Melbourne International Arts Festival
acknowledges the Wurundjeri/Woiwurrung
and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation
on whose country these events take place.
We pay our deepest respects to all Elders
—past, present and emerging.
Welcome
I arrived in Melbourne four years
ago with one defining question:
‘What do you give the city that’s
got everything?’
Once the Board had confirmed
that an iTunes voucher wasn’t
going to cut it, I sat with everyone
I could, from Kulin Elders to
artistic visionaries, from festival
tragics to city legends, to
begin the dark art of defining
the grand vision from which to
summon a set of festivals.
‘Only connect!’ said E.M. Forster
in Howards End, ‘Only connect
the prose and the passion, and
both will be exalted.’
For 35 years the Melbourne
International Arts Festival has
looked for new and unexpected
ways to connect Melbourne
with the rest of the world, to
connect a complex past with the
emerging future, and to connect
the passion of artists with the
prose of society.
These three imperatives are as
alive today as ever, but a fourth
has emerged: to allow us all to
connect with each other, in new
spaces and contexts.
In a world in which digital
disruption has become
business as usual, in which we
think of ‘connecting’ in terms
of how soon we can politely
ask someone for their Wi-Fi
password, the role of this
festival is to create the most
astonishing individual and
group experiences both digital
and analogue, with artists as
the navigators and us, the
audiences, as the explorers.
This year’s Festival has been
designed to be sharply focused,
to create energy and urgency.
Following the build-up of
pressure and tension, we want
the Festival to be the moment
of lightning: charged by the
friction of ideas, engagement
and exploration, harnessed in
the aftermath to create energy,
debate and inspiration.
We start where we should always
start, with the first words being
spoken by the First Peoples
of this land, the Eastern Kulin
Nation, sharing some of the
oldest culture on earth and
welcoming us onto their land.
From there we each follow our
own paths around the city and
around the world, experiencing
the solitary and the communal,
the epic and the intimate,
magic and truth. Experiences
selected to be irresistible in this
already well-served city, to be
constantly surprising and fresh,
to give you what you want but
not what you expect.
And so please find enclosed my
final Melbourne International
Arts Festival. I am deeply proud
of the incredible moments we
have shared over the past few
years and am equally excited
about the ones that lie ahead.
Festivals are fuelled by hope,
one of the few infinitely
renewable resources, and are
equally audacious. In this year’s
Festival I hope we will all find
endless opportunities to truly
connect.
The Wi-Fi password is Melbf@st1,
by the way.
Jonathan Holloway
— ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
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