An Odd Thing Happened On The Way To 2013

With its backdrop of sustainability, camping out and NYE hoopla, Peats Ridge has been recycling out-of-date calendars and putting on parties since 2004.

This year in the valley Sydney's Pork Collective will bring their avowedly eccentric Night Odditorium to the festival site. Crammed with over 60 acts, the Odditorium has been described as a “little left-wing anarchist world” and, as befitting such a freak-themed sideshow, it promises to stretch the perceptions.

For chief curator and head oddball Pete Manwaring, there most definitely is something in a name. “We used to use terms like surreal and strange or irreverent but I think 'odd' kinda sums it up,” he says. “The concept is that it's another world and people come through this rebirthing passage, which I know is a bit of a cliché but it works at a festival. It's where both audiences and performers have permission to be and do different things.”

As the moniker suggests, the Night Odditorium will be both nocturnal and outside the square. In Manwaring's own words it will be populated by a menagerie of “dancers, live musicians, DJs, carnies, freaks and weirdoes.” If all that sounds like a promisingly good idea, Manwaring gladly concurs. “For us, a big part of it is to have a fantastic time. These festivals, they're running on a shoe-string budget, so this is about getting ninety of our performer friends together and sharing our oddness.”

Already veterans of festival land (with performance installations at the Sydney, Underbelly and Cockatoo Island festivals), the Pork Collective know that events like Peats Ridge present a particular set of challenges; not the least of which is the wandering, non-committal nature of the crowd. “That's the festival world,” Manwaring calmly notes. “Every act deals with that. Rather than worry about it I like to shift the performer's perspective a little and get them to accept that rather than being a one stage, one act, stop and watch show, ours is this combobulation of ten or twelve different things going on at once. It'll be an anarchic, hectic mess but that's what it's all about.”

The obvious flipside for the Odditorium's performers is that festival goers can also be up for a dose of experimenta. As Manwaring observes, “If we were to do this at the Opera House I think there would be a totally different expectation. It would be a lot more boxed up; whereas here it's a lot more open.”

Factored into everything that happens at Peats Ridge is festival founder Matt Grant's philosophical focus on sustainability. For Manwaring and the Pork Collective this has meant getting clever with staging. The Odditorium uses old shipping containers, recycled sets and even discarded tents and inflatables to build its bizarrely coloured microcosm.

“It's a serious art piece disguised as a loose festival,” Manwaring concludes. ”One of the fundamental messages in my mind is about celebrating diversity and absurdity. It's a response to the lack of respect I see elsewhere. A lot of people are very judgemental when they first see something different but in the Odditorium they will see a lot of things they haven't seen before and some of them will get it; and we'll be happy with that.”

And if that sounds like an odd way to see out an even numbered year… So be it.

WHAT: Night Odditorium
WHEN & WHERE: Saturday 29 December to Tuesday 1 January, Peats Ridge Festival, Glenworth Valley