Odd Couple: Jurassic Lounge’s Matt Ravier and Adult Educator Imogen Ross

Matt Ravier is director of the Festivalists, who run Jurassic Lounge and are about to release their first Sydney Film Festival Hub into the arms of an eager Sydney Film Festival public.

With a talent for getting grown-ups to go to edifying places and start playing, we thought Matt needed an interviewer who also leads adults to learning on a regular basis. Luckily, adult educator Imogen Ross agreed to quiz this current maestro of public engagement on our behalf.

How did you come up with Jurassic Lounge?

There's two philosophies that underpin everything we do at the Festivalists. The first one is access. We want to make our events as accessible to as many as possible, especially people who are not currently engaged with whatever we're bringing  forward. That's the motive behind the Access All Areas Film Festival, for example. Seniors' film festival is the same thing. Seniors are the fastest growing segment of the Australian population, but yet a lot of the feedback we get from them is "cinemas are not designed for us". What would a festival look like that was designed for an audience over sixty?

I have a lot of overweight people in my life. A film festival for people who can't fit into ordinary chairs..?

..is a really interesting idea.

Because many people can't fit into cinema chairs, and they don't go out.

And they don't. And that's a real loss. I always feel like it's a personal tragedy when someone misses out on film, on cinema. Especially the kind of film that I'm interested in defending.

Jurassic Lounge is not film focused. Film is a part of it, but it's only of a much wider myriad of events and performances, and sounds, and experiences that are created in the museum. And I find it fascinating that you've jumped off the screen into very much a 3D world.

And that leads me to that second idea that underpins what we do, which is play. Film festivals can be sometimes intimidating, or they can be a challenge in terms of audience development. For example, our Canadian film festival. There is not a huge in-built audience for Canadian cinema in Australia. So, we were faced with a challenge: how do we  introduce people to Canadian cinema? We decided that it was going to be a festival like Canadians. Who are inclusive, and playful, and welcoming, and friendly. So, we started adding a lot of things to our screenings. Like parties, like performances, like live music. This play element is always the idea that a festival should be festive. And it should be film, but it's more than film.

If you just want to see a film, these days you can: you don't need a festival to do that. To bring back a communal experience — and to make it vital and festive experience — we started adding live elements, expert talks, performance. We're always looking for ways to make the experience a little more rich. That playfulness was always a part of what we do. Jurassic Lounge was really a natural extension.

It's really interesting. What you're describing there are the principles that underlie andragogy. Which is the new current way of approaching the way adults learn. There's the thought that children are empty vessels waiting to be filled. It's the underlying principle of our schooling system. Whereas it's acknowledged that adults are not empty vessels. They come into the room full of experience. With lots of things already. Then your festivals are not just about watching and hearing a movie, but experiencing it in lots of different ways. And I'm thinking that this is exactly the way that adults are being taught new skills. It respects...

...what they they already know. What they bring to the table. More and more people, especially 18 to 35s I would imagine, are used to being able to talk back. Anywhere online, it's a two-way conversation. They're not just passive spectators. That experience — whether it's in a museum or a film festival — of just going, being shown something, having no say in how that is interpreted during the event, and then leaving: I think that's dead, or it's dying.

And part of what Jurassic Lounge does is feed back the comments into the programming in real time. Whether it's through the Twitterfall, or whether it's through photos that they take that are immediately looped back into the programming. So the audience is constantly programming along with us.

Can you give me an example?

It can be really prosaic. For example, we will collect data on Twitter during the night about people's reaction to food and drink. And they might complain about certain waiting times. Because there's several bars in the museum. And they might say "They queue is terrible. I can't believe it." So we will immediately put more people from the bar at that particular location. Or encourage people, through talking to them on social media, to try the bar on the third floor.

It's like giving the entire audience a walkie-talkie.

Pretty much. I mean, some things you have to tune out. But we try to learn as much as we can from that. And then, it's also opening a channel with the museum. Which is a whole other idea. When we've surveyed audiences a lot of the feedback we've been getting is like "Wow. The museum is actually really interesting." It's always been at their doorstep, but yet it took something like that to make it okay for them to go back inside.

I think it's brilliant that the museum has actively sought this collaboration and allowed it to happen.

And they have a very progressive attitude to programming Jurassic Lounge. So they are not looking to vet absolutely every detail about it in advance. They're much more about saying yes, and then finding a way to make it happen. It's really that same attitude that we have. Which is that we experiment and correct our course as we go along.

In a way, the whole thing occurs like a jazz improvisation.

Yeah. That's a good analogy, actually. We make sure that all the tools are there for it to happen, but it only takes place once the audience is a part of it.

A performance/education mash-up. Where a little bit of everything goes in the mix. And you don't know what it's going to taste like.

Exactly. And we're constantly surprised by what happens. In a good way.

Interview conducted by Imogen Ross.