The Ten Best Things to See at Brisbane Festival 2016
Pharrell Williams' new work, rainbow vomit and a city pop-up dancefloor. It's baaaaack.
The Ten Best Things to See at Brisbane Festival 2016
Pharrell Williams' new work, rainbow vomit and a city pop-up dancefloor. It's baaaaack.
Clear your calendars for the next three weeks, and then start filling them with Brisbane Festival events. The city's annual artistic celebration is back — and, as proves the case every September, it's absolutely begging for your attention.
Basically, if you're seeing a show, wandering around an exhibition, taking to the dancefloor or just having a beverage with a friend from September 3 to 24, then you'd best be doing it at Bris Fest. In his second year as the festival's artistic director, David Berthold has put together quite the list of options for Brissie arts and culture lovers: 70 productions and 540 performances across five key venues, in fact.
You'll find a showcase of music cinema, a theatre re-telling of a recent chapter of Brisbane history, Meow Meow's take on The Little Mermaid and a couple of classic film versions of Snow White among the program's many highlights, plus hangout spot Arcadia and the explosive finale that is Riverfire, too. And if you can't decide what to see, we're here to help. In addition to the above, here's our pick of the ten festival events we think you should be flocking to.
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The Spiegeltent is a Brisbane Festival favourite for a reason. Inside its doors, all manner of performers take to the stage — and whether you’re discovering new talent or witnessing an icon in action, no night is ever the same.
Where else can you see Kim Gordon one evening, Kilo Kish the next, and everyone from Montaigne to Rhys Nicholson on others? And, this year Bris Fest is doubling the Spiegeltent fun with a second structure. Add the rest of the entertaining antics in the surrounding Arcadia area to the mix, and you’ve got yourself a festival hub, hangout, haven and all-round highlight.
Image: Meow Meow’s Little Mermaid.
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Think rainbows and unicorns are just for kids? Think again. Sure, Dancenorth’s addition to this year’s Brisbane Festival is an all-ages affair; however more mature festival-goers won’t want to miss out on a performance that features 7.6 kilometres of UV rope.
Yep, as well as a kick-ass name, Rainbow Vomit boasts enough luminous thread to get you from the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts through the city to West End. It also includes a story about morphing creatures and magical ‘fireworks glasses’ that refract light into the titular multi-coloured phenomenon. Enough said.
Image: Amber Haines.
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With Motherland, Katherine Lyall-Watson and Caroline Dunphy explored the stories of three women yearning for their homelands, and won a spate of awards for their efforts. Reuniting for Hanako: Desire and Other Secret Weapons, the duo tells another cross-cultural tale.
Set in an imagined future, the production throws together traditional Japanese and contemporary urban culture — plus music, anime and fashion, too — to follow the adventures of a young girl as she embarks upon a tentative journey. As for what comes next, well, you’ll just have to get yourself along to Brisbane Festival to find out.
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If you need a reason to see Blanc de Blanc, it’s this: it comes complete with a human champagne fountain. Of course, given that the acrobatic cabaret is the latest production from Brisbane Festival favourites Strut & Fret (aka the folks behind LIMBO, Fear & Delight and Cantina) that shouldn’t be the only enticing factor.
It’s a show that’s heavy on vintage glamour and agile acts, as well as foam and giant bubbles. Heading to Brissie straight from London’s West End, it’s also the most indulgent, seductive and cheeky night out you’re likely to have in some time — but hey, isn’t that what festivals are all about?
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When Pharrell Williams teams up with choreographer Jonah Bokaer and visual artist Daniel Arsham, something special is bound to happen. And as audiences in Dallas in the US have already discovered, something special has.
They’re the only people in the world to have seen Rules of the Game, the multidisciplinary dance, video and sculpture work that heads to Brisbane Festival head of its New York premiere in November. Loosely based on Nobel Laureate Pirandello’s controversial play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the piece features Williams’ first-ever orchestral score for the stage, Bokaer’s crisp, elegant dance moves and Arsham’s offbeat, architectural environments in an eight-performer effort that turns dance into visual art.
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Get up close and personal to one of the world’s most famous fairy tales, but don’t expect it to play out the way you expect. You don’t take on Snow White and call it a gripping reimagining without shaking things up — and in this case, it’s the boundaries between good and evil.
In La Boite Theatre Company and Opera Queensland’s take on the Brothers Grimm’s tale, showing at this year’s Brisbane Festival, four musicians and four singer/actors do more than just ask magic mirrors about their appearance; they sing everything from opera to rock, and find the sensual heart inside an enduring classic. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to the dark side of the story we go. And no, this version definitely isn’t for kids.
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Can you do the polka? Do you know how to swing? Or are Bollywood and Bhangra moves more your style? Perhaps you’re mighty fine at bouncing along to reggae, or maybe you can boot scoot, salsa or jive.
Whatever style of fancy footwork you favour, the name of Brisbane Festival‘s pop-up inner-city dance floor says it all: You Should Be Dancing. Over eight nights at Queens Park outside of the Treasury Casino, you’ll have the chance to learn the requisite steps, watch the experts do their thing and kick up your own heels. Now that’s what we call a party.
Image: Gregory Lorenzutti.
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First, the bad news: Ground Control might be a space oddity, however, this Brisbane Festival show isn’t a Bowie-themed production. Instead, it’s a queer feminist science-fiction effort that tells the tale of young astronaut trying to find a second earth to save humanity from climate change, clever cyborgs and their own misogynistic ways. So, not too far-fetched then.
It’s also an effort that’s part science experiment and part love story — and part comedy and confronting performance too. And, if you’re a fan of this experimental, urgent, immersive breed of theatre, there’s more where it came from. Just check out the rest of Bris Fest’s Theatre Republic program.
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In Harlem in the ’20s and ’30s, everyone was doing a brand new dance — and no, it wasn’t the locomotion. Usually performed to big band music and known for being acrobatic, it was the Lindy Hop, which fused parts of jazz, tap, breakaway and the Charleston.
If you’ve seen the music video to the Elvis Presley vs. JXL remix of ‘A Little Less Conversation’ from back in 2002, then you’ve seen it in action — now, you can try it for yourself. With Singapore artist Loo Zihan and his collaborators taking up the dance style over a decade ago, they’re hosting an Australian-first, Brisbane-exclusive participatory performance class. 50/50 isn’t just a way to learn new moves, though — it’s an exploration of authenticity, identity, sexuality and culture.
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A microfestival nestled within the broader Brisbane Festival program, UNBUTTONED is an event for everybody — and every body. Threading together a lineup of visual art, live art, talks, social events and film, it doesn’t just aim to interrogate traditional notions of gender; it attempts to blow them out of the water.
And with everything from a photographic exploration of gender identity to a one-woman show about a sex clown on offer, it’s safe to say the mini-fest does just that. Come for the exploration of the history of fetishism, stay for the wank bank masterclass, plus screenings of Spear, Hedwig and the Angry Inch and 52 Tuesdays.
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