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.
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