Brisbane Festival artistic director Ebony Bott describes the Olivier-Award nominated West End hit The Choir of Man as “the best night down the pub you’re ever going to have – but with better singing’’.
Poised to launch her inaugural festival, Bott said this feel-good, foot-stomping musical – it has a working onstage bar – is a celebration of male friendship and camaraderie and “the opposite of what we read about with toxic masculinity”. She added: “It’s a real (audience) favourite, and it’s never been to Queensland.”
The Choir of Man enjoyed a five-year stint on London’s West End and has played to sold-out houses around Australia, but its 2020 Brisbane season was cancelled because of the Covid pandemic.
Bott has now made this high-energy compilation of hits by Queen, Sia, Paul Simon and Guns ’n Roses a centrepiece of her program, and its season in the Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent – returning to Brisbane after a six-year hiatus – has already been extended.
The festival boss, whose last role was as head of contemporary performance at the Sydney Opera House, has envisaged Queensland’s biggest cultural event as a broad church, embracing everything from sunrise yoga and early morning DJ sets to the annual Riverfire fireworks spectacular, a highly anticipated new play by leading dramatist Suzie Miller, jaw-dropping dance stunts from Los Angeles and concerts by Human Nature and Missy Higgins.
“Audiences don’t respond to an art form, they respond to an experience,’’ Bott told The Australian, adding that it was “absolutely thrilling” that Miller’s new work, Strong is the New Pretty, about the long gestation and birth of the AFLW competition, would open the festival on September 4.
Bott visited rehearsals for the play in Sydney earlier this month – the production is a collaboration between Brisbane Festival, Sydney Theatre Company and Trish Wadley Productions – and said she was impressed with how the performers had mastered footy skills as well as their roles.
“It’s quite extraordinary to see that many women in the room telling this story that needs to be told,” she said. “This game that’s been called Australia’s game for so long, Aussie rules, was (previously) really only open to 50 per cent of the population.’’
Miller is the playwright behind the Olivier-Award winning global sensation Prima Facie, and Bott said the dramatist’s latest work has “a sense of humour that I think people will love, and Suzie just knows how to have us all on the edge of our seats’’.
For an ex-Sydneysider who “hit the ground running” when she took up her role last October, Bott seems cool and collected on the eve of her first rodeo as festival boss. She described Brisbane’s annual cultural jamboree as “a very fit festival” that “knows how to take over the city”.
Despite cost-of-living pressures facing consumers, tickets to her three-week program were selling strongly, she said. On the other hand, cost-of-living increases were front of mind when she decided to make the program radically accessible. “Seventy per cent of the program is free,” she said, including a nightly laser, light and water sculpture show on the Brisbane River.
The 2028 Olympic torch handover from Los Angeles to Brisbane has also influenced her festival ambitions. Representing a cultural bridge between the two cities, LA-based dance company Diavolo: Architecture in Motion is bringing its celebrated show Escape – a fusion of dance, high-risk acrobatics and large moving objects – to Brisbane, and Bott said she “loved the physical, athletic nature of their work and how that actually ties into the Olympics’’.
The Brisbane-Gold Coast corridor is home to Australia’s largest Pasifika population, a demographic Bott reflects with four New Zealand works, including the epic Maori play Tiri: Te Araroa Woman Far Walking, which spans 185 years of history.
Family show Fijian Flying Circus is an exploration of tribal storytelling, stunts and dance, while another family-friendly attraction, QAGOMA exhibition Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of the Jim Henson Company, unpacks the creative vision behind beloved screen characters Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster and Miss Piggy.
Bott’s festival also includes a “live mixtape” of blue chip Australian rock and soul stars with Missy Higgins, Icehouse, The Temper Trap, The Cruel Sea and Magic Dirt taking to the stage at the Roma Street Parkland.
The festival director, who grew up in Perth and built her career in producing roles at the Adelaide Festival Centre, Arts Centre Melbourne and Sydney Opera House, said she had felt widely welcomed in Brisbane and was working with an “extraordinary” festival team.
“The artistic community here are quite incredible at just getting behind an idea and running with it,” she said.