Anywhere Festival is an annual

Brisbane Brisbane ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the states and territories of Australia, Australian state of Queensland, and the list of cities in Australia by population, third-most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a populati ...

based

festival A festival is an event ordinarily celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect or aspects of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, mela, or eid. A festival c ...

for

performance A performance is an act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Management science In the work place ...

anywhere but traditional theatre spaces. The first anywhere-but-in-a-traditional-theatre concept was brought to Brisbane in 2011 by creative director Paul Osuch and his partner, Ally McTavish. Their theory is that we need to take traditional story-telling out of theatre buildings and back to where life really takes place, in the community. The festival – which holds performances anywhere but in a traditional theatre – began in 2011 with 4000 attendees and 31 productions. Since it began, the Anywhere Festival (they dropped the "Theatre" in 2015) has grown in size and popularity as it inhabited the nooks and crannies of this city of ours The idea behind Anywhere is that the art of theatre should not be constrained by, well, a theatre nor by a time frame of two plus hours with interval, or even a genre. The idea behind Anywhere Festival is that you don't - you shouldn't - have to go to a traditional theatre space to see theatre. You shouldn't have to pay a lot of money for tickets, and artists shouldn't be limited by space or cost or time. For 10 days this month, you can see exciting theatre in parks, backyards, bedrooms, lifts, trains and even on Twitter, not just in Brisbane but as far away as Toowoomba to the west, and Yandina to the north.
"The festival is about theatre anywhere but in a theatre," explains Paul Osuch, the mastermind behind the festival. He started Anywhere with his wife, Alex McTavish. "I could see people wanted exciting theatre that didn't have to happen in a theatre," he says. "What kicked it over the line was when English actor Ian McKellen couldn't find a theatre space in Brisbane to bring his acclaimed Waiting for Godot. I figured that if he had trouble getting into a Brisbane theatre there were probably a lot of less-well-known theatre producers with the same problem." It wasn't just a lack of available theatre venues that prompted him to act. Osuch says he found many traditional theatre spaces were restrictive, both for audiences and artists, and smothered in an air of "elitism" that was turning people away. "I find that most performances in a theatre space are just a little sterile. And parking's difficult, the drinks are generally overpriced and, as someone over the height of six foot, I'm not a big fan of theatre seating where I have to watch a show through the gap between my knees," he says. "I feel that the traditional theatre spaces stop more people going to experience it than it regularly attracts. It's been turned into this big thing with a huge infrastructure around it instead of it being something that people feel they can pop along to in their own neighbourhood or do themselves." "Ultimately, the Anywhere Festival is about entertainment and theatre but it is also about encouraging businesses to engage with their community in a new way", says co-founder and creative producer, Alex McTavish." "It may seem like it is a simple arts festival but community and communion is what it's all about," she says. The festival is held in

, Mackay, Queensland, Mackay, Frankston and

Parramatta Parramatta () is a suburb and major Central business district, commercial centre in Greater Western Sydney, located in the state of New South Wales, Australia. It is located approximately west of the Sydney central business district on the ban ...

History

The festival began in 2011 as the Anywhere Festival, Brisbane but became known as the Anywhere Festival in 2014 to expand its remit beyond traditional "theatre". It was created and directed by Paul Osuch and Alex McTavish. In 2014, the first Anywhere Festival was presented in Frankston and in 2015 grew to include

, Mackay, Queensland, Mackay, Dysart,

Middlemount Middlemount is a rural town and locality in the Isaac Region, Queensland, Australia. In the the locality of Middlemount had a population of 1,841 people. It is nicknamed the "Giant Peanut" by some locals due to its peanut-shaped road layout. ...

Moranbah Moranbah is a coal mining town and locality in the Isaac Region, Queensland, Australia. In the , the locality of Moranbah had a population of 8,735 people. In addition to the permanent population, Moranbah also has a large fly-in fly-out popula ...

and Frankston. In 2017, the festival expanded to

Noosa The Shire of Noosa is a local government area about north of Brisbane in the Sunshine Coast district of South East Queensland, Australia. The shire covers an area of . It existed as a local government entity from 1910 until 2008, when it was ...

and Sunshine Coast with Toni Wills and Nycole Prowse joining and Alex McTavish leaving the festival.

