On the Gold Coast, the hinterland lingers in your field of vision. At BLEACH*, this serves a desire to ask the audience to consider not just what art is, but where it might live. To present art in unusual spaces is to subscribe to a growing trope of the modern arts festival. But this context can also overlook food itself as a mode of cultural expression and can mirror extractive power dynamics. The act of dining, as seen at the likes of Dark Mofo’s Winter Feast, is laden with theatre. A festival highlight for me was watching a ponytailed girl glide between ramps with steely grace, buoyed by the performers’ energy. An empty lot on a suburban industrial estate played host to demi-DEMO, in which members of Branch Nebula – a company that has long worked at the intersection of street sports and performance – cut elegant lines through space on skateboards before leading a workshop. A brewery is the canvas for Back to Back Theatre’s Radial, an experimental filmmaking project that features Tralala Blip, a mixed-abilities electronic music ensemble from the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales.
Artists turn shipping containers into open studios. BLEACH* isn’t confined to theatres, galleries or recital halls. It attempts to answers these questions while challenging their very terms.
#BLEACH FASHION ART FULL#
It’s the first full festival delivered by artistic director Rosie Dennis, who is respected for her work with Western Sydney’s Urban Theatre Projects, after two years of pandemic-enforced cancellations. This year’s edition of BLEACH* features 233 artists, 94 performances and 36 events over 11 days.
#BLEACH FASHION ART HOW TO#
How to create an arts festival in a city where the cultural value of art dovetails with the economic imperatives of tourism? One that reflects a place when that place is itself, in many ways, a reflection? But it no longer entirely represents the country’s sixth-largest city, where 28 per cent of the population is overseas-born and regional migration is fast turning ideas of centre and periphery on its head. This image of sun, surf and sand is a still-too-common metonym for Australian identity. It’s a place without a clear centre, where – at least on the surface – the myths of endless leisure remain intact.īLEACH*, the Gold Coast’s flagship contemporary arts festival, was conceived in 2012 to coincide with – what else? – a Quiksilver World Surf League event. This string of resort towns has been shaped and reshaped by a range of interests from Brisbane hoteliers and American soldiers to European colonists who once sought cedar from the nearby hinterlands. Here breezeblock apartments and candy-coloured motels line suburbs with names such as Miami and Mermaid Beach.
The city, whose traditional custodians are the Kombumerri people within the Yugambeh language group, follows a highway that unfurls along the Pacific Ocean. The Gold Coast has always wilfully blurred the line between reality and fantasy.
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