Next Wave Festival

Next Wave is a biennial festival based in Melbourne, Australia, 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 (formerly Kickstart) 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.

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 (following a strategic funding review), with Next Wave receiving $350,000 in annual funding.

The current Director is Georgie Meagher.

Kickstart Helix is Next Wave’s major developmental activity, assisting early career artists across artforms, along with writers, curators and producers, to develop new work in a supportive environment. Taking place in the non-festival year, Kickstart projects are developed with a view towards inclusion in the forthcoming Next Wave Festival. Kickstart participants undertake a program of workshops covering all aspects of project development including creative development, budgeting and marketing as well as receiving ongoing administrative support and professional advice from the Next Wave staff during the Kickstart period. Kickstart programs culminate in developmental showings of the work-in-progress to peers, stakeholders and other Kickstart participants.

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.

...
Wikipedia