Bleach* Festival

Overview

Sculpture meets spectacle and acrobatics meets outdoor art at Bleach* 2024. The annual Gold Coast festival's latest program, aka the feast of 110-plus performances filling the Glitter Strip this winter, includes Playbook among its standouts. One of several shows by circus company Gravity & Other Myths, it uses people and light to create an immersive piece about connection and life's franticness, and it's a firm reasons to head to the fest's North Burleigh hub.

Each year, Bleach* makes the most of being a coastal event by setting up shop at North Burleigh, and is doing so again in 2024 from Thursday, August 1–Sunday, August 11. Attendees will kick off the festival with the First Light opening service at the same spot, this time showcasingf vocalist Mohini Cox and four-piece band The Snack. Ten, a new performance by dance company The Farm, is also on the bill. So is The Walking Track, a suite of six performance works curated by Indigenous dance group Karul Projects, which are designed to be experienced along the Burleigh Esplanade.

When you're not spending Bleach* by the water, the festival's three other hubs await: at HOTA, Home of the Arts, the Broadbeach Cultural Precinct and in the Tallebudgera Valley. A range of events fill the first two, while the third takes you to a 20-acre Gold Coast hinterland spot for three-hour show Slow Art — Sounds of the Valley. Featuring pianists Karl S Williams and Erik Griswold, percussionist Bree van Reyk and singer Christine Johnstone, the performance plays out amid the greenery as 30-minute mini concerts, complete with picnics by HOTA's Palette Restaurant.

Art Work Agency

Back at HOTA itself, Gravity & Other Myths wants audiences to peer at The Mirror, which uses an LED wall and cameras on selfie sticks to ponder what entertains us and why screens are such a focus. Or there's Fourteen, Shake & Stir Theatre Co's stage adaptation of Shannon Molloy's memoir about being a queer teenager at an all-boys Catholic school; Locked In, with Shock Therapy Arts stepping into the shoes of someone with locked-in syndrome; and rockers Selve unveiling part of their visual album Red Desert Dream.

In Broadbeach, music is a highlight. The hub's tunes are again echoing from a floating 15-metre stage, whether 100 Pasifika voices are forming a community choir or the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University Brass Orchestra is picking up their instruments.

Gravity and Other Myths is also back again, this time with Us and All of This featuring 100 local dancers. And if you'd like to see the Nerang River lit up, River of Gold is here to do just that.

Across all its 2024 locations, the Bleach* lineup continues, including with live tunes free by the beach in North Burleigh from Friday–Sunday, a daily outdoor bar in Broadbeach, and both a series of two-person performances heroing Lucy Guerin and an installation built from 21 screens that steps through 21 years of her past works.

Top images: Lindsay Moller Productions, Andy Phillipson, Art Work Agency, Gregory Lorenzutti and Shuttermain.