2011

The 2011 Anywhere Festival included

cabaret Cabaret is a form of theatrical entertainment featuring music, song, dance, recitation, or drama. The performance venue might be a pub, a casino, a hotel, a restaurant, or a nightclub with a stage for performances. The audience, often dining or d ...

circus A circus is a company of performers who put on diverse entertainment shows that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, and unicyclist ...

comedy Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term o ...

drama Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been ...

site specific theatre Site-specific theatre is a theatrical production that is performed at a unique, specially adapted location other than a standard theatre. This unique site may have been built without any intention of serving theatrical purposes (for example, a hote ...

and kids theatre features productions by Riot Stage, underground Productions, Black Fox Theatre, Divalution, Cracked Pavement, Rag Tag Productions, Somerset Mills Productions, Flipside Circus, Roundabout theatre, Queensland Arts Council, Gumball Theatre, Edge Improv, Spangles Aura Productions, Booster cushion, The Deconverters, Fractal Theatre, Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble, Two Hours Traffic, Circa Zoolings, Cradle Productions, Michael Weston Organisation, Soapbox Theatre, Circa Zoo, allison Manson and Imploding Fictions.

2012

The 2012 Anywhere Festival ran from 10 to 19 May 2012 and included the following organisations and theatre practitioners: Arts Queensland, Queensland Theatre Company, Brighton Fringe, Markwell Presents Cinematic Theatre Co, Underground Productions, The Alleyway Collective, Cradle Productions, ELaRT Productions, Hannah Taylor, Tease, Black Fox Theatre, La Petite Famille, 2Muse Productions, Egg Festivals Inc., Musica Viva, Arts Support, Sarah Reinking, La Boite, Stage On Screen, Metro Arts, Woodfordian Institute of Street Performances (WISP), SeeD Theatre, Fixate Productions, HolePunch, Synestheatre, Tessa Waters, Mager & Smythe, Lucy Ingham & Alexander Baden Bryce, Australian Actors Network, Jennifer Bismire, 8 Wing Theatre Co., Two Hours Traffic, heartBeast- vicious theatre ensemble, Flipside Circus, Queensland Wind Orchestra, Oxford Girl Theatre Project, Hidden Room, Edrich, Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble, Belles of Hell, Marcus Lilley Artist, Small Crown Productions, Sandra Carluccio, UQ Drama, Medley Theatre Company, Babushka, Circa.

2013

The 2013 Anywhere Festival changed from a ten-day to twelve-day festival, running from 8 to 19 May.

2014

The 2014 Anywhere Festival ran from 7 to 18 May and included 420 performances of 67 different productions over 27 suburbs of

. It featured

and kids theatre. Festival director Paul Osuch said this year's event, running May 7 to 18, would see pubs, hotels, shops, cafes, parks, churches, homes and even a garage serve as a venue for a range of theatre, dance, music, circus and comedy acts.

2015

The 2014 Anywhere Festival ran from 7 to 24 May across

, Mackay, Queensland, Mackay,

Mount Isa Mount Isa ( ) is a city in the Gulf Country region of Queensland, Australia. It came into existence because of the vast mineral deposits found in the area. Mount Isa Mines (MIM) is one of the most productive single mines in world history, bas ...

and

Cairns Cairns (, ) is a city in Queensland, Australia, on the tropical north east coast of Far North Queensland. The population in June 2019 was 153,952, having grown on average 1.02% annually over the preceding five years. The city is the 5th-most-p ...

2016

The 2016 Anywhere Festival ran from 5 to 21 May 2016.

2017

The 2017 Anywhere Festival ran from 4 to 21 May 2017 across

with Sunshine Coast and

becoming part of the festival.

2018

The 2018 Anywhere Festival ran for 18 days from 10-27 Mayacross

, Sunshine Coast and

. More than 500 artists and arts workers presented 370 diverse performances with

dance Dance is a performing art form consisting of sequences of movement, either improvised or purposefully selected. This movement has aesthetic and often symbolic value. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

and

all popping up in surprising places.

