“This year’s Melbourne Festival covers an enormous range,” says Festival Director, Josephine Ridge. “There are shows aimed at disrupting our thinking with visual arts as performance, theatre as choral experience, and classical music getting together with the world’s best techno DJs. We offer the purity of tradition as well as the boldness of the contemporary.”
Highlights of the 2014 contemporary music program feature an exclusive concert of Light From the Outside World, which sees Detroit techno titan Jeff Mills join forces with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at Hamer Hall, award-winning composer Clint Mansell will perform a sweeping retrospective of his film compositions including his famed score of Requiem For A Dream, while the Foxtel Festival Hub will return to the banks of the Yarra with performances from German composer and pianist Nils Frahm, the world premiere of Pop Crimes: The Songs of Rowland S Howard, Mikelangelo’s album launch, Buck 65, Since I Left You: A Celebration of the Avalanches and much more.
This year will see the festival shine a spotlight on circus, with performances from groups from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia featuring Cirque Eloize, Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe, Circa, NICA, Flying Fruit Fly Circus, Dislocate, D’Irque & Fien and Circus Oz.
Other highlights include the legendary Heiner Goebbels’ When the Mountain Changed Its Clothing which will feature an epic-scale production with 40 teenage girls from Slovenia, Carsten Holler’s life-size Golden Mirror Carousel will light up the NGV, a major new architecture commission and design event MPavilion which will take over the city and the world premiere of Anouk Van Dijk and Falk Richter’s theatre collaboration Complexity of Belonging.
