The Wild (and arty) West
THE small West Coast community of Queenstown will become Tasmania’s arts capital for one wild weekend this October, with the program for this year’s Unconformity festival officially launched in Hobart last night.
Originally known as the Queenstown Heritage & Arts Festival, the biennial event was renamed The Unconformity in 2016 and attracted big crowds to the remote mining town.
This year’s festival, which runs from October 19-21, will open with sound artist Dylan Sheridan’s Tectonica, with “bloody big speaker stacks on the main street” used to explore the West Coast’s geological history and celebrate the region’s most recent big geological event — AC/DC’s visit in 1976.
Participatory sound performances will include Halcyon Macleod and Finegan Kruckemeyer’s immersive audio-based walking tour The Falls; Richie Cyngler’s durational work Listening, which is set in an old limestone quarry; Tom Blake and Dominique Chen’s “roaming sounds work” A Score to Scratch the Surface; and Prospect, which invites visitors to “strike it rich” by exploring Queenstown’s Passion Park with a metal detector.
Hunters & Collectors frontman Mark Seymour and Australian blues and roots legend Jeff Lang will perform at Queenstown’s art deco Para- gon Theatre; and the festival will feature the premieres of Thomas E.S. Kelly’s dance piece Junjeiri Ballun — Gurul Gaureima and the three-part miniseries A Diary of Lost Memories, part of the Tasmanian Ghost Town Project.
The Unconformity Art Trail will feature works by 20 West Coast-based visual artists; and there will also be stand-alone exhibitions by Raymond Arnold, Lucy Bleach, Selena de Caravalho, Helena Demczuk, Chris Wilson and more.
The festival will conclude on the Sunday with the Unconformity Cup football match between the West and the Rest, played on Queenstown’s infamous gravel oval.
Unconformity artistic director Travis Tiddy said 95 per cent of this year’s program was created from scratch, in re- sponse to “the ever-changing heart of Queenstown”.
“We aim to mine new ideas that challenge the status-quo, redefining perceptions of what’s possible in our special part of the world,” he said.
Details and bookings: www.theunconformity.com.au