Returning for its 18th yearly instalment from Wednesday September 18 to Sunday September 29, additional funding means that this year’s Darebin Music Feast will undergo a major revamp. The festival’s new Artistic Director Ciel Fuller confirms that the event will be of greater proportions than in the past. “When I came they said ‘we’ve got a budget increase for a curated program and we’ve brought you onboard to take it to this next level’.”
Music Feast has been operating since 1996, but hitherto it’s had a fairly basic structure.
“Essentially until now the Music Feast program has consisted of all of the shows that the venues register to be included, plus in recent years a small program put on in the Northcote Town Hall as part of an artist support program. It’s really good for presenting new and experimental sort of work,” says Fuller.
This year Music Feast will extend well beyond Northcote to permeate the whole Darebin region with a variety of gigs, community activities, pop-up bars and food vendors. One of the most important advents will be a festival hub located at Northcote Town Hall Civic Square. The free entry hub provides a central community meeting point and Fuller is emphatic that the centre of activity will allow people of all ages to get involved. “I decided that we really need a festival hub space. The introduction of what we’ve dubbed the ‘Bain Marie’ is going to be really fun. I’ve programmed that night and day, everything in there is free and kid friendly.”
A further interactive initiative of this year’s Music Feast is the Street Feast program, which will deliver a multitude of relaxed and accessible activities all over Darebin, from Westgarth to Preston. Fuller enthuses that Street Feast is likely to unearth plenty of hidden talent.
“Part of that is a really fun space that I’m putting in called Banana Island, which will be on the corner of Bayview and High Street in front of the Orthodox Church. It will have this great installation that I found called the S.S. SingSong; it’s a karaoke caravan. It will be really fun! I’m going to put a little community stage/busker’s stage in that space as well.”
Despite the broadened dimensions of the Music Feast, Fuller affirms that it will continue to be an undiluted showcase of the area’s artistic core, dismissing any chance Darebin will follow a similar path to the glossy growth of their Southern neighbours. “You know how you’ve got things like ‘Queensland: beautiful one day, perfect the next’? In our team we all say ‘Keeping Darebin Weird’ – that’s a bit of a mantra for us. We would never seek to interfere with or to stifle or to gentrify that bohemian, big awkward family kind of identity.”
Fuller explains that throughout planning the festival, she has been following a subtle conceptual framework, motivated by this appraisal of the Darebin arts scene as a ‘big awkward family’. “I’ve been using the Wes Anderson films as a reference point. There’s so many beautiful connections.” Indeed a semblance can be identified between Music Feast’s encouragement of unconventional and sometimes oddball or mismatched artistic expression and the quirky content of many Anderson films (such as The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited).
“They always have this dominant theme of really eclectic, eccentric, interesting and creative families and friendship structures. I see that as a really beautiful fit with the Darebin municipality as well,” says Fuller. Wes Anderson’s thematic focus is not simply an abstract reference point, and Fuller reveals that the festival’s visual aesthetic takes it lead from the highly stylised look of Anderson’s films. “I went to my designers and said ‘I want you to get all the local live music venues and create little cardboard cutaway/pop-ups, almost little theatre sets, of each venue in the same that Wes Anderson uses that cutaway effect; especially in the Life Aquatic where they cut the whole submarine in half and go through it.’ I gave the designers a strict colour palette they had to use as well.”
The festival’s curated program will present performances from Howlin Steam Train, Quarry Mountain Dead Rats, Royal Jelly Dixieland Band, Chris Russell Chicken Walk, Chook Race, The Tiger & Me, as well as including guest speakers and music comedy. Fuller explains how important community inclusive music events are for encouraging unity and progressive thought in the City of Darebin.
“There’s a lot of studies that show that community and music festivals are a really great way to service council well-being strategies. You know, since we got rid of the washing holes and we all got washing machines, there’s no places where people have to come together as a community anymore. Councils know that community arts, as in free access arts events, are really important for building community resilience, community connectedness and also community identity.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
