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“ Directors have brought a sharper political focus to the Festival .
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Jonathan Mills ( 2000 — 2001 ) was given a gargantuan task : to produce three festivals in two years . In between the regular calendar dates was the Centenary of Federation . The budget was doubled for the Federation Festival and Mills produced an all-Australian program that mixed classical and pop in a celebration of Australian history and critical appraisal of it . Works explored Indigenous experience and Australian engagement in the Vietnam War . The Deakin Lecture series dealt with many aspects of Australian social and political life and its engagement with the world . The international component of the Festival came largely in that series , with eminent speakers such as Susan Greenfield ( UK ), Sir Martin Rees ( UK ), Amartya Sen ( India / UK ) and Craig Kielburger ( Canada ), now all regular visitors to Australia .
Mill ’ s Festivals were strong on music , as one would expect from a celebrated composer . A tribute to JS Bach was the centrepiece of his first . One of the most ambitious musical celebrations ever staged in Australia , Bach 2000 involved an epic 17 concerts over 17 days , performed by leading interpreters from all over the world .
In Mills ’ second year , music was equally strong if not as curatorially focussed . The centrepiece that year was the Kirov Opera ’ s performances of Prokofiev ’ s The Fiery Angel and Salome under the great Valery Gergiev , who also conducted the Kirov Orchestra in a thrilling concert of Russian music . Transporting 215 musicians to Australia was always going to be a logistical headache , and the post – 9 / 11 invasion of Afghanistan forced last minute route changes . That was only the beginning of a nail-biting series of catastrophes throughout the visit , in which everything that could go wrong did .
Mills also programmed an impressive dance offering : Israel ’ s Batsheva Dance Company ( 2000 ) made its Melbourne debut and so did Ballett Frankfurt ( 2001 ) with William Forsythe ’ s Eidos : Telos . In the same year , exhilarating theatre included Chicago ’ s Steppenwolf Theatre Company ( Side Man ) and New York ’ s The Wooster Group ( The Hairy Ape ). Mills introduced Melbourne to The Famous Spiegeltent — its first appearance on the Australian festival scene .
Robyn Archer ( 2002 — 2004 ) and the Festival ’ s President , Noel Turnbull , suggested to government that expectations were high following the financially enhanced 2001 edition . If there couldn ’ t be greater investment in the Festival , the State might consider that a city as culturally busy as Melbourne might not need a three-week festival but a year-round international season along the lines of many European cities . This eventually led to an increase in funding , which came into play for the 2005 Festival .
Working with a substantially smaller budget , and not interested in a must-see shopping list approach , Archer worked on themes that would give a sense of continuity across the Festivals . She chose one for each year : Text , Body , Voice . Shows that intersected with all those themes demonstrated the increasing hybridity of contemporary art . She programmed the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker ’ s celebrated company Rosas not into the Body but into the Voice year , for example : the music , Mozart ’ s arias , was played by the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra , conducted by the edgy Italian baroque specialist Alessandro di Marchi , and sung by three sopranos . Domesticity and education were undertows throughout her tenure and she actually cooked for the crowd at her first Festival ’ s launch .
British director Di Trevis worked with students from the Victorian College of the Arts , to their great benefit , when she directed Harold Pinter ’ s meditation on Proust , Remembrance of Things Past . There were endless surprises too . The Canadian puppeteer Ronnie Burkett ’ s Tinka ’ s New Dress was a show of such skill and depth — and political acumen — it turned out to be one of the hits of 2002 . Robert Lepage ’ s The Busker ’ s Opera and Trisha Brown Dance Company and Simon Keenlyside ’ s Winterreise gave fascinatingly new takes on opera and music .
MELBOURNE FESTIVAL : 30 YEARS