Next Wave Festival
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 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.
History
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, with Next Wave receiving $350,000 in annual funding.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the 2020 festival to go virtual.
2016 Next Wave Festival
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.
2014 Next Wave Festival – New Grand Narrative
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:
- HOME by Brienna Macnish
- Fluvial by Matthias Schack-Arnott
- Terminal by Dylan Sheridan
- Personal Mythologies by Shian Law
- Wael Zuaiter: Unknown by Creative Nonfiction
- Madonna Arms by I'm Trying to Kiss You
- Next Wave Festival 2014 for Curatorial Contribution to Contemporary Performance
2012 Next Wave Festival – The space between us wants to sing
Several works were nominated for various categories of the Green Room Awards including:
- 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
2010 Next Wave Festival – No risk too great
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.
2008 Next Wave Festival – Closer Together
Themed 'Closer Together', the 2008 Next Wave Festival involved almost 400 artists working across 61 projects in 40 or so Melbourne venues. Around 155,000 people came to an exhibition, saw a theatre or dance show, rocked up to one of five or more festival parties or caught one of the festival's Keynote Projects.It all began on 15 May when 1300 people came along to the festival's opening night at Federation Square in the heart of the city. From there it was 16 days of some of the best work by Australia's leading emerging artists. Significantly Next Wave organised a series of Keynote Projects that involved the Canadian duo The Movement Movement jogging more than 150 people through the Melbourne Museum; a vast series of workshops and forums in Polyphonic; a collection of artists and artist-run initiatives from around Australia presenting new work in and around Federation Square in a project called Membrane, and a two art/nightclub events, called The Nightclub Project, staged at two unique venues in the heart of Melbourne's CBD.
2006 Next Wave Festival – Empire Games
The 2006 Next Wave Festival was themed 'Empire Games' to coincide with the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games, which took place from 15 to 26 March 2006. Running alongside all the sporting events was a free cultural festival called Festival Melbourne 2006, and Next Wave was responsible for delivering the Youth Program for this festival.The program for the 'Empire Games' Festival engaged with Melbourne's characteristic architecture and urban space. Some of the key projects included 100 Points of Light, which transformed the city's laneways and shop fronts with installations and projections, and the Containers Village at Melbourne's Docklands, which presented the work of forty-three Commonwealth artist-groups in shipping containers.
Empire Games also presented innovative regional projects, including the digital art project Bitscape. Artist Pip Shea worked with youth from Morwell, Moe, Wagga Wagga and the Macedon Ranges to create audio-visual works which were displayed as large-scale projections on a 90-metre high cooling tower.