White Night Melbourne
Feb. 24th, 2013 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sharplittleteethI seem to have a grudge against sleep this week. All Tomorrow's Parties last weekend. Einstürzende Neubauten on Tuesday night. And last night we were out until 4am at White Night Melbourne.
I am very tired and my feet are very sore. But we had a blast. The city was transformed last night, and it was magical.
White Night is an international network of all-night public arts festivals. It started in Paris in 2002, and I'll stop boring you now because you can read a history page as well as I can.
We got into town around 9:00 pm, and Swanston Street was packed. I suspect the organisers had no idea how popular it would be. People were saying the crowds were bigger than at New Years Eve. We bumped into our friend Sayraphim, who was running The Whispering Society, on the steps of the town hall. She had expected maybe 150-200 people to play the game over the course of the night. Instead, they had had over a thousand players.
We missed a few things we wanted to see because the queues were too long, or it was just to hard to move through the crowds. But overall it was fantastic night.
Here's our blow-by-blow steps through the night...
BILL HENSON'S PARIS OPERA SERIES
Three photos from the series on display in the Sofitel foyer. Henson's work is sublime, but the hanging angle meant al we could see were the lights refelcting off the glass rather than Henson's twilight colours. And the Sofitel staff didn't seem to know they'd been listed in the events -- we head the concierge reporting into his walkie talkie "There's all these people just walking around. It's not a good look."
COLLINS ST REGULARS
Little canvas sculptures of the background figures figures from John Brack's famous Collins St, 5pm painting.
BILLABONG
This was a sound and video installation recreating a billabong outside the Town Hall. But we couldn't see the video because there were too many people, and we couldn't hear the sound because there was a busker just across the street.
We headed up Swanston Street to the State Library, hoping to kill some time there by playing the Whispering Society until the crowd thinned out. But there was an enormous queues to get in, so we went around the side to the Wheeler Centre.
ALL NIGHTER
The Emerging Writers Festival had set up tables were people could join in an all night writing session, and they had readings every hour. We listened to Briohny Doyle read her story about staying up all night in a Japanese manga library reading boylove comics. I wanted to come back at midnight to hear Lawrence Leung read, but we got stuck on the other side of town.
A. wanted to see the foam sculpture at the NGV, so we made our way down Russell St, thinking it might be less busy. Ha.
In Flinders Lane we found a five tall inflated cone sculptures that glowed different colours. People's repsone to these cones waswonderfully affectionate: they kept hugging them. We wandered down Hosier Lane past the graffiti and the paste-ups, saw DRAWING WALL being constructed, and emerged out onto Flinders Street.
WONDERLAND
The Forum and the two buildings next to it were lit up with brightly-coloured projections, changing from vivid reworkings of the faced to abstract geometric lines of yellow and red and green. It was spectacular.
After admiring it for a while, we cut across the back of Federation Square down to Birraung Marr. We passed some Tim Burton-esque inflatable clown sculptures, and watched a laser light show projected onto arcs of water. After some slow progress through the crowds, we crossed the birdge and reached the NGV.
BOUQUET FINAL 2
A towering sculpture that slowly produced wide tentacles of foam, Bouquet FInal 2 crouched in the NGV's Great Hall like a benevolent foam god. Little clouds of foam would break free from the main tentacles and drift in the Great Halls. People reached out to catch them, eyes bright with wonder.
We rested for bit. Had a coffee and and an orange cake. It was after midnight by this stage. The crowds were thinning. We walked back to the river to watch the laser show again from the other bank, then meandered down along South Bank. Three giant white spheres floated in the river, onto which were projected people's SMSed messages of love. A cheer went up when a guy used it to propose to his girlfriend, and another cheer followed when she replied yes.
We crossed the Elizabeth Street bridge, wandered up a back street lit by illuminated pairs of shoes, and returned to the State Library. There was still a queue to get in, albeit a much shorter one. After fifteen minutes, we were up the bluestone stairs and into the domed Reading Room, where Dean Frenkel demonstrated harmonic singing while people tiptoed and chairs creaked.
Queen's Hall was beautiful. The Whispering Society was still runnning, but it was 3am and we were far too tired to cocentrate on an hour-long, city wide game by that stage.
We walked back down Swanston Street, were A. kept bumping into friends. The Cat Empire were playing on the Flinders Street Station steps, but I preferred the final performer we saw in White Nights - "Uptown" Brown, a steampunk one-man-band, who sang "Video Killed the Radio Star" while we waited to catch our tram.