2019

The 2019 Anywhere Festival ran from 9 to 26 May across

, Sunshine Coast and

with over 500 performances of 96 shows in 101 different towns and suburbs. The festival featured performances by Violet&Rose productions, Mixed Messages Productions, Independent Graduates from QUT, Magnetic North Theatre Company, Virag Dombay, Cello Dreaming, BYTE Theatre Company, Vulcana, Lightning Bolt Creative, Ritual Theatre, Victoria Posner, XYZ ARI in collaboration with Anthony Elliott Baker, Bec Redsell, Muses Trio, Screech Arts, Chris MartinTalk Is Free Theatre, Cycles in Sync, Linsey Pollak & Lizzie O’Keefe, Phoebe Hilton, Collectivist, Taylor Edwards and Rosa Sottile, Salted Pineapple Productions, Hayley Condon, Emma Lamberton + Brie Jurss, Lady Beard & Co., ThunderBear Productions, Luminescence, Tremayne Gordon, Minola Theatre, Amanda Cole and Kim Kirkman, Half Hitch, The Adwah Haswah Theatre Company of Wonder and Magic, The Humour Experiment, Wester-Dyer Productions, The Shadow Collective, Underground Productions, Riley Cope Creative, Relativity, 3bCreative, Spiral Dance Company, Sunshine Troupe Inc, Tim Ross and Kit Warhurst, Lonnie Gilroy, Senaai Chapple & Johanna Lyon, Aaron Ducker, Etch Events, Prathana Thevar-Brink, Maybe Mad Theatre Company, Moment of Inertia Productions, Gary Nostrils, Local Upstarts, Inc, Comedy Lounge, Shiny Tin Productions, The Big Crew, Ben Burns, Ben Keane and friends!, InsideOutside Theatre Company, Big Fork Theatre, Ruckus, Edge Improv, Toukie Wood, browbrow, Republic of Song, supported by Vulcana, SMacNifiCo, Alex Harper, Noah Milne, Planet Clare, Red Chair, Gabe Francis, The Singer’s Anatomy, Fools Theatre Company , The Owl’s Nest, Talk of the Town Storytelling Services, Chance Collective, Lightning Bolt Creative, Sho Eba, Gemma Elsom & Joseph Wilson- The Drama Merchant, Red Robin Entertainment, The Smooth End of the Pineapple, Sharon Moore, Little Seed Theatre Company, The Reaction Theory, Fiona Bryant and co., Act/React, D.I.V.E. Theatre Collective, Scott Wings, Interim Theatre, Mira Ball Productions.

2020

The 2020 Anywhere Festival was due to run 7 to 24 May 2020 and was cancelled due to

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. An out of festival season was run between June to September featuring 21 productions across 32 towns and suburbs using online shows with

Zoom Zoom may refer to: Technology Computing * Zoom (software), videoconferencing application * Page zooming, the ability to magnify or shrink a portion of a page on a computer display * Zooming user interface, a graphical interface allowing for image ...

and performances in driveways to meet social distancing and venue restrictions while theatres were unable to reopen. The driveway performance idea lead the way for the

Brisbane Festival Brisbane Festival is one of Australia's leading international arts festivals, and is held each September in Brisbane, Australia. Its presence dominates the city for three weeks in September and its line-up of classical and contemporary music, ...

Street Serenade program, announced shortly after for a September season.

References

External links

*
Arts Queensland Case Study of the 2011 Anywhere Theatre Festival

Arts Queensland Creative Capital Strategy document referring to Anywhere Theatre Festival

Paul Osuch interview with ''The Australian''

Commissioned Blog by Festival Director Paul Osuch on Anywhere, anytime

''Green Room'' interview with Paul Osuch

"Creative Spaces Case Studies
{{Fringe festivals in Australasia Theatre in Brisbane Festivals in Brisbane Tourist attractions in Brisbane Companies based in Brisbane Festivals established in 2011 2011 establishments in Australia Fringe festivals in Australia Site-specific theatre