FESTIVAL
Fresh from directing the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, creative director Greg Clarke promises to overflow Launceston with a riotous swath of fun acts
Creative director Greg Clarke reveals his rambunctious plans for Launceston’s Junction Arts Festival
When it comes to festivals, trying to create an authentic street-party atmosphere is a bit like capturing lightning in a bottle. Getting all the conditions just right can be an elusive balance. It requires not just the right kind of events and attractions, but also a certain attitude from the festival-goers and sense of community spirit.
Now in its seventh year, and under the guidance of creative director Greg Clarke for the second time, Launceston’s Junction Arts Festival might just have cracked that winning formula. With his past experience of directing the Adelaide Fringe Festival for five years from 2011-2015, and as creative director of the most recent Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, it is fair to say Clarke knows how to plan a party.
While the festival has a firm focus on Tasmanian artists and performers, most being from Launceston, Clarke has also used his Fringe Festival contacts to bring in some top acts from elsewhere. The other lesson he learnt from his time with Fringe, he says, is the importance of having a central hub to give people a place to gather and for festival activities to branch out from.
When Clarke introduced Princes Square as the Junction Arts Festival hub last year, full of kids’ activities, food vans and the popular Fountain Bar, attendance figures tripled, hitting 6000.
“The Fringe Festival is the one I’ve taken the most from,” Clarke says. “Adelaide Fringe has its festival hub in the parklands and the community just loves coming together in one central space. I wanted to recreate that in Launceston.
“With a hub like that, audiences don’t just go to see a show. They go to make it a whole day, a whole night, they eat and drink
and see a show while they’re there. A lot of what is in the square is free – people can just come along, turn up, enjoy being there in that party atmosphere and hopefully while they’re there they might say, ‘Hey, the show in that tent looks interesting’. Then they can buy a ticket and see that as well.”
Running for five days from September 6, Junction covers visual arts, music and performance, offering everything from public art installations and art walks to concerts, cabaret shows and a food and wine tour. The festival encourages people to appreciate the city’s distinctive federation and art-deco architecture, with sitespecific performances and installations in and around many of the city’s most interesting buildings. And, of course, there is a strong emphasis on local artists and performers.
While Junction is a huge contrast to something as big as Mardi Gras, Clarke approaches it with the same mindset, of making the event as fun and ebullient as it can be.
“I like to create something special and unique for the community, whether that event is big or small,” he says.
“We don’t have the big budget of something such as Mofo, but what we do have is a community that is very engaged, so we have created a festival that is very niche, immersive, very intimate.”
Princes Square will once again host the Fountain Bar, a fully licensed bar with a free music program that will run throughout the festival. There will also be a light show at the Val d’Osne fountain each evening, which will be the starting point for the Nightlight self-guided art walk through the city, taking in some specially commissioned artworks, performances and installations around the precinct.
Attractions along this walk include cartoonist Ben Winwood drawing live in a shop window illuminated by UV light, an ongoing dance performance by Stompin, a youth dance company outside Chalmers Church, and sculpture inside St John’s Church.
“Earlier this year we did something called the Stompin Youth Choreographic Project, and this will be an extension of that,” Stompin artistic director Caitlin Comerford says. “We just finished a show at UTAS, where young people made their own choreographic short works, and the Junction performance will feature a full program of these short works, where the audience actually journey through the work as the dancers perform.”
Launceston designer Paul Murphy is excited about his sculpture project Traces being installed in St John’s Church for the festival.
“It’s made from styrofoam, basically, and it’s supposed to look like sea stacks, rose quartz formations, drawing on the history of the original Lake Pedder with its quartzite sands,” he says.
“I was organising a music festival at Lake Pedder and learnt the significance of the site while I was there, so this is inspired by that. St John’s Church is this large cavernous space. I think it will look really effective.”
A trained architect, Murphy prefers to use his skills for sculpture than building design. “I always enjoyed using styrofoam for making architectural models, so I just took it a step further,” he says.
Another popular event at Junction is the all-female concert series When She Believes, which started at the 2015 festival as a showcase for emerging and established female musicians from Tasmania.
Launceston indie-folk singer Tiarni Cane, 24, is thrilled to be playing her second Junction festival.
“It’s great to have that platform. For some of the performers it is their first time performing like this, so it’s an amazing opportunity,” she says.
“The original music scene has really taken off in Launceston over the past couple of years, and it’s so well-received. We have such great support and great numbers through the doors.”
Cane was born in Launceston and describes herself as one of the typical Launcestonian youths who flew the coop as soon as she was able to jump on a plane to the mainland.
“I was freshly 19 years old and I was only away for a couple of months before I realised it was too expensive,” she laughs.
“I’ve always loved Launceston. I think I just needed that time away to really appreciate it. When I was 19, there wasn’t anything here for me as a musician. If you wanted to play you had to do a covers gig, and the people in the pub weren’t there to hear you, they were just there for the cheap booze. But now it’s completely different. People are open to original music now.”
The cabaret and comedy program includes two different shows from critically acclaimed Michael Griffiths: In Vogue, in which he performs Madonna’s greatest hits and takes the audience on a journey through the singer’s life; and Sweet Dreams, in which he performs the work of Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics.
Also on the cabaret ticket is Georgina Symes playing Uta Uber Kool Ja, a faded rock diva taking a small, intimate audience into a hotel room at the Grand Chancellor for a rock’n’roll after-party like no other. It is said that by the end of the show, everyone is in the same bed with her.
There is live theatre, with Launceston’s newest theatre company Relevant performing the Evan Placey play Pronoun, which explores the changing dynamics of a young romance when one of the pair changes gender. And Mudlark Theatre Company will perform a new work, commissioned especially for Junction, called ULG, exploring life, death and the lies we tell ourselves just to stay sane.
The popular Tweed Run is back, inviting members of the public to don their best tweedy fashions and join together for a bike ride around the city – led by a penny-farthing and culminating with cucumber sandwiches and Pimms, naturally.
If all you want to do is dance, Tasdance will lead a weekend of free workshops at their Wellington St studio. Meanwhile, the Tamar Valley Taste Trip, a tour of the region’s wineries with a gourmet barbecue, has already sold out.
Clarke hopes the festival will create a new perspective of the Northern Capital in the eyes of those who attend.
“I think the people of Launceston love that it is a celebration of this city and its artists,” he says. The Junction Arts Festival runs from Wednesday, September 6, to Sunday, September 10, with free and paid events around the CBD area, centring on the festival hub at Princes Square. For full details of all events, visit junctionartsfestival.com.au or look out for the little green booklet in various businesses around Launceston