New Ten Days director Lindy Hume says art has the power to unite society

SOCIETY shouldn’t underestimate the power of art, says Lindy Hume.

New artistic director of Ten Days on the Island Lindy Hume. Picture: NIKKI DAVIS-JONES

IT may not have the power of natural disasters to unite communities, but art is a potent force for good and plays a pivotal role in bringing people together, says Lindy Hume.

“The arts are the beating heart of an empathetic society,” says the new artistic director of Ten Days on the Island with the conviction of someone who lives and breathes their work.

We are at Salamanca’s Maldini Italian Cafe Restaurant, where the acclaimed opera director and former director of Sydney and Perth festivals is a sucker for the chandeliers, which look so splendid against the rough sandstone walls.

Hume holds morning meetings here over a skinny latte when she travels down from Ten Days’ new headquarters at Burnie. And Maldini pastas make for comforting suppers when she is on the road.

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Hume’s peripatetic lifestyle as a creative-for-hire sees her living part-time in a farmhouse rental near Wynyard, commuting from her home at Tathra in the Bega Valley of NSW’s South Coast.

She was on her way back to Tathra from Tassie in March when bushfire devastated her home town, burning down 15 houses in her street.

“Five times my house was alight and five times my neighbour put it out,” she says. “The bushfire has deepened my interest in regional communities and seeing firsthand how neighbourhood works. It was apocalyptic, but it was also a great example of how regional communities pull together. It’s a strange time to be away, but I feel a beautiful sense of solidarity with other regional communities.”

The notion of neighbourhood and, by extension, citizenship and our responsibility to one another in society are Hume’s key themes as she curates the program for her first Ten Days festival, which will launch in Devonport on March 8.

“My particular perspective is of how living in regional Australia impacts on the creative process of artists,” she says – and she has a PhD on the topic to prove it. “I think it does that in lots of ways, from responses to environment to ideas of community. I see regional Australia as an incredible field of artistic potential.”

More broadly, she says the role the artist plays in a compassionate society is worth illuminating “partly because of the crazy times we are living in”.

Social cohesion is being eroded, she says, and the arts have the power to ameliorate that. “A festival is a welcoming, tolerant, inviting and exciting meeting place.”

A tired festival, though, can be an amorphous thing that fails to hit its mark. Hume says Ten Days on the Island was facing “an existential crisis” before moving its base to the North-West from Hobart last year.

The biennial event, which will celebrate its 10th festival in 2021, filled a void pre-Mona, says Hume, but it was time to reimagine it. The firm focus now for our only statewide multi-arts festival is on its role as an incubator of Tasmanian innovation in ideas and art and as a champion of regional Tasmania.

“Festivals need to respond to the world around them or they are redundant,” she says. “It’s not about rolling out a shopping trolley of festival events, but building cultural currency and legacy.”

So what should we expect from the illustrious Lindy Hume’s first Ten Days?

“It’s Tennish Days on the Island,” she jokes, describing a key change from 10 consecutive days to three long weekends: four days in the North-West, three days in Launceston and the North-East and three days in Hobart and the South.

“Burnie will be in absolutely no doubt the festival is placing a lot of its big names up there,” she says, with Burnie Arts and Function Centre the hub of music and theatre, including a new work by contemporary circus company Gravity & Other Myths.

Burnie’s significant socio-economic disadvantage and associated issues will be the focus of site-specific storytelling, with a production emerging from an Urban Theatre Projects residency involving local young people.

Hume’s key collaborator in the North-West is 2018 Tasmanian of the Year Scott Rankin, whose Big hART arts organisation created the biggest hit of the past two Ten Days festivals. The popular Acoustic Life of Sheds, featuring micro concerts in rural outbuildings, will again be reprised. Hume’s next goal with Rankin is to create something new together for the 2021 festival.

In the North-East, Hume is determined to lure more young people to shows with a strong family program, coupled with more sophisticated offerings such as Opera in the Vineyard.

In Hobart, the plan is to turn City Hall into a citizens’ theatre, a place for performance of all kinds, including a musical centrepiece and “as much theatre as we can pack in”.

It will also be an ideas fest, with a philosophical stream. And there will be a collaboration with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

It’s exciting, she says. “I’ve very lucky to be almost subversively fighting the forces of evil through the arts.”