Next Wave Festival

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Next Wave is a biennial festival based in Melbourne, Australia, which promotes and showcases the work of young and emerging artists. Encouraging interdisciplinary practice, Next Wave fosters the creation and presentation of works by artists aged 16 to 30 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 organization and in non-festival years, it runs a development program called Kickstart. Artists who participate in the Kickstart program develop their works, with the potential of including them in the following year's festival program.

In August 2007, Next Wave also presented Free Play: The Next Wave Independent Game Developers' Conference, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.^[1]

1 History
2 2008 Next Wave Festival – Closer Together
3 2006 Next Wave Festival – Empire Games
4 See also
5 External links
6 References

[edit] History

Next Wave was established in 1984, under the direction of Founding Director Andrew Bleby, who is currently the General Manager of Arts Projects Australia.^[2] 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. The next festival will be held in May 2008,^[3] with the theme 'Closer Together'.^[4]

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.^[5]

The current Artistic Director for the 2008 Festival is Jeff Khan, and the current General Manager is Fiona Maxwell.^[6]

[edit] 2008 Next Wave Festival – Closer Together

The theme for the 2008 Next Wave Festival is 'Closer Together' and it will take place from 15 to 31 May 2008. Artistic Director Jeff Khan states that: The 2008 Next Wave Festival will explore new ideas of closeness and its conflicted nature: as a catalyst for connectedness, community and exchange, but also of claustrophobia, confrontation and invasion.^[7]

[edit] 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 Melbourne2006, and Next Wave was responsible for delivering the Youth Program for this festival.^[8]

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.^[9]

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.^[10]