Program Guide 2016 Program Guide | Page 3

Welcome IMAGE | Toni Wilkinson Womenjika biik-dui narrap from the Traditional Owners of this land. Melbourne Festival takes place on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the East Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to the traditional owners of this country, their ancestors, their children and the lore of the creator spirit Bunjil. Welcome to this, the 2016 Melbourne Festival. I’m delighted to be artistically directing this great festival in one of the world’s most diverse and dynamic cities. For tens of thousands of years people have met on this land to share songs and stories and to dance together. This is where they gathered to explore their dreams and realities. For thousands of years, festivals have been the moment when we can step outside the day to day, a space where we can ask the big questions, celebrate what we know and discover the new. Each October, we invite artists from around the world to join us and help us to rediscover our own city, to reinvent who we are and how we connect. This year’s Festival is full of events that freely and inquisitively traverse borders in all their forms. Having directed festivals across two hemispheres and in two different decades, I never stop questioning how each city is unique, then marveling at the differences. My first eighteen months in Melbourne have been as provocative, inspiring and surprising as the city itself. A festival is a love letter to its city, and the Festival team and I look forward to sharing this one with you. ►► Jonathan Holloway ARTISTIC DIRECTOR #melbfest We shine a spotlight on the ever shifting borders between childhood and adulthood, between life and death, between dreams and reality. We puncture the creative borders between artforms, and between the arts and civic society. We have sought every opportunity to blur the borders between artists and audiences. The Festival’s own borders embrace the incredible diversity of where we live: from our first event on Festival Eve, Tanderrum, in which the First Peoples of Victoria meet and invite us onto their land, to the very last event of the Festival, a celebration of multiculturalism in which the most recent arrivals to our creative state share their music and dance. // 1