Artists performing at the OzAsia Festival (Image: Adelaide Festival Centre)
Adelaide will be the centre of Asia in September when the much-anticipated OzAsia Festival kicks off, bringing a comprehensive and exciting lineup of artistic talent from across the continent.
‘The focus this year of course is to show the exciting breadth of contemporary performance across Asia at this point in time,’ said Joseph Mitchell, who takes up reigns as the new Artistic Director for the festival in 2015.
‘I was really interested in taking on a festival which had a real artistic uniqueness about it and with a brief of putting together an entire festival to showcase contemporary Asia I found that there’s really not any other performing arts festival in Australia working to that brief.’
The ninth OzAsia festival will be marked by exciting collaborations and cross-cultural encounters: Japanese Butoh dancers in collaboration with contemporary Australian dancers; Australian and Chinese musicians collaborating; and a fusion of contemporary dance with Indian Kuchipudi, choreographed and performed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Shantala Shivalingappa. In addition to live performance there will be an extensive visual arts program, film screenings, talk events and a giant Adelaide Night Noodle Market food experience. .
Mitchell said that the festival brings together young, exciting and innovative artists who are pushing boundaries and blurring genres. A lot of the works are immersive, enabling audiences and artists to interact within the same space.
‘Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker is a hybrid performance from this really wild group of artists from Tokyo and everybody in the audience has to wear raincoats for protection.
‘And it’s not theatre, not dance, not multimedia, it’s unclassifiable – a crazy wild 45 min assault of contemporary performance by young artists and their work is kind of rejecting the idea of Japanese in the traditional sense,’ said Mitchell.
Another example is Teater Garasi’s The Streets, which will have its Australian premiere at the opening of the Festival.
‘It’s an immersive dance theatre production where the audience walk into a black studio that’s been converted into a Jakarta street at night time and there’s performers walking around in character, some might be military police checking identification, or some might be begging for money, or scoping out the environment and then eventually a dance-theatre piece evolves through the space with a very Jakartan flavor that abstractly captures a sense of Indonesia’s street-level dialogue about the aspirations and challenges of becoming a democracy in this century,’ said Mitchell.
The opening weekend will include the biggest showcase of arts from Indonesia ever presented in Australia, with over 20 events and performances from more than 100 artists.
‘Indonesia is our closest neighbour and a fantastic holiday destination, but sometimes it’s hard for Australians to move beyond Indonesia’s strong links to tradition and culture, and see that it’s a leading country in the world in terms of contemporary performance and visual arts.
‘So I felt a showcase of the diversity of contemporary performance-making and visual arts from across Indonesia over the first three days would be a great way to kickstart the festival,’ added Mitchell.
He believes that, ‘this is the Asian century and a sense of recontextualising Asia in the contemporary sense is more important than ever for the performing arts’.
The 2015 OzAsia Festival expects nearly 100,000 people in attendance enjoying the creatively curated events and environment of the Adelaide Festival Centre, and the surrounding Riverbank precinct, which will feature the Adelaide Night Noodle Markets.
‘I was thinking how we might realise the hub for OzAsia Festival around the Adelaide Festival Centre and Riverbank areas, and it just seemed like a natural alignment bringing together the iconic Night Noodle Markets atmosphere that is so well known in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and incorporate that into a contemporary Asian performing arts environment,’ said Mitchell.
He explained that, ‘the idea of the festival is that it’s almost impossible to come here and do one thing’.
‘We’ve scheduled shows so that you can see two or three shows on any night, and there are free talks around the events at the same time, various installation artworks throughout the festival hub and we’ve even planned a whole series of secret performances that will kind of pop up every night.
‘So, it’s about coming to a festival as opposed to coming to a show or coming to experience food – it’s about doing all of those things together and having fun,’ he added.
The OzAsia Festival runs from 24 September – 4 October 2015. Visit the Festival website for program details and booking tickets.
Here is a small preview of this year’s festival program.
