This Is Not Art Festival
Granted, the folks behind Newcastle’s This Is Not Art festival are doing a lot right, but you’d think that by their tenth year they might have realised the jig is up. So, a little friendly advice, TINA: we’ve heard that ‘not art’ schtick before, and baby, we’re not buying it. TINA is an annual convergence […]
Overview
Granted, the folks behind Newcastle’s This Is Not Art festival are doing a lot right, but you’d think that by their tenth year they might have realised the jig is up. So, a little friendly advice, TINA: we’ve heard that ‘not art’ schtick before, and baby, we’re not buying it.
TINA is an annual convergence of emerging and experimental performers, tastemakers, writers, musos and dabblers: over 400 artists from Australia and beyond, all told. With dozens of (mostly free!) events crammed into five days and nights, the whole affair feels something like your friendly neighbourhood street fair. On crack.
It’s fitting, then, that the newest addition to the TINA family is the Crack Theatre Festival, which will be sharing the lineup with old favourites like Critical Animals, Electrofringe, National Young Writers’ Festival and Sound Summit. Crack is serialised theatre spread across three days, with a grand finale on the fourth: a one-day open event in which participants work together to devise, rehearse and perform an original piece of theatre.
Writer and artist Alli Sebastian Wolf will be directing Crack’s Saturday night installment. “It’s kind of like those old time radio serials. It’s about a detective, very 1930s film noir kind of stuff,†she says. “You can come to any one of them and just enjoy each one as its own little piece, or you can come from the beginning. They all kind of work as independent bits of theatre: you get caught up in each of them.â€
Alli says her piece developed as a series of one-offs at Sydney writers’ night Penguin Plays Rough. “It started off there as just little readings, and we did the first sort of chapter and people were like, ‘When’s the next one?’†she laughs.
“So we ended up making more and more to go on up there for about five months and decided that we wanted to actually make it into something that stood together as a performance by itself … They used to not even have to really flow on from each other as long as you had the same couple of characters, everyone was drunk, and it was a month ago so who remembers? This time it’s a bit better, but they do still have their own little style, and hopefully their own little arcs and spirits.â€
Oh, and zombies. Naturally. “And zombie machines and mad scientists, and then you’ve got some gangsters and you’ve got your film noir detective who can stare off into the middle distance and have ridiculous similes,†Alli adds. “We’ve got a sound guy doing live sound from a desk next to the stage, with all kinds of jugs and pots and pans and craziness. And we might have our own live saxophonist,†she enthuses. “It’s just a good time, I reckon.â€
And if theatre’s not so much your thing, there’s plenty more going on. Apart from the usual workshops and panel discussions, TINA will also host performances from the likes of Melbourne’s Suzanne Grae & the Katies and US band The Vivian Girls; horror shorts night Scream Screen; and dance and video installations from The DeConvertors. Triple J’s Marieke Hardy and the ABC’s Lawrence Leung will also be making appearances.
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