There’s a new addition to the 2020 festivals calendar with Canberra announcing its new bi-annual arts festival for July this year. With the first iteration called Elsewhere, the event will be helmed by Creative Producer Yolande Norris, who has long been part of the city’s art community in various roles including as a co-producer of the You Are Here Festival.
‘The genesis of the idea came as an extension of Canberra’s Centenary [in 2013] when Robyn Archer, director of the centenary of Canberra, finished up in her role she made a broad range of recommendations and put forward some ideas that would be of benefit to the city’s culture. And one of those ideas was for a festival that shone a light on Canberra’s artistic greatness,’ Norris told ArtsHub.
To be held early in July, Elsewhere will run over two weeks bringing back artists who originated in or developed their artistic practice in Canberra. While she is still tight-lipped about the artists on the program, Norris sees returning artists to the city as building on Canberra’s existing arts community because it exemplifies how Canberran artists have been successful beyond the city. ‘It’s an opportunity to tell a story about how arts careers happen,’ Norris reflected.
‘There will be some really exciting opportunities for people to work alongside them [visiting artists] in a whole range of capacities to deliver some pretty major works. Which is always really exciting to get those experiences. But also just to have them here in town to be able to see them again to talk to them about what happened for them and how they took their art to the next level,’ Norris said.
The road to Elsewhere
Norris herself has experienced the journey of a local artist who looked beyond the city to grow her arts career. Canberra’s centenary gave her an opportunity to co-produce the first You Are Here Festival and she had previously produced Newcastle’s This Is Not Art Festival which she characterised as ‘this incredible crash course in art making in Australia’.
Norris began her career as a visual artist graduating from the Australian National University, aiming to one day work as a curator. But her career led her in another direction. ‘I discovered I was much more interested in writing about art and talking to artists,’ Norris said. She went on to write extensively including for Overland, Arts Almanac and an essay for Meanjin on Canberra at 100.
When David Finnigan asked her to be a co-producer of You Are Here, she got the chance to shape a new event but with the substantial support of Robyn Archer and the centenary. ‘She [Archer] wanted to commission an arts festival focusing on the emerging and the experimental and sort of more underground than what people associated with Canberra.’
After the centenary, Norris stayed with the festival for another two years before working with Big hArt. ‘I left when I had my second son to go on mat leave, but I went through a bit of a wobbly patch where I just wasn’t sure which way to turn. It was around the time that the Australian Council was gutted and everything was just looking on very shaky ground.’
For Norris a role at artsACT was the next logical step. ‘It seemed like this rambling breadth of things that I’ve done, what felt to me like a strange kind of gaggle of things might actually be an asset in an arts department that covers so much ground.’
Programming a new biennale
A big attraction to the role was the extent to which Norris has been given the chance to innovate. ‘One thing I like about artsACT and have admired before I worked with the department is that they are really good at giving artists free rein and not interfering with artists and their work in terms of what may or may not be politically desirable for the government of the day,’ Norris said.
There’s been several new changes at artsACT including how funding is being distributed. Norris sees the changes as much needed. ‘What might sound like small changes, but are actually really major to how people do business as artists. For example, instead of having one major funding round, we split that and do it twice a year now so that people don’t have to move their project timetables around to suit annual funding,’ Norris explains. She also points to smaller rapid-response grants as helpful to Canberra’s artists who may need small seed funding to get their project started.
Elsewhere will sit in midwinter, a gap in Canberra’s major events between March’s Enlighten projection festival and September’s garden gala Floriade which has also added a cultural program in recent years. The biennale will happen in the same year as the ACT’s election so while there are expectations for the event, Norris remains positive. ‘I’m sure that there may be challenges that arise and people may sort of question whether or not that’s the best way to do this, but I’m feeling pretty confident and it’s seems to be working pretty well so far,’ Norris said.
She sees the planning as a ‘rollercoaster’ of activity that has busy peaks followed by troughs where there is less to do followed by the frantic activity of the event itself in July. As she puts the finishing touches on her program, she’s sanguine about the process. ‘One thing I love about festival work is that it’s kind of like a snowball – once you’ve programmed it, you can’t stop it. In a way like it’s going to happen and you just have to keep up the best you can, but it will happen.’
