2008 Next Wave Festival: 15 – 31 May

This May, the Next Wave Festival invites you to get closer to the future of art. With over 400 young and emerging artists from around Australia, the Festival presents two remarkable weeks of genre-busting new works across Melbourne.

Through 61 projects, the 2008 Next Wave Festival will infiltrate the city with visual art, performance, dance, new media, literature, hybrid projects and more. Next Wave’s artists will caress, confront and ensnare audiences with their fearless, multifaceted approach to making art: pushing the boundaries of existing media and creating some new ones in the process.

More than 50 artists from interstate and 5 artists from across the seas, as well as hundreds of local artists will converge on Melbourne to grab the arts industry by the seat of its pants and thrust it into the public domain with startling public projects, unexpected performances and invigorating discourse. The Next Wave Festival Club at the Mercat Cross Hotel will be buzzing with ideas throughout the day during the Polyphonic workshops and forums, and sparkling at night as artists, audiences and passers by come together to exchange ideas, dance moves and phone numbers every night of the festival.

Young indigenous artists come to the fore throughout the Festival, embracing modern arts practices including hybrid performance styles, collaborative writing, puppetry, digital technology, reworked classical theatre and photography to tell stories of identity and their people.

Themed Closer Together, the 2008 Next Wave Festival can be experienced down a phone line; over the internet; in seedy hotel rooms; in Fed Square’s hidden underground bunker; beneath the Tullamarine Freeway; in nightclub toilets; and up the flank of St Paul’s Cathedral. Moreover, the Next Wave Festival will continue to invite audiences to experience Melbourne’s galleries and theatres – traditional and new. Further projects will slip into bars and onto footpaths, over billboards, through laundromats, high up on rooftops, and three light years into outer space.

Next Wave Artistic Director Jeff Khan says,
“The rise of global culture is compelling us to live out our personal lives in very impersonal arenas. The 2008 Next Wave Festival creates spaces for vulnerability, intimacy, transgression and exchange, and offers a rare chance for audiences to see the future of Australian contemporary art.”

The 2008 Next Wave Festival will explore new ideas and, for a couple of weeks in May, plunge Australian art and culture into the future, and beyond.

LISTING INFORMATION
Dates: 15th – 31st May
Venues: Various venues around Melbourne, regional Victoria and beyond
Tickets: Most events are free. For the few ticketed shows check the Next Wave website for details.
Bookings info, show details and everything else: www.nextwave.org.au