This year’s BLEACH* Festival is going to the punters rather than trying to entice them to traditional venues.
The annual contemporary arts festival on the Gold Coast returns for its 13th year from August 1 to 11. While many festivals are shutting down due to financial pressures BLEACH* Festival is celebrating its resilience with eight world premieres and 18 Queensland premieres.
Artistic director Rosie Dennis says there’s increased recognition around the country of the festival’s significance and how it distinctly reflects its community.
“BLEACH* plays across numerous sites, so I think that’s what makes us distinctive in the Australian cultural landscape,” Dennis says. “We’ve got four festival hubs in four different pockets of the Gold Coast. We are on the beach at North Burleigh and we use the natural staging of the North Burleigh headland, which is a really arresting piece of coastline.
“We open the festival there every morning. Everything we program at North Burleigh is family friendly and we have workshops there this year – weaving, natural dying textiles and 50 hours of live music.”
One very local event is a new work from Karul Projects called The Walking Track, which will take place on the Burleigh Esplanade over August 10-11.
Minjunbal-Yugambeh, Wiradjuri and Ni-Vanuatu artist Thomas E.S. Kelly is artistic director of Karul Projects and director of The Walking Track, which responds to last year’s referendum on The Voice to Parliament.
“We’ve got five First Nations makers each making a seven-to-10-minute solo work,” Kelly says. “They’re all going to be placed along the esplanade of Burleigh, then people follow me and I take them on a bit of a walking track, touring from one point all the way up to seeing each one. And I’ll be weaving them all together into a story.
“I love the idea of this project being five things that are interconnected – they’re the chapters of this story and you’ll be taken into that world. We’re a Gold Coast company, so it’s really exciting to be a part of BLEACH* properly for the first time.”
Dennis says BLEACH* Festival starts early.
“BLEACH* starts at sunrise,” she says. “When I took the reins five years ago I was really conscious that we were a place-based festival and looking at the rhythm of the city. We are early risers in this city. This year’s opening is going to be beautiful. We’ve got William Barton coming in for a solo to open First Light. We’ve created a choir this year for BLEACH* – a hundred voices from the Pacific. It’s amazing.”
Other BLEACH* events will be staged at alternate hubs in Tallebudgera Valley, Broadbeach and HOTA.
“We’ve got a really exciting program in Tallebudgera Valley where we’ve commissioned four composers and musicians to create four new works. It’s called Slow Art – Sounds of the Valley,” Dennis says.
“It’s a concert where you move from one performance to the next and it culminates with Brisbane musician Erik Griswold playing piano. He’s an amazing pianist. We’re putting him in the middle of a dam on a pontoon and asking him to play a 20-minute concert. At the end of the concert the piano gets set on fire and Eric continues to play, and then you’ve got this blazing burning fire. It will be quite spectacular.”

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Dennis says that with so many festivals being cancelled, this year’s BLEACH* Festival is particularly significant.
“Festivals are a reason for us to come together,” she says. “It’s multiple experiences happening in the one place at the one time. So, it’s kind of like a tiramisu. You’ve got all these layers, they’re slightly different flavours, but when they come together, they give you a richer experience of that moment.”
Other BLEACH* highlights include Ellen Van Neerven’s work Swim, in partnership with Sydney’s Griffin Theatre, a new show from circus group Gravity and Other Myths called The Mirror, Shock Therapy Arts presenting Locked In, and The Farm’s new work Ten – a bold performance of movement, sound and theatre.
Over 11 days there will be more than 30 shows and 110 performances of music, dance, theatre and visual art.
bleachfestival.com.au
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