then we paint the town black.”

A neat fit with Dark Mofo, he says it would address light pollution, for which growing evidence shows negative consequences for humans and animals, including birds.

It would also mark the beginning of Hobart’s future as a Dark City, a place where people could come to escape artificial skyglow (believed to affect 80 per cent of the global population) and see the stars.

“I think it can become one of Hobart’s most important brand attributes,” he says.

He points to the US city of Flagstaff, in Arizona, where artist James Turrell has led a successful campaign to turn down the lights year-round — Carmichael’s ultimate goal here as he joins the Dark Sky movement.

Ryoji Ikeda’s spectra. Picture: Ian Wollstein

“I am not saying no to street lights, but we need to look at what they are,” he says.

The irony that he has been partly responsible for Dark Mofo’s spectacular light shows, including Ryoji Ikeda’s 2013 spectra, which returns to Hobart tonight, beaming from Mona for four nights, is not lost on him.

Carmichael has a more pressing plan for the CBD that is much more advanced.

DarkLab wants to bring the Hobart CBD alive at night.

This weekend’s Night Mass around the historic Odeon Theatre precinct in Liverpool St is more than a nocturnal playground for Dark Mofo revellers with entertainment and bars. The epic block party is a trial run for a major art precinct Carmichael passionately wants at the site.

DarkLab and property developers Riverlee have been in partnership for more than a year to develop the vision, but it is still in design and planning stages.

Carmichael sees it becoming a top multi-theatre live music venue, with galleries, cinemas, restaurants and bars. The site would hold up to 4000 people and feature a 200m-high pyramid or “art spire”, an element Walsh “isn’t as keen on as I am”.

“The waterfront is buzzing with restaurants and night-life, but the CBD is quite dead and there’s an opportunity over the next five to 10 years to move people back into the city,” he says.

The Odeon Theatre in Liverpool St, Hobart.

Saving CBD performance spaces such as the c.1916 Odeon, which was earmarked for demolition, is a key plank.

“We want to work with council and others to hold onto venues [so we don’t] have a heap of hotels and apartments and lose the cultural fabric of our city.”

Culture, he says, is what gives life meaning. “When you come out to festivals and you share food, stories and art, that is what makes life worth living. You experience and enjoy something bigger than yourself. I think it’s incredibly important for a city.”

As for Friday’s dreaded nude swim? “It’s awful, but after you’ve done it, it’s exhilarating,” he says.