THE ARTS/FESTIVALS	MARCH 2, 1998 NO. 9
	Arts Inc. It's not for love alone that Australia and New Zealand spend millions on culture-fests: business benefits as much as art By MICHAEL FITZGERALD n an inner-city warehouse, Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras parade director Brenton Kewley watches 15 artists at work on pieces of a giant surreal puzzle. "I can see stars and cones and dinosaur ribs and balls and triangles and swords and globes of the world, Roman columns and..." The full picture will not be revealed until Feb. 28, when half a million people are expected to cheer 300 floats along Oxford Street in the world's biggest celebration of homosexual subculture. A day earlier, at the Adelaide Festival launch, artistic director Robyn Archer will watch her own vision ignite with a procession of flame artists, dragon boats and a Belgian-singing opera chorus along the River Torrens. She hopes her first festival, like Mardi Gras, will take on a life of its own. Says Archer: "Something bigger than just the sum of the shows is going on." Certainly the business and hype of festivals can loom larger than the art. In Western Australia, as his 23rd Festival of Perth unfurls, director David Blenkinsop is already at work on his program for 2002. "Life goes on," he says. So does festival business: the Adelaide and Mardi Gras events pull in around $13 million and $27 million respectively; in terms of raising Australia's cultural profile abroad, their effect is incalculable. "These festivals are incredibly important," says Australian Tourist Commission managing director John Morse. "At a more esoteric level, they actually help define what a country is. At the more pragmatic end, they generate significant additional income. The other aspect, of course, is that these festivals are a powerful promotional tool for us." The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan uses 3,500 kg of rice to create a mood of Zen-like ritual in each performance of Songs of the Wanderers. But before the first grain falls in Adelaide, Archer must sell her festival to the locals. "I do two or three addresses a day saying BUY BUY BUY," says the actress and singer, a noted interpreter of the Brecht/Weill song repertoire. "My head is everywhere, including on the backs of buses." There's pressure to bring the $7 million biennial event home on budget, after Barrie Kosky's 1996 festival suffered a $400,000 loss. The $5.8 million New Zealand International Festival of the Arts, which opens with a dawn ceremony in Wellington on Feb. 27, also has eyes on the bottom line. "At the end of the day it's important that the finances work out," says artistic director Joseph Seelig, "otherwise you can't do another festival." Archer, though, doesn't want her party hijacked by economics. "If that's all you've got to talk about, your festival's dead in the water." Adelaide's true value, she says, "as with all great celebrations, lies in its ephemeral aspects, what it does culturally." While Adelaide readies itself for the Old Testament in Hebrew, the sacred sounds of Hildegard von Bingen, and Robert Lepage's The Seven Streams of the River Ota, the Mardi Gras--whose final parade "is the jewel in the crown," says festival director Jonathan Parsons--has been pushing the cultural envelope in Sydney for the past month. Mardi Gras has blurred the border between mainstream and fringe, taking over Government House for a chamber music series, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (where Indian watercolorist Bhupen Khakha's An Old Man from Vasad Who Had Five Penises Suffered a Runny Nose has raised more smiles than stir) and the Opera House. More cutting-edge was performance artist Groovii Biscuit, whose one-woman show mixed drag with body painting and simulated sex with a TV set. "Educational and subversive--that's really what a festival should be about," says Burlesque Tour director Barrie Kosky. While some see it as just a jolly parade, Mardi Gras was born of precisely such a desire to inform and challenge. "The politics has changed very much in 20 years," Parsons says of the festival, which grew out of a 1978 street march and riot that led to 53 arrests. "It's not just about placards marching down the street anymore." Festivals have the power to move not just communities but nations. "There was a time when the first thing every newly independent country did was get a new flag, an airline and then a festival, like some sign of virility," says Seelig. Yet festivals need not be empty symbols. Australia's Olympic Arts Festivals, which began with last year's indigenous Festival of the Dreaming, hope to explore rather than trumpet a national culture: this year's A Sea Change will chart the impact of migration in a series of events staged nationwide over five months; in next year's Reaching the World, Australian culture will travel overseas through festivals, concerts and exhibits; then eyes will return to Sydney for 2000's Harbour of Life. "It's this time capsule of Australian culture," says Olympic Arts Festivals & Events general manager Craig Hassall. "Whatever we do over these four years will end up in the archives of the Olympic Museum in Lausanne telling people in 100 years time what Australia was about culturally at the end of the century." To be meaningful, festivals need both a sense of place and a clear mission--which the festivals of Perth, Adelaide and Mardi Gras all share, whether through the tyranny of distance (Adelaide and Perth) or of sexuality (Mardi Gras). "They sprang unconsciously from a community need," says Kosky, "and have maintained their roots within those communities." Along the way, they have become incubators for groundbreaking new work. "It's a gamble, but one that the major international festivals have to play," says Blenkinsop, who commissioned the memorable Mimi and this year's theatrical odyssey, Cloudstreet. Already Archer has 15 new works planned for her 2000 festival: "I want to celebrate the new," she says. So does the city of Wellington, which this week premieres the opera Alley, a collaboration between local and Chinese artists about the New Zealand revolutionary Rewi Alley, who joined China's peasant uprising. Says Seelig: "A festival is at least as much about creating work and developing talent for the future as it is a catalogue shopping expedition." And about creating a bridge to business. Increasingly companies see festivals as vehicles for niche marketing, and the festivals are happy to oblige. Telecommunications giant Telstra sees Mardi Gras and Adelaide festival-goers, 25% of whom come from interstate or overseas, as ideal markets for its long-distance services. "If we can manage these events, think what we can do for your business," says Telstra's group manager for sponsorship and the Olympics, Adam Jeffrey. Yet art czars hope festival-goers will be embraced by more than market forces. "If you let art touch you," says Robyn Archer, "you can imagine a different world, a different life, different values." Just ask New Zealand cabaret star Mika, who has festival-hopped around the world after a successful season at last year's Edinburgh Festival. "It really has changed my whole career," says Mika, whose one-man show mixing Maori haka with Burt Bacharach travels to Wellington after stints in Sydney and Perth. But with a three-and-a-half-octave range, "you have to start watching your voice," he says. Mika's not the only one feeling exhausted. In the festival world, there's no such thing as too much. --With Reporting by Simon Robinson /Auckland
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