Melbourne Festival Director Jonathan Holloway's 2017 Program Reveals The Big Picture

The language of creativity is often a superlative salad: art should be beautiful, moving, astounding, entertaining, and many more glowing adjectives too numerous to mention. But for Melbourne Festival's Director Jonathan Holloway, one descriptor is more apt than all the rest: art should matter.

This ideal is clearly enshrined in his second program for the Victorian capital's flagship arts fest. After nearly 20 years working as a curator, with Melbourne being the fourth city where he has helmed a major arts festival, the British-born director believes his 2017 offering may be the most significant of his career to date. He spoke to The Music about the challenges and triumphs of capturing the spirit of Melbourne, and how art can reveal the big picture.

Check out our selection of the 15 must-see shows of this year's Melbourne Festival program
 

This is an extremely well-heeled program, and certainly in terms of its breadth and scale, easily one of the most vibrant line-ups of 2017. But it also seems to be driven by a strong underlying message about the value and power of diversity in our modern society — a message that has a strong geopolitical resonance at the moment. Did this idea emerge as you developed the program or was it a conscious decision to highlight this from the outset?

For me, this year's Melbourne Festival is one of the most relevant things I've done, because we're living through an important moment in world history right now. If you look at when Cabaret was written, just before WWII, you see all this joy turned into all this horror. And let's be honest, we just don't know what this current moment in the world is, or where it might take us. So, I think as an artist, the most important thing we can ask ourselves is, 'What can I do in this moment? What can I communicate or celebrate or respond to? How can art show us the big picture?'

The thing that excites me about this year's festival is that there are two or three projects that utterly capture and sum up the times we're in. I don't think anything more encapsulates the brilliance of Europe as it has been and as it needs to be than Tree Of Codes. That collaboration could only happen in a world that embraces collaboration across borders. In the Taylor Mac performances, and the opening event Tanderrum, we'll see the coming together of many people for the united purpose of expressing something magical, something powerful and transformational. This is work that matters. It is vital that it is done.

Curating an international festival is a complex combination of aspiration, negotiation, and often, compromise. But it seems, given the prestige of the headline events and the cohesiveness of the program as a whole, that this year's program has changed very little from its original vision.

This year, the stars aligned in so many ways. Some programs you have to keep driving forward, you have to add to them and push them and expand on them, to keep the momentum and the relevance. This year was almost the opposite of that. The job has been to hold it in, to focus it and harness it, because the scale and energy of some events are just enormous. There's work on a scale this year that could not have been placed anywhere last year, but there's also work on intimate scales that still holds true to the fiercely independent art scene in Melbourne. There's not a single redundant piece of work, not a single piece of filler.

Other than the idea of diversity and its importance, are there any other thematic connections behind this year's line-up?

This is one of those festivals that is defined by a bunch of incredibly strong elements. The world is going through a unique moment, and I don't know anyone who doesn't feel the significance of that. But within that global story, Melbourne also has a unique place. It's a cultural capital, and it's one of the most diverse, inclusive and well-governed cities certainly in Australia, and probably in the world. In a period of political upheaval, we live in a city that has superb leadership and visionary leadership, and that definitely says something about the way this place ticks. Also, because of its distance from a lot of the world, Melbourne has its own energy — a left-field kind of cool. This is a place that refuses to conform.

There are ways that culture is reflected throughout the program. For example, there's a quartet of two person shows - Caravan, We Love Arabs, Two Jews Walk Into A Theatre and In between Two. They're all about a conversation between two people from slightly different places, slightly different perspectives. But they're also about communication, about how we express ourselves and our right to exist in this world, and about defining who we are.

Then there are the projects that are about collaborations with this city, because our festival can only exist if the city says yes: if the legal profession says yes to being part of Please Continue, (Hamlet), if every possible diverse community says yes to working with Taylor Mac, if six people over 70 say yes to telling us about all the sex they've ever had, if our Aboriginal elders say yes to allowing us to witness and engage with an almost lost part of Indigenous culture. This is a festival that makes an offer and then invites people in, but it can only exist in Melbourne and be brought into being by Melbourne.

I think it's important that messaging doesn't overwhelm art. As a single action, be compelling, be exciting, be fun, be engaging, be irresistible. Do not be preachy, do not be worthy, do not lecture or condescend, because I don't think any of us have to try very hard to find things to fear or that enrage us at the present moment. We don't need to be shown that. What we need are things that make us hope and believe. This festival has to be, in the broadest sense, something that uplifts and inspires.

Melbourne is a city that is perennially well served for arts events, with festivals on every scale almost year-round. Yet the program for Melbourne Festival offers a density of performances that, even by Melbourne standards, can be dizzying. How do you recommend festivalgoers approach this year's program?

I think the art on offer takes care of that question for me. If each element doesn't move you on, the audience will turn off. Festivals are the ultimate binge, in the way we are all very familiar with now thanks to streaming TV. If the end of the previous episode doesn't make you want to say, 'Oh, alright. Just one more,' then it has failed. And I think the festival's job is exactly the same; every show should make you want to say, 'Alright, just one more.' I don't think twice about programming something like Taylor Mac, which is four six-hour shows, because I wouldn't think twice about watching six hours of brilliant telly on a Saturday night. Or let's be honest, on a school night if it's keeping me engaged!

One aspect of this year's program that truly stands it apart from the rest of Australia's major arts festivals is the level of community engagement. Earlier this year, the festival put out calls to artists to collaborate with Taylor Mac, and other events further champion local talent. This will also give back to the community, with the experiences of those local artists, working with world-class stars, filtering back into our local arts scene. Do you think this scale of creative exchange is something that might only be possible in Melbourne?

I wanted it to be, but I didn't know if it could be until now. What's interesting with this festival is that it builds on an idea that it will only be successful if people are open-minded and open-hearted. But if my first year [in 2016] showed me anything, it's that Melburnians are exactly that. Now, we're very lucky to have some truly world-class artists coming, who are quite capable of making a silk purse from a sow's ear. But I have never seen a city - not just in Australia, but in the world - more capable of giving them nothing but silk.

Check out The Music's pick of the 20 Must-See Events Of The 2017 Melbourne Festival.

Full details of the Melbourne Festival's 2017 program are available now.