Okay so we are excited to announce that we will be bringing Boho's Best Festival Ever: How To Manage A Disaster to Canberra this August.We'll be at the Street Theatre for two weeks over 12 - 22 August.This will be the first Boho show in Canberra since Word Play in 2013, and the first presentation of Best Festival Ever in Australia. After premiering the show last year with seasons at the Battersea Arts Centre, the London Science Museum and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, we're really stoked to be bringing this one home.Best Festival Ever: How To Manage A Disaster places the audience in charge of programming and managing their very own music festival.Seated around a table, participants take charge of designing, constructing and managing their festival from beginning to end. From taking care of rowdy campsite parties to assembling the perfect lineup of bands, from dealing with artist tantrums to preventing fights in the moshpit, the audience experience every part of the festival manager's ride.Part theatre show, part performance lecture and part boardgame, Best Festival Ever introduces participants to concepts from Systems Science and asks how we can best understand and manage the complex systems we live in.Each of the Canberra shows will feature a conversation with a guest scientist talking about the ideas in the work, including Dr Will Steffen (Climate Council), Dr Bob Costanza (ANU) and Dr Nicky Grigg (CSIRO).
Following the conclusion of Big Day Out, Harvest, Future Music, Stereosonic, the Great Escape and Parklife Festivals, this might be your last chance to experience a music festival in Australia: jump on board.
17 shows in 9 venues: The first Best Festival Ever season
David here with a final wrap-up note at the end of the first Best Festival Ever season. After 17 shows in 9 venues in London and Stockholm, we've finished the show's first tour and returned to Australia for a break - as well as to plan and prepare for the project's next phase.Over November, we presented the show at venues including the Battersea Arts Centre, the London Science Museum, Central St Martins, Kings College London, Forum for the Future, Zone Creative Agency, Färgfabriken, Miljöverkstan and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.We shared the work with theatre audiences, scientists, high school students, sustainable development post-grads, researchers, festival-makers, urban planners, museum staff and corporate groups.Fereday Films produced a great video of the show in action, which you can check out here:Perhaps the most satisfying part of the work for me was the discussions with the audience we held after the show. For our Science Museum season, scientists Yvonne Rydin, James Millington, Chris Brierley and Emily Lines presented short talks after the shows, discussing their own work in relation to the systems science ideas in Best Festival Ever. The conversations about sustainability, planning, climate change and complex systems were incredibly rewarding to listen to.That's it for Best Festival Ever in 2014. In 2015 we'll be looking at further tours for the show both within Australia and overseas. We're also seeking to begin partnerships with other organisations to develop new interactive tabletop works looking at specific systems.If you're interested in knowing more, or if you'd like to chat about a possible collaboration, please drop us a line. And thanks to everyone who contributed their support to make this project happen - we're hugely grateful!Cheers from David, David, Nikki, Nathan and Rachel!