Leotards dance to a beat. Tongues sing tuning forks. Paint splashes a ray of wet. A fierce wave of creativity lands on the streets of Melbourne - with its many faces and flavours, the Melbourne Festival arrives.


New York dance group Streb performs Up!
Photography Kevin Powell

There's an energetic buzz on the street, forming into an air of urgency and expectation. It could be around the next corner. It could be this one. It could be us-here-now. With over 280 performances, 2700 participants and around 400 musicians in the outdoor program alone, it's hard not to be standing in the Melbourne Festival.

Part of the magic is that Melbourne brings its own personal character to animating the Festival. Sue Nattrass, the 1998 Artistic Director, believes the real secret of the Festival's success lies in "the way that people in Melbourne get behind an event. People here are really prepared to get out there and go to it. We're wonderful like that."

The Festival's opening night on October 15, titled A Spectacular Beginning, is as much a night for the city as it is for Melburnians. Staged outdoors around the Concert Hall, across the Princes Bridge and spilling into the intersection of Swanston and Flinders Streets, the opening will start with a great silence, a moment of quiet stillness, arrival and beginning. Then a sudden burst of celebration, light and fireworks, as an artistic narrative of the city's original inhabitants unfolds.

Instead of submerging itself underground after the opening, the Melbourne Festival will maintain a strong outdoor spirit throughout its eighteen days. For those who miss the spectacle of opening night, Chromolithe, the lighting show on the facade of Flinders Street Station, continues every day and night of the Festival. Down by the Yarra River, Sounds of Southgate will present an eclectic mix of local and Australian bands, while physical theatre will push new boundaries in Born in a Taxi at the Southgate Spiral Staircase.


Deborah Cheetham in White Baptiste ABBA Fan will be part of the 1998 Melbourne Festival.
Photograph courtesy of the Melbourne Festival

As various as the Festival's events are, there is an underlying commonality which makes the event a lot more than just the sum of its many parts. Sue Nattrass brings to the Festival a unique vision of this whole: "What happens on the streets is a complementary adjunct to what happens in the theatres. They all link back to each other."

According to Sue, the Festival draws its threads together via several broad themes. "If you look at the issues that underlie the Festival - family, violence, indigenous culture, integration, multiculturalism - the negative of these is manifested through a lack of equality," she explains. "Hopefully the Festival can go some way to turning that around."

Aboriginal culture and expression play heavily in all the artistic genres of the Festival. On the stage, the Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-operative and Playbox present the world premiere of Stolen, a play about five Aboriginal children taken from their homes. In White Baptist Abba Fan, Deborah Cheetham uses candid humour and honesty to tell how she went from being raised in a religious, white, middle-class home to becoming a gay koorie opera singer.

What Sue Nattrass admires most in these plays is that "they're highly personal, using humour and humanity to tell their stories." More broadly, she feels "the arts are a non-threatening way of informing and helping change people's minds. A lot of the problems come from people not understanding and knowing."

What makes the Festival so special is that it's not afraid to take risks. "If you don't take risks," says Sue, "you don't take a step in any major direction." Going out on a limb - or two! - is why Melbourne and its Festival stand apart from the pack.


The Nederlands Dans Theater 3, No Sleep Till Day of Dawn featuring Sabine Kupferberg part of this year's Melbourne International Festival.
Photography Joris Jan Bos


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