2010 Next Wave Festival

Info about the 2010 Next Wave Festival, which finished up at the end of May this year, will appear here soon.

For now, you can visit the 2010 Next Wave Festival website, or check out some Festival images HERE.

2008 Next Wave Festival

Jeff Khan’s first Festival as Artistic Director was one of the most ambitious, complex and successful to date. Themed Closer Together, the 2008 Next Wave Festival involved almost 400 artists working across 61 projects in 40 or so Melbourne venues. Around 155,000 people came to an exhbition, saw a theatre or dance show, rocked up to one of five or more Festival parties or caught one of the Festival massive Keynote Projects.

Click HERE to visit the 2008 Next Wave Festival site.

It all began on the 15th of May when 1300 people came along to the Festival’s opening night at Federation Square in the heart of the city. From there it was 16 days of some of the best work by Australia’s leading emerging artists. Significantly Next Wave organised a series of Keynote Projects that involved the Candian duo The Movement Movement jogging more than 150 people through Melbourne Museum; a vast series of workshops and forums in Polyphonic a collection of artists and artist-run-initiative from around Australia presenting new work in and around Federation Square in a project called Membrane, and a two art/nightclub events, called The Nightclub Project, staged at two unique venues in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD.

Brisbane artist Hiromi Tango, inside her project Absence, as part of the 2008 Next Wave Festival. Photo by Jorge de Araujo.

ABOVE: The Age covers the 2008 Next Wave Festival.

Closer Together

The 2008 Next Wave Festival theme

The rhetoric of global culture tells us that we are being brought closer and closer together. By media, communication technologies, the free market and other snappy buzzwords which signify somewhat less transparent systems. But how close are we, and how much do we really know about each other?

The 2008 Next Wave Festival explored new ideas of closeness and its conflicted nature: as a catalyst for connectedness, community and exchange, but also of claustrophobia, confrontation and invasion. The collapse of the private sphere into the public and the increasing tendency to live out our personal lives in very impersonal arenas. The demise of public space, as a concept and a reality…where is the space for vulnerability, intimacy, privacy and exchange in an increasingly globalised world? What is the potential for genuine, unexpected connections, and what might they look like?

For all the 2008 Next Wave Festival’s details, including projects, listings and artists, visit the Festival site here.

Images from the 2008 Next Wave Festival

Dance projects in the 2008 Next Wave Festival

Next Wave On Flickr
You can browse images from the 2008 Festival on Flickr here.

2006 Next Wave Festival

Marcus Westbury’s second curated festival was themed EMPIRE GAMES and coincided with the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. Next Wave presented the Youth Program of Festival Melbourne2006, the cultural program of the Commonwealth Games, which ran alongside various Next Wave programs, and included 100 Points of Light, The Containers Village, and The Brand Project, as well as a series of smaller programs.

EMPIRE GAMES, as theme, was both an ironic nod to the Commonwealth Games’ own history as well as a curatorial strategy to position the festival at the cutting edge of both art form development and contemporary cultural issues. Work for this festival embraced the detail of the city – alleyways, outdoor spaces, bars and more conventional arts settings, as well as new and innovative presentation in regional centres. This included the flagship regional project Bitscape, created and presented in Moe and culminating in a 50-metre high projection onto a power station cooling tower over a series of nights during the games.

Click HERE for a copy of the 2006 Next Wave Festival poster (pdf).

2004 Next Wave Festival

Theme for the 2004 Festival was UNPOPULAR CULTURE and was designed to encourage a range of responses to current day issues and youth culture. Artistic Director, Marcus Westbury, who was in the demographic of festival artists, embraced Melbourne’s inner-city laneways, old Dojos and empty buildings. Highlights included the Festival Club, which presented the first ever Freeplay conference, the Containers at Federation Square program, and Colliding Worlds – a major regional program. In all 600 artists participated in 90 projects that attracted massive audiences and inspired a new generation of young Next Wave participants.

2002 Next Wave Festival

Under the direction of Steven Richardson as Executive Producer/CEO and David Young as Festival Director, the 2002 Next Wave Festival was most notable for offering an entirely free program. With the tag line ‘Free at Last’ the festival delivered a cultural rodeo of art, pop culture, new media, social action, environmental concerns, healthy dissent and extreme sport. The most colossal example of this was the Colony Project, during which acrobatic angels lived in the spire of the Victorian Arts Centre. The Festival also featured the on-line Megabite project, showcasing short works of digital animation.

2000 Next Wave Festival

To usher Next Wave into a new century and millennium, Artistic Director Campion Decent quickly settled on the theme WIDE AWAKE Dreaming at Twilight. From this a program was curated, exploring ideas of collective dreaming, slipping between subliminal states of alertness. It was a theme that also directly informed the now (in)famous artwork and design, the notoriously ‘innocent’ 50s boy and girl making bombs, offering pills and scooping brains.

Eight years after Zane Trow first introduced the Art & Technology program, the 2000 Digital Arts package saw technology spill over into everything from live performance to the visual arts. The festival’s web site was by far the most extensive thus far, including an events program, audience surveys, discussion lists, and an annex to the community-building exercise Fest on the Net.

1998 Next Wave Festival

While each festival emerges with its own vision, Artistic Director Zane Trow entered his fourth festival with a decision to develop a program along a single curatorial brief Distance. The theme encouraged various responses, with artists exploring distance along various lines, including geography, culture and gender. Zane was unable to complete his tenure, and Wendy Lasica seized the reigns to see out the festival providing 625 Australian artists opportunities to present their work and ideas to some 238,000 attendees.

1994 Next Wave Festival

Whilst the festival is staged every two years, non-festival years see special events. In 1993 Next Wave produced South East, a collaboration of community workers, teachers, young people, and established and emerging artists described as a “cabaret for the nineties” with the spotlight on fusions of contemporary and traditional south-east Asian art forms.

Come 1994, the festival played host to events and programs attracting audiences of 80,000 people. In the Art and Technology program, digital artists were attracted from the USA, Japan, Germany and Spain. At a national level, the 7th National Youth Arts Conference was planned to coincide with Next Wave – drawing together delegates from across the country to discuss the future practice and direction of youth arts.

1992 Next Wave Festival

1992 saw Zane Trow enter the role of Artistic Director and steer the festival in new directions. The new program area Art & Technology supported artistic endeavors that explored emerging technologies. BYTEBEAT gave witness to nine local ‘techno pop bands’ playing to 1000 revellers in the Great Hall of the NGV. Berni Janssen coordinated the growing Writers Programme, with a video documentary of the program made by secondary school students. Behind the scenes, radio trainees took over 3RRR, and RMIT Media Studies students produced reviewing programs for 3JJJ.

1990 Next Wave Festival

For the third time Andrew Bleby held the helm of Festival Director, launching both the festival and young artists well into the ’90s. As if psychically pre-empting one of the new decade’s iconic themes, the 1990 Next Wave Festival opened with ‘Planet Earth Boogie’ – drawing attention to environmental and indigenous issues through the creative energy of thousands of teenagers and youth. As another first, the festival included a significant program for young writers and readers, a fitting innovation for International Literacy Year.

1988 Next Wave Festival

With the second festival lined up to coincide with Australia’s bicentenary in ’88, Victorians endured a wait of three years for the next installment of what was already established as the state’s most significant arts event. In that time the festival developed in size and scope, with more new works and proportionally more young people as performers, writers, directors, musicians and visual artists. Now a festival institution, the opening saw an invasion of the Melbourne City Square, with a quintessentially ’80s titled (6000-people-strong) party, ‘The Next Wave Boogie’.

1985 Next Wave Festival

Before the Melbourne Festival was launched off the back of Spoleto, 1985 ushered in the state’s major arts festival. In the year of Victoria’s 150th Anniversary and International Youth Year, Next Wave was as timely as it was urgent as an expression of the state’s emerging youth arts.

Under direction from Andrew Bleby, the first festival set precedents to be built on in years to come: 80 per cent of events involved young artists, 90 per cent were Australian, and there were 13 regional festivals across Victoria. Figures aside, as one reporter poignantly noted at the time, “at last we don’t have to go to Adelaide”.

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