Interior view of the Exxopolis Luminarium.
It’s August: the last month of winter. The time when you bargain with your Seasonal Affective Disorder (SADs) by monitoring the ever-so-slightly lengthening days and inspecting the jasmine vines for new buds.
This year the City of Stonnington have developed a festival to alleviate the need for wishful thinking. With 50 events over 11 days across Prahran, Malvern, Armadale, Toorak and South Yarra but open to all, Glow Winter Arts Festival means winter is not something to escape from, but something to escape to. From 14 – 24 August, Glow invites people to ‘lighten up after dark.’
Francesca Valmorbida, Manager, Economic and Cultural Development for the City of Stonnington, explains that the council has wanted to add a winter arts festival to their award-winning repertoire for some time. ‘We’re really excited to bring an accessible cultural program to the precincts that inspires people to get out and about despite the cold,’ Valmorbida says.
The festival centrepiece is the Exxopolis Luminarium: a monumental sculpture whose labyrinthine tunnels and cathedral-like domes entice visitors to journey through spaces of bright colourful light. Installed on the Jam Factory rooftop car park for the duration of the festival, the Exxopolis Luminarium combines ancient architectural forms with modern materials to generate a diversity of interior subtle hues and produce a stimulating and serene immersive user experience.
‘The Luminarium is an incredible, inspiring, unique and wonderful work that appeals to a diverse range of ages,’ says Valmorbida. ‘It only works by interacting with light, so it became the perfect feature piece for Glow.’
Like its exalted structure, the Exxopolis has an impressive history. It is the work of UK company Architects of Air which began as a community project in Nottingham in 1992. Designer Alan Parkinson created the original Eggopolis structure in collaboration with a group of offenders who were serving their punishment by working in the community. Since then, Architects of Air have made over 500 exhibitions in 37 countries. For the Exxpolis, the ‘GG’ has been replaced by the ‘XX’ to refer to the 20th Luminarium design.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, Glow is also teaming up with Melbourne International Comedy Festival to sponsor the Glow Comedy Club for six nights at the Prahran Town Hall.
Glow Comedy Club host, Harley Breen, describes the hosting role as akin to throwing a house party. ‘It’s like I’m introducing two friends together. One of my friends is the audience and the other one is the actor I’m about to bring on stage. I’m really hoping that my two friends get along… cos if they don’t get along I’m going to have to get angry with one of my friends,’ he jokes.
Breen has just returned from touring Asia with fellow Glow comedian, Anne Edmonds, who he describes as ‘funny right to the core of her body’. They will heat up the stage with other guests including The Project’s Em Rusciano, Kate McLennan, Nova’s Tommy Little, Colin Lane and Geraldine Quinn. In addition, comedy commandoes Damien Callinan and Gavin Baskerville will be bring their show, Road Trip, to Chapel Off Chapel.
‘It’s nice to have a festival to come back to outside of normal festival season,’ Breen says. In fact, Breen observes that Glow Comedy Club is in its element insofar as winter provides the perfect conditions for comedy.
‘It’s an interesting bit of trivia that just about all the big comedy cities in the world have shifty weather – Edinburgh, Montreal and Melbourne – all have grey skies, gloomy rain and cold days in common,’ he says. ‘Comedy succeeds in colder climates because that’s what’s needed.’
But will it prevent the northsiders from coming southside to Glow? ‘Absolutely not,’ Breen says. ‘I think it’s such a hilarious rivalry in Melbourne, this whole idea of not jumping the river. It’s barely a river! It’s like a creek – you could nearly just walk through it.’
The Glow cabaret program at Chapel Off Chapel is another festival highlight worth forging natural elements for. ‘The festival was programmed to cater to a range of people and budgets, so we have everything from Beyoncé to Beethoven,’ Valmorbida enthuses. ‘The Rhythm Spectacular, starring Adam Hall and the Velvet Playboys, was a sell-out in Perth. People were pleading for spare tickets online and we’re sure they will have the same impact on Melbourne audiences,’ she says.
The cabaret line-up includes Jersey Boy’s Bobby Fox in The Fantastic Mr Fox; Emily Taheny who will be accompanied by some of Melbourne’s top musicians in Mad for Mancini; and Normie Rowe who has created a new show Show ‘n’ Tell, especially for Glow. Grande Milonga will bring Buenos Aires to Malvern Town Hall. Rush Roshan and her band, Tango Noir, insist they will have everyone out of their seats dancing.
In recognition of the reality of street violence, the City of Stonnington have invited the School of Hard Knocks to perform their Street Requiem Combined Choir as part of Glow on 19 August. Street Requiem is a contemporary setting of the traditional sung requiem with additional English, African and Persian lyrics and a modern setting of the Latin text. Celebrating a diversity of skills and experience in the community, Street Requiem is an essentially optimistic work that features music reflecting the multi-cultural and multi-faith traditions of multi-city living utilising gospel, celtic, romantic, indigenous and contemporary musical genres and instrumentation to spectacular effect.
For those interested in satisfying visual and gustatory appetites, the Flicks’n’Feasts screen program brings (free) film and food together. Or is it food and film? ‘Who doesn’t love a bit of Kung Fu with their dim sum?’ Valmorbida asks. Located in the Prahran Market Laneway across the festival’s weekends, Flicks’n’Feasts pair Bollywood and curry, Spaghetti Westerns and pizza and Godzilla and sushi, encouraging patrons to ask how film is enriched by sensorial cultural experiences.
Glow’s visual arts program features more than 10 exhibitions; however it’s the inaugural Shot in the Dark Photographic Walking Exhibition that promises to link together a range of sites around Stonnington. The exhibition comprises competing images submitted by photographers invited to take a ‘Shot in the Dark’ and capture the faces, places and lights of the city’s distinctive nightlife. ‘The winners will be announced with the launch of the festival on 14 August,’ Valmorbida says, ‘but I can say we’ve had some incredible entries that have brilliantly captured the City of Stonnington after dark.’
‘The idea behind the exhibition, and Glow in general, is that the works are immediately accessible. Whether you’re enjoying live music in a cafe in Toorak Village, spotting KAGE perform acrobatics on a forklift in Chapel Street, or simply hovering your smart phone in front of a shop window, you will be part of the festival experience,’ Valmorbida says.
The Shot in the Dark exhibition involves a technological twist using augmented reality technology where the images, displayed at night in retail windows around Stonnington, will only be visible with the assistance of a smart-phone or tablet. The exhibition is curated by Joel Rainford and internationally acclaimed mobile photographer Misho Baranovic.
For more information including free events, kids’ events and Howard Arkley visit Glow Winter Arts Festival.
