Next Wave Festival

The tradition & historical record

Next Wave is a biennial festival based in Melbourne, which promotes and showcases the work of young and emerging artists. Next Wave encourages interdisciplinary practice and fosters the creation and presentation of works by emerging artists working across a broad range of art forms, including dance, theatre, visual arts, performance, new media, and literature. Next Wave is also an artist development organisation and in non-festival years, it runs a development program called Kickstart Helix (formerly Kickstart) with the potential of their works being performed in the following year's festival program. In August 2007, Next Wave presented Free Play: The Next Wave Independent Game Developers' Conference, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. ¹

Next Wave was established in 1984, under the direction of Founding Director Andrew Bleby. The first Next Wave Festival took place in 1985, and established its focus on developing and presenting work by young Australian artists. From 1998 onwards, the festival has occurred biennially. Next Wave is supported principally through Arts Victoria, the City of Melbourne, and the Australia Council for the Arts. In 2006, the then Minister for the Arts, Mary Delahunty, announced a funding increase to Victorian festivals (following a strategic funding review), with Next Wave receiving $350,000 in annual funding. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the 2020 festival to go virtual. ¹

Forgoing a Festival theme, Director Georgie Meagher invited artists to 'think wide, listen deep and go long'. The event ran 5–22 May and was clustered into geographic precincts across Melbourne, presenting work in a series of both traditional and unique spaces, including the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, an underground carpark, and a storage unit. 37 projects spanned the Festival, including theatre, dance, visual art, music, parties and workshops. Highlights include Nat Randall's 24-hour epic The Second Woman at ACMI; Pony Express's Ecosexual Bathhouse; The Delta Project's Under My Skin; Maurial Spearim's BlaaQ Catt, a series of Indigenous Language Workshops hosted in partnership with Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, and a Writers in Residence program for writers with disability. Next Wave Festival 2016 was the organisation's most inclusive and accessible yet for artists and audiences with disability, and in recognition Next Wave was awarded a VicHealth Award for Building Health Through Arts. ¹

Artistic Director Emily Sexton asked artists to respond to the idea of the 'New Grand Narrative' for the 2014 festival taking place 1–11 May. Specifically the festival was offering the following ideas to be explored, "How do we come to care about things we're not interested in? The information we encounter is increasingly curated. And we have increased ability to filter that which doesn't add to our worldview. There are less pages of the newspaper to turn, more apps to buy and I don't have to follow you if you're not relevant. What are the grand narratives of our time? How do we come to understand them and whose voices create their meaning?" 38 commissioned works by 239 artists from across Australia, the Philippines, Korea, Lebanon, Canada and the UK made up the 2014 event. Blak Wave was the keynote initiative of the 2014 Festival, presenting major commissions, public conversations and a publication that explored the future of Indigenous art. 2014 Victorian Green Room Awards nominations included: ¹

HOME by Brienna Macnish Fluvial by Matthias Schack-Arnott (WINNER) Terminal by Dylan Sheridan Personal Mythologies by Shian Law Wael Zuaiter: Unknown by Creative Nonfiction (WINNER) Madonna Arms by I'm Trying to Kiss You Next Wave Festival 2014 for Curatorial Contribution to Contemporary Performance ¹

The Next Wave Festival unfolded from 19 to 27 May 2012. Its theme was 'The space between us wants to sing' and was Emily Sexton's first festival as Artistic Director. The theme was explored by artists in a variety of ways including No Show's interactive theatre piece, Shotgun Wedding and The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere by Asian-Australian artists Abdul Abdullah, Nathan Beard and Casey Ayres. This part-installation part-performance piece took place in the National Gallery of Victoria. Several works were nominated for various categories of the Green Room Awards including: ¹

The River Eats by Justin Shoulder Bingo Unit by Team Mess Flyway by Elizabeth Dunn The Stream / The Boat / The Shore / The Bridge by Dan Koop & Co. Blindscape by Skye Gellann Monster Body by Atlanta Eke Supertone by Rennie McDougall Hiatus by Fiona Bryant & Lucy Farmer "The Stream / The Boat / The Shore / The Bridge" was subsequently awarded Outstanding Production – Creative Agency For Audiences. ¹

Can art be challenging and meaningful in a risk-averse, overly cautious society obsessed with security, OH&S policies and micro-management of behaviour? The 2010 Next Wave Festival's theme, 'No Risk Too Great', was a challenge to the artists to be ambitious and see what art can achieve while asking the question: is our society and our art too safe? Next Wave opened up new spaces for artists to explore this question. Building on the momentum of previous Festivals, the 2010 Festival brought together around 53 projects and over 300 artists from Victoria, Australia and across Asia. Popular highlights were Bennett Miller's Dachshund U.N., the Sports Club Project at the MCG and the Festival Club. It was also Jeff Khan's final festival in the role of Artistic Director. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Next Wave Festival”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Next Wave Festival is Australian arts festival, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ²