Australia is Festival Central. We host a vast variety of outdoor events throughout the year. In fact, there’s a cultural festival somewhere here in Australia every month. They range from international concerts to drama performances and local cultural expos.
Organising these exhibitions is big business, and it supports a huge feeder industry of artists, dancers, food vendors, and banner printers. Before each festival and throughout its duration, there’s a flurry of demand for exhibition stands, portable banners, display systems, food court materials, sound equipment, lighting gear and so on.
Today, we’d like to run through a quick overview of events here in Australia. We’ll only cover a handful, but if you check local websites, you’re bound to find an outdoor celebration that fits the target audience of your product or service, and you can narrow down which events to get your display banners ready for.
Every year, The Sydney Festival launches in January. It’s one of the most comprehensive outdoor events in the nation, encompassing film, dance, music, visual arts, and theatre. It isn’t strictly a performing event. It also hosts discussion forums on matters related to the arts. Sydney Festival is an international outdoor gala, with more than 500 artists from all over the world. Activities are spread across 80 events in different indoor and outdoor venues around the city.
Between February and March, the Perth International Arts Festival has recurred since 1953. Its focus is on contemporary performances, street art, comedy, and literature, as well as the more traditional art forms of music, film, and theatre. It includes a lot of free community functions and has a lot of satellite galas linked to the main festival. This community prides itself in showcasing indigenous art forms and premiering breakout stars in the art world.
Easter weekend in Canberra is dedicated to poetry, storytelling, and dance in Australian Culture. The National Folk Festival spans five days in April and includes over 100 concerts. Many revellers camp on site the entire time. There’s plenty of food, fun, and there are even kid-specific activities to enthral your little ones.
May and June are good months for literary minds – could your customer demographic be attending this type of event? The Emerging Writers Festival in Melbourne is just one of many outdoor exhibitions dedicated to new authors. Throughout the year, there are others writers’ festivals in Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Darwin, and Byron Bay. In July, the Noosa Long Weekend incorporates writers as well as music, dance, and other media. The week-long festival has 120 events that include beach-time fun and a generous sprinkling of workshops.
In August, the Darwin Festival celebrates indigenous dance, music, and culture from local communities of Pacific Islanders.
There are also exhibitions from Indonesia and other international performances. The focus is on Darwin’s multicultural spirit, and there’s a lot cabaret, opera, film, and comedy. The festival includes workshops to allow attendees to mingle and learn from one another.
The Brisbane Festival in September has a slightly more cosmopolitan leaning. It bills itself as an intellectual, international gathering, embracing everything from iconic global performers to the local grassroots community. It includes a circus, as well as the Sunsuper Riverfire.
In October 1986, a composer named Gian Carlo Melotti inaugurated the Melbourne Spoleto Festival. It was part of a three-city outdoor extravaganza that had wings in Spoleto, Italy and Charleston, USA. The festival has changed its name twice and is now called The Melbourne International Arts Festival. It runs for 17 days every year. It targets unique performances in dance, music, theatre, film, and multimedia, exposing these acts to the public through elaborately designed free outdoor events.
For jazz lovers, November is an exciting month. The Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and Blues hosts close to 60 international acts over a syncopating three-day weekend. The festival is held in Victoria and is sponsored by big names in banking, education, media, technology, business, and the arts. It has run every year since 1990, and its highlight is the National Jazz Awards, which fetes and rewards upcoming jazz musicians below the age of 35.
Literally closing the year is the Woodford Folk Festival in Queensland. This outdoor family event starts just after Christmas and ends on New Year’s Day. Its vast international itinerary includes a kids’ festival, meditation sessions, a circus cabaret, dance, comedy, street shows, and folk performances.
If your customers love artistic exposition, cultural collaboration, and the vibrant energy of the outdoors Festivals are just the thing for your business to get involved in. They’re booked all year round at venues across the nation, so get your calendar out and start calling the organisers to see how your business can have a presence at some of these events.
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