 Mourning Cloak (2006)
Although the programme for her fourth and final Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) was launched last week, Kristy Edmunds has no time to contemplate her legacy – not with 17 days chock-full of art from around the world to coordinate.
“Richard, in all honesty, I have such a strange relationship with the word legacy, because I don’t feel I’ve been walking on the planet long enough to be actually able to achieve one, you know? I’ve got a long way to go, and I always think of a legacy as the sum total of your contribution throughout your life,” Edmunds tells MCV.
That said, when pressed Edmunds is able to identify certain elements common to the three festivals she’s presented to date.
“I guess I’ve focussed on artists who expand the sense of what’s possible because of their vision,” she says thoughtfully. “Contemporary artistic practitioners; the artists who are alive and in some way pushing at the boundaries of their artform ... as opposed to purely upholding a specific tradition and falling in line with that tradition.”
It’s an approach which has seen Edmunds come under occasional attack from the more conservative members of Melbourne’s arts community, and simultaneously lauded by others, who have praised her festivals for their vigour, passion and creativity.
This year’s programme is no exception. Featuring over 90 events, including 19 world premieres and 28 Australian premieres, MIAF 2008 promises to once again engage, enrapture, and perhaps occasionally enrage.
“One of the things that became quite clear to me early on, especially two, three years [ago] when I started on the early stages of some of the work that we’ve commissioned, like Liza Lim with The Navigator, [was that it was] very much addressing something around transformation; a transformational state… She’s often, in her work, seeking and trying to find an ecstatic feeling; and she’s trying to push the work to that kind of transformation.”
Melbourne International Arts Festival, October 9 - 25
www.melbournefestival.com.au
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