The next Next Wave Festival will run from the 19th to the 27th of May 2012.

Its theme is The space between us wants to sing.

Our nation-wide call-out for 2012 Next Wave Festival projects has now closed.

Read more about our Next Wave Festivals.

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The space between us wants to sing

The 2012 Next Wave Festival Theme

I’d like to send you an invitation.

In this time where a sense pervades of perpetual threat, constant competition and fearful individualism, it has become increasingly important that we gather. And while we’re here, I’m going to insist on three things: we make art that is generous, is curious and is difficult.

Our work won’t be made for art’s sake, nor will it be made for people’s sake. It will resolutely occupy a shared and common ground where discoveries can be made, new thoughts can be found and open minds can abound. We will go straight to the rumbling points of tension and absorb it under our fingertips. We will beat new voids into being and then fill them with song. We will share this work with as many souls as possible.

If we’re to offer original ideas, stories and visions that are relevant for a world facing this extended emergency, then we need to be genuinely paying attention to the guy who drives the tram. We can then make work that’s interesting and complex, because that’s what people are.

Necessarily political and possibly noble, the 2012 Next Wave Festival will move us towards a more tender society, of thoughtful questions and honest dances. Forget 5, 10, 20 year plans; I’m not sure we have that much time left. What stories are so vital that they must be told tomorrow? What ideas will fundamentally shift our world if we execute them the next time we walk out the door?

Next Wave is Australia’s leading contemporary arts festival for young and emerging artists. And yet our artists are just half of the story. Because those who are watching, participating and putting flesh on the bones of our ideas, are ensuring that our art can exist at all. The 2012 Next Wave Festival will see the creation of new, exciting and urgent art being discovered by curious, and in some cases quite unwitting people – and it is at this precise point of exchange that we will create the festival that’s needed.

This invitation doesn’t prescribe the content of the 2012 Next Wave Festival. It does however frame the way in which the Festival will be made. By asking careful questions – then listening slowly for the answers – we will ensure our art can leave its own field, and become visible as part of something else.

No longer simply ‘artists’ and ‘audiences’, the 2012 Next Wave Festival invites both to soar into a courageous new artistic landscape where it just may be possible to find solutions for contemporary society’s most heartbreaking, most ignored, and most difficult questions.

I very much hope you will lend a small amount of your time and wisdom to our undertaking.

Emily Sexton
Artistic Director
Next Wave

Download the 2012 Next Wave Festival theme HERE (pdf, 300kb).

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IMAGE: Trees on Teshima, Japan. By Paul Davis.