Kaleidoscope Festival director Drew Anthony.
Camera IconKaleidoscope Festival director Drew Anthony. Credit: Supplied/Martin Kennealey d475209

Joondalup: Kaleidoscope Festival creative director places event among ‘most enjoyable’ in stellar career

Tyler BrownJoondalup Times

WORKING on Kaleidoscope Festival has been “one of the most enjoyable experiences” creative director Drew Anthony has ever had.

And that is saying something from someone who has worked on many large-scale events including the Sydney Olympics Closing Ceremony, Doha Asian Games, Vancouver Winter Olympics, NZ Rugby World Cup, NRL State of Origin and White Night in Melbourne and Ballarat.

“Over the years, I’ve done some pretty amazing events around the world but I feel this is the culmination of a lot of things that I’ve learnt,” the East Cannington resident said.

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“These sorts of events are the sum of a great number of parts, from the quality of the installations to the guest experience and the way we create the event site for maximum enjoyment from people.

“I’ve had the best time putting this festival together and working with some really amazing local creative people and artists.

“I really think the audience this year are going to be blown away by what we’ve been able to achieve in such a short space of time and with fairly limited resources.

“This year is the platform for this festival to really take root and become something that not only the City of Joondalup can be proud of but the people of the wider Perth area can really come to and enjoy.”

Kaleidoscope Festival, which the City launched last year, is a four-night free festival of light, art, music and food that will take over the Joondalup city centre from November 9 to 12.

Anthony said he “jumped at the chance” to work on this year’s event.

“I think the City of Joondalup is extremely forward thinking and courageous to have the foresight to recognise that Sydney has its Vivid and Melbourne has it White Night and Canberra has its Enlighten,” he said.

“All of these great festivals are popping up and becoming very successful very quickly and the City of Joondalup is to be applauded for having the foresight to realise that Perth hasn’t yet stepped in to that space and they’re very much taking the lead on making that a reality.”

This year’s festival has been created around the artist statement: “You have to find the light within you so that you, in your own way, can illuminate the world”.

“It’s a really simple but very potent statement which asks people to take responsibility for their own lives and to positively affect the people around them,” he said.

“All of our artists have really enjoyed creating and working to that simple statement.”

He said he was “bringing lots” to this year’s festival, including Four Seasons at the City’s administration building.

“There’s this four-sided glass meeting room so we’re doing a really cool projection that comes from the inside and across on to the four different walls,” he said.

“We’ll be directing visitors to walk around that and journey across those four seasons with four contrasting projections from four very, very different visual artists.”

There will also be the interactive FaceOff projection where visitors can have their faces projected in real time up on the building and the Walk of Wonderthat will include the “magical” Will-o-the-Wisps made up of “thousands and thousands of little LED nodes” and The Birds of Lumos, which is a “representation of the rare kiwi birds in New Zealand”.

“Then there’s some other little surprises along the Walk of Wonder that I don’t want to give away,” Anothony said.

“And on top of all of those fantastic projections and installations, we’ve got some great live performances, all of which have a light-up element to them whether it’s fire twirling or LED hula hooping or neon tap shoes.

“We have a real line in the same this year too where the lights come on at 7.30pm so the whole event precinct slowly falls in to darkness then bam, at 7.30pm all the lights come on.

“We invite people to come down earlier than that, any time from 5pm where we’ve got all our food trucks and lots of entertainment for the family.”

What: Kaleidoscope Festival When: November 9-12 Time: 5pm to 10.30pm Where: Joondalup city centre

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