DreamBIG Children's Festival Celebrates 50th Birthday

DreamBIG Children’s Festival is revered for several reasons.

First of all, celebrating its fiftieth birthday this year, it happens to be the oldest children’s festival in the world.

It boasts over 50 events, shows, workshops, and installations for families to enjoy. It allows children to engage in a range of creative activities. Crucially, it allows children to engage in these activities for free, allowing creativity and fun to be accessible to all.

The festival, which takes place this year from May 7th to May 17th, is a wonderful opportunity for children with a variety of different interests and backgrounds to have fun and to be artistically challenged.

Local music extravaganza Thea Martin - known for being a mainstay in several musical projects on Kaurna Land, including Twine and Any Young Mechanic - has been involved with DreamBIG Children’s Festival before as a music educator, running a series of workshops in schools with disabilities units around a locally written story called The Nest, through the progressive organisation Connecting the Dots In Music. On Sunday however, for the first time, Martin performed with their very own musical project, short snarl, for the children, who swayed and danced in giddy circles, and occasionally contributed dissonant chimes and shrieks.

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“Children’s festivals are so important,” Martin says. “I love that DreamBIG not only offers public programming in the centre of the city, but also reaches to schools right across the state.

“Having the opportunity to be involved in the festival through a different part of my artistic practice as a performing musician is so exciting. I love performing in public spaces, I love performing outside. I love that people have the opportunity to hear music outside of the context of night clubs and pubs. And it can be something that is for everyone in a safe, welcoming, child-centred environment.”

Speaking as a versatile and committed music educator, Martin adds, “Music and arts education is still very inequitable across South Australia, or across Australia more broadly. Having access to arts education, particularly before the age of seven, is so important for young people’s development and for accessing a holistic education.

“I had the privilege of engaging with music education at a really young age, actually not through my school, but through lessons that my parents supported me to access. As someone who now works in schools and works with people as young as five right through to seventeen-year-olds, I know how important and how life-changing access to arts education can be for a sense of community, for a connection to self.”

The DreamBIG festivities continue, for free, until May 17th.