“You should be able to sit on a tree stump and stare at light hitting the river for three hours and just bliss out,” says Benney. “That is an essential part of it, though it’s not necessarily on the program. The point of this festival, for us, is not to just build three or four giant stages that people stand around at all weekend. You can do that anywhere in the world. There’s nothing special about that.
“You can do so much more interesting stuff at a festival. That’s where you really have the opportunity to change people’s lives, by not giving them what they expect. People might come here for a big DJ or a big band, and then find themselves drinking samurai-style tea at two in the morning or at a workshop doing an ice immersion bath with a bunch of complete strangers.”
Heading up this year’s lineup is Detroit techno producer Carl Craig, along with Americana ensemble Dirtwire, hip hop artist Hoj and a laundry list of musicians and DJs from around Australia, Europe, South America and Japan. Moving into a new, larger space has given the festival an opportunity to open a variety of new stages, from ‘The Grove’, where party acts like Hiatus Kaiyote and Nightmares on Wax will perform, to ‘The Village’, a more low-key space combining live performance with art displays and shiatsu massage.
Workshops will run the gamut, from hula hooping and meditation, to crafting workshops; teaching attendees how to make dreamcatchers, macrame plant hangers and screen-printed tees.
Benney hopes that this year’s Strawberry Fields will be a chance to push back against the increasing commodification and wastefulness of music events: selfie sticks are on the banned items list, alongside fireworks and illicit drugs.
“The scene that we grew up in, you drove into the middle of nowhere, and half the time, you wouldn’t know what was happening,” says Benney. “It was raw. It was about coming out into nature for a transformational experience, not to be on Instagram, not to carry your phone around the whole weekend, not to compare yourself to other people, but to open yourself up to new experiences with a positive mindset. These days, festivals in general, whether they’re what people perceive as commercial or what people perceive as underground, are consistently being dominated by quite a superficial energy. That’s something we really want to move away from.”
Attendees looking for a breather between jams can retreat to the tea lounge, a placid space overseen by tea master Hannah Dupree, former proprietor of the Storm in a Tea Cup cafe. Dupree will provide free tea, ranging from traditional matcha to oolong, and other Asian varieties.
Strawberry Fields’ tea lounge provides a more social and engaging alternative to the chill-out stages found at other music festivals, says Benney.
“Believe it or not, for someone who runs a festival, I don’t like to stay up all night and go from blasting stage to blasting stage,” says Benney. “This is a space you can go to be engaged, rather than just sitting on the dirt and listening to some ambient beats. It’s a space that you go to spend time with your friends, spend time with some strangers, drink some delicious blends of tea and kick it, but in an engaged way, not in a passive way.”
This year’s festival has been engineered to help attendees make new friends and have unexpected experiences, on top of the expected music and workshops, says Benney.
“If you talk to someone on the tram in Melbourne and they don’t know who you are, they’ll think you’re crazy, but, at a festival that’s completely fine,” she says. “We want to leverage that openness to try to feed people some new information. We’d like to give them some kind of inspiration they can take away into their lives, the other 362 days of the year.”