Sorry that was so long. Too tired to write anything coherent. Here, have a video of the projection on St Paul's as a thank you for your indulgence:
I am very tired and my feet are very sore. But we had a blast. The city was transformed last night, and it was magical.
White Night is an international network of all-night public arts festivals. It started in Paris in 2002, and I'll stop boring you now because you can read a history page as well as I can.
We got into town around 9:00 pm, and Swanston Street was packed. I suspect the organisers had no idea how popular it would be. People were saying the crowds were bigger than at New Years Eve. We bumped into our friend Sayraphim, who was running The Whispering Society, on the steps of the town hall. She had expected maybe 150-200 people to play the game over the course of the night. Instead, they had had over a thousand players.
We missed a few things we wanted to see because the queues were too long, or it was just to hard to move through the crowds. But overall it was fantastic night.
Here's our blow-by-blow steps through the night...
BILL HENSON'S PARIS OPERA SERIES
Three photos from the series on display in the Sofitel foyer. Henson's work is sublime, but the hanging angle meant al we could see were the lights refelcting off the glass rather than Henson's twilight colours. And the Sofitel staff didn't seem to know they'd been listed in the events -- we head the concierge reporting into his walkie talkie "There's all these people just walking around. It's not a good look."
COLLINS ST REGULARS
Little canvas sculptures of the background figures figures from John Brack's famous Collins St, 5pm painting.
BILLABONG
This was a sound and video installation recreating a billabong outside the Town Hall. But we couldn't see the video because there were too many people, and we couldn't hear the sound because there was a busker just across the street.
We headed up Swanston Street to the State Library, hoping to kill some time there by playing the Whispering Society until the crowd thinned out. But there was an enormous queues to get in, so we went around the side to the Wheeler Centre.
ALL NIGHTER
The Emerging Writers Festival had set up tables were people could join in an all night writing session, and they had readings every hour. We listened to Briohny Doyle read her story about staying up all night in a Japanese manga library reading boylove comics. I wanted to come back at midnight to hear Lawrence Leung read, but we got stuck on the other side of town.
A. wanted to see the foam sculpture at the NGV, so we made our way down Russell St, thinking it might be less busy. Ha.
In Flinders Lane we found a five tall inflated cone sculptures that glowed different colours. People's repsone to these cones waswonderfully affectionate: they kept hugging them. We wandered down Hosier Lane past the graffiti and the paste-ups, saw DRAWING WALL being constructed, and emerged out onto Flinders Street.
WONDERLAND
The Forum and the two buildings next to it were lit up with brightly-coloured projections, changing from vivid reworkings of the faced to abstract geometric lines of yellow and red and green. It was spectacular.
After admiring it for a while, we cut across the back of Federation Square down to Birraung Marr. We passed some Tim Burton-esque inflatable clown sculptures, and watched a laser light show projected onto arcs of water. After some slow progress through the crowds, we crossed the birdge and reached the NGV.
BOUQUET FINAL 2
A towering sculpture that slowly produced wide tentacles of foam, Bouquet FInal 2 crouched in the NGV's Great Hall like a benevolent foam god. Little clouds of foam would break free from the main tentacles and drift in the Great Halls. People reached out to catch them, eyes bright with wonder.
We rested for bit. Had a coffee and and an orange cake. It was after midnight by this stage. The crowds were thinning. We walked back to the river to watch the laser show again from the other bank, then meandered down along South Bank. Three giant white spheres floated in the river, onto which were projected people's SMSed messages of love. A cheer went up when a guy used it to propose to his girlfriend, and another cheer followed when she replied yes.
We crossed the Elizabeth Street bridge, wandered up a back street lit by illuminated pairs of shoes, and returned to the State Library. There was still a queue to get in, albeit a much shorter one. After fifteen minutes, we were up the bluestone stairs and into the domed Reading Room, where Dean Frenkel demonstrated harmonic singing while people tiptoed and chairs creaked.
Queen's Hall was beautiful. The Whispering Society was still runnning, but it was 3am and we were far too tired to cocentrate on an hour-long, city wide game by that stage.
We walked back down Swanston Street, were A. kept bumping into friends. The Cat Empire were playing on the Flinders Street Station steps, but I preferred the final performer we saw in White Nights - "Uptown" Brown, a steampunk one-man-band, who sang "Video Killed the Radio Star" while we waited to catch our tram.
Sorry that was so long. Too tired to write anything coherent. Here, have a video of the projection on St Paul's as a thank you for your indulgence:
