And so, Festival Season begins.
Just when you thought you couldn’t make it through another day of winter, some writers festival, film festival, or other creative offering drops. It can be easy to assume that the best of these are taking place in urban centres, literary festivals mimicking Australian literature, hugging the eastern seaboard, questioning the beach versus the bush.
Which is why we are keen to start my profiling the Red Dirt Festival, building on the back of The Dirty Word and drawing inspiration from Ellen van Neervan’s words: we are heat maps / our footprints never fade, Red Dirt Festival start on Thursday the 28th of July with the slam hosted by BAD!SLAM!NO!BISCUIT!’s Andrew Galan, eschews the idea that poets can’t get up early in the morning by starting the next day at 7:30 AM, emblazons the Todd Street mall with poetry posters, rolls all the way over into Sunday with music, hip-hop, and broken hearts.
When looking at the program and considering the range of artists and voices and perspectives we can only hope that Alice Springs is ready for Pushcart Prize nominee, Desireé Dallagiacomo from Louisiana, USA; Darwin-hot vocalist Caiti Baker and producer/instrumentalist James Mangohig with Sietta; Lawrence “Big Money” Gino; Celestine Rowe, national slam finalist; Anupama Pilbrow from the Suburban Review and Peril Magazine’s, Eleanor Jackson, among so many others.
Full program here