Art and rare optimism in tough times

Bleach* Festival artistic director Rosie Dennis is staying positive despite the COVID-enforced postponement of the Coast’s celebration of the arts — and she now sees a major silver lining when the festival returns in November

WITH ANN WASON MOORE

ROSIE Dennis gazes up at the cloudless sky over Nobby Beach.

“I just wish it would pour,” she sighs.

Rosie’s not being melancholy, it’s just that we’re meeting on August 12, the date that the 2020 Bleach* Festival was meant to debut, before the pandemic rained on the world’s plans.

Instead of launching one of the city’s signature cultural events, her first as artistic director, she’s sitting in a beachfront cafe and rueing the brilliant sunshine that would have made its launch picture perfect.

But Rosie’s day will come – on November 12 to be exact. While the 45-year-old refused to allow COVID-19 to cancel her citywide celebration, it’s certainly made an impact. “We had to cancel two headliners just yesterday, we can’t book anyone out of state because we just don’t know what’s going to happen with the borders, we have to future-proof for November,” says Rosie, who lives with her partner and two children next door to her childhood home in Pottsville. “On a personal level,

I may even have to move over the border if they shut down the bubble. It’s a very tricky situation where you have a festival that needs so much scheduling time and a pandemic that constantly changes the boundaries.

“But even in the darkest hour, I could never cancel the festival. I knew we had to send the message that the arts won’t be silenced and the city won’t be silenced.”

Despite the challenges caused by COVID, Rosie says it has also presented enormous opportunities for artists and our city alike.

She says with most of the country and the entire world unable to host cultural events, she is expecting this year’s festival to truly go global – and to take the Gold Coast’s reputation with it.

Now in its ninth year, Bleach* Festival’s large-scale exhibits, cabaret, dance, live music and thought-provoking performances will deliver 11 days of entertainment across three major COVID-safe precincts including Burleigh, Chevron Island and the Gold Coast Regional Botanic Gardens at Benowa.

“I think our foot traffic will understandably be down this year – there are strict limits on how many people we can have in any one space – but I think our digital and media reach will go further than ever,” says Rosie. “The eyes of the world will be on us, on how we host a big event like this, on how we make it safe and how we make it relevant.

“I think it’s really going to help change perceptions of the Gold Coast.”

And in fact, that’s the very reason Rosie decided to join Bleach*.

While she grew up on the Tweed and Gold coasts, she moved to Sydney at the age of 17 and carved a stellar career in the arts. Until 2019, she was the artistic director and chief executive of Urban Theatre Projects in Western Sydney where she curated the award-winning BANKSTOWN: LIVE project, conceived and directed the theatrical triptych Home Country and directed two documentaries – Bre & Back, and One Day For Peace.

So when she announced that she was leaving the NSW capital for the bright lights of the Goldie, the reaction was incredulous.

“People still have this impression that the Gold Coast is meter maids and the whiteshoe brigade. They don’t understand that there is a real cultural scene growing here and the demographics of this city make it one of the youngest and hippest in Australia,” she says.

“There is a lot happening here and now is the perfect opportunity to be a part of it. Not only do we have a safe space to work in, but we have a city that’s young and dynamic and open to change.”

Challenging people’s preconceptions is not just how Rosie works but how she lives.

And it’s yet another reason that she felt drawn back to the Gold Coast, a city whose comfort zone is social conservatism.

“My partner of 26 years is a woman and we have two children,” she says. “In some ways the Gold Coast is quite a grown-up town, but in others it still has an older narrative and I guess me just being me challenges that.

“A perfect example is a child at my son’s school was asking my son if it was true that he had two mums, and he replied that actually he has two dads as well. The other child answered ‘wow, you must be rich’. I love that. The more we own who we are, the more that people accept that.

“I think that’s one of the great things that art can do … it promotes conversations. We just need to be able to talk about things and help people understand they don’t have to fear change.”

Rosie says while the city has changed significantly since she was a teen in the 1990s, there is more work to be done.

She says the cultural heart of the city has grown organically in the southern suburbs, but needs to expand northward up the length of the Coast.

“I think Tom Tate has actually done a great job in investing in the cultural hub at Evandale, while private precincts like Miami Marketta are growing all on their own,” she says. “But there are still gaps. Even in northern NSW, I see some of the same behaviours now as I did in the ’90s. Kids are bored and have nowhere to go so they’re on their bikes looking for mischief, getting into drinking and drugs.

“The arts aren’t going to solve everything but if you have live music happening across the length of the city, you’re going to see people drawn to that rather than making ‘fun’ of their own.

“The cafe and restaurant culture has done a great deal in growing the Coast, but now we need to take it to the next level, to combine dining with arts and entertainment.”

While the disruption of COVID might seem the undoing of many countries, Rosie says it could well be the making of the Gold Coast and beyond.

She says in some ways it is the pandemic we had to have.

“It’s like this happened for a reason, the world needed a huge disruption,” she says.

“This is a huge opportunity to rewrite society, to right the wrongs and to start again. This is the first time the world has really been united in a common goal. The disruption is difficult, I get that. I’m living that. But that’s how we make change. For the Gold Coast specifically, this is our chance to step up and show off. “This is our time to shine.” And maybe, just maybe, it’s blue skies ahead.