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What you see in the LA Festival is not what I think is important.
- Peter Sellars (2002: 137)
Site-Specific Problems in Festival Performances
Mention that a "problem" occurred within the context of the staging of the Alice Desert Festival and you would not surprise anyone who has had experience any of the Festival's iterations, as a performer or as an audience member. The Alice Desert Festival is an arts festival. By design, arts festivals rely on a whole heap of do-it-yourself initiative and a spirit of collaboration and adaptation that is directly related to converting public spaces into performance venues. What's more, the Alice Desert Festival is a community-based regional festival, markedly limited by a set of budgetary and infrastructural parameters: all the more reliance on the do-it-yourself initiative.
The Alice Desert Festival had its start in 2001, and was developed out of the place-based interests of small groups of local residents. It runs for approximately 10 days on a yearly basis, and features a combination of work by professional and non-professional artists, locals and visitors. Operating on a budget in the hundreds of thousands, which is generated by local, state and Commonwealth competitive funding schemes, the festival is supervised by a volunteer executive committee or "board" and employs approximately 4-6 foil-time artists, organizers and technicians for a modest stipend during the months immediately before and during the festival. It relies on the volunteer labor of hundreds of community members.
Regional community arts festivals in Australia serve a unique function in the cultural landscape of this relatively young Commonwealth nation (British arrive in 1788; nationhood in 1901), whose population (which just exceeded 23 million in April of 2013) is disproportionate to the size of its land-mass (7.7 million km squared, though much of that is considered to be uninhabitable) and whose citizens live and work, by overwhelming majority, in five cities on the east and west coasts of the continent (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide). These big cities have their big festivals, which run annually on budgets in the millions and which draw international attention, audiences, artistic participation and even direction. Scholars have only recently begun to investigate the smaller regional festivals,1 in part because they are a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact,...