Woodford Folk Festival: The Fire Event

THE FIRE EVENT - CLOSING CEREMONY OF WOODFORD FOLK FESTIVAL

20,000 people sit on the amphitheatre hillside, in the cooling evening air, full of anticipation. For them, research shows, this event provides a potent transition from one year to the next. To say "good bye" (and in some cases good riddance) to the last year, and welcome another year with hopeful joy and expectancy.

These feelings are palpable and ultimately they all know that after the lantern parade, the theatrical telling of a mythic story, heart swelling music from the community choir and orchestra, the 12 metre high sculpture will explode with fireworks then become a bonfire.

The Closing Ceremony came to be known as The Fire Event because the centrepiece of the event is that big sculpture, rigged with fireworks that ignite a bonfire set inside the sculpture. It becomes the finale of the event.

231 Beacon of Hope ignited Fire Event 2017.jpg

236 Beacon rains hope Fire Event 2017.jpg

240 Beacon shoots stars Fire Event 2017.jpg

In 1994 my 7 year old daughter Freyja and I drove from Melbourne to Woodford, about an hours drive northwest of Brisbane, so I could work on the Closing Ceremony of the Woodford Folk Festival and a whole new world opened up for me, for us both. Recently she described her memories of those times as utter freedom, childhood joy and the feeling of being in a safe place. In fact she tells me she has hesitated to return because those early memories are precious and potent, and she doesn't want to displace them. Maybe she'll take her husband and son one day.

The first Fire Event I worked on shifted my whole consciousness sideways. Dr Neil Cameron, the director, welcomed me immediately I arrived on site by telling me the story of that year's show, The Tree Of Life, saying I could make anything I liked provided it fitted that theme. Music to my ears!

After a three day drive to get there, setting up my flimsy little one person tent on the muddy hillside, making a butterfly puppet that was about 5 metres high, and a crooked heart covered in hot pink tissue, rehearsing in the mad midday sun and performing in the show, all the while somehow eating and sleeping and negotiating other life necessities (including the drop toilet) I was a different person from the one who arrived.

After the audience left, we brought the things we'd made down to the bonfire that remained of the main sculpture burn, and performed them for each other to the improvised accompaniment of Lindsay Pollak and his gamelan orchestra. By then I was in such a heightened state from the whole experience - the scale of the thing, the close proximity of a huge audience - that I was outside my physical body. As we threw my butterfly onto the fire and watched it take on other sculptural forms as it burned I experienced what I can only describe as a whole body hallucination. No drugs required. While that hasn't happened with the same vivid impact again, I feel as though I enter another state of being each time I work on the Fire Event. It's one of the things that has taken me back 15 times.

Woodford site map.jpg — Woodford Folk Festival

The festival was set up by the Queensland Folk Federation who had bought a beautiful valley in southeast Queensland, that had been degraded by decades of cattle farming.
They wrote a 500 year plan and set about revegetating and running the festival. About five years ago, on the initiative of longterm festival director Bill Hauritz, People's **Republic of Woodfordia** was born.
This festival site map gives a sense of the scale of the thing.

Initially deeply knowledgeable ritual theatre director Dr Neil Cameron, developed and directed the Fire Event, setting ritual into the bones of the event. As we worked he would talk to us about the significance of acknowledging the passing of one year, and forming intentions for the next year. He gave us a sense of participation and expression in making the work, that could be conveyed convincingly to the audience. Neil directed from 1994 until 2002, and I worked on 7 Fire Events with him. The event transitioned from his directorship, through several other directors (Paul Lawler, Joey Ruigrok Van De Werven) and I was invited back in 2012.

In 2014 the outrageously talented Alex Podger took on the role of director. Working with Alex, my role as Lead Visual Artist, Set Decor, included leading a team of volunteers, designing and making big things to dress the set. It is such a thrilling thing to know that anything I design can be made because someone has the skills. I have worked on 15 Fire Events now.
Alex was 8 when I met him the first time I worked with Neil in 1994. He was there with his amazing mother Lily Podger, a long term Fire Event artist who now heads up the live fire team. That is one aspect of the 500 year plan in action.

Around this time of director transitioning, the festival conducted some research to ascertain the important elements of the event for the audience. Turned out the element of ritual was more meaningful than we'd realised. As was the live fire the event culminated with. So both had to stay!

The Fire Event team of 150+ artists camp in the head of a tropical valley, work in a big tent, and make a deeply important moment for 20,000 people who value the ritual nature of this transition from one year to the next. Each year Alex writes a story, that is part of the aesthetic of Woodfordia, and is in context with past Fire Event stories. He enlists the team and keeps us inspired and focussed on the work, on our responsibilities as activists for the planet and on maintaining each other, our workspace and our camp. And every year we make more amazingness than we could imagine.

One day last year I was lamenting that all my favourite people were away, moved to Berlin or London, away working or holidaying. Then I realised that I met these favourite people at the Fire Event. It is the place where I have felt most respected both as an artist and as an older woman. This alone is significant. And because of Alex Podger's uncanny ability to pull together a team of luminously talented people, there is a deep sense of camaraderie, of knowing we are all on the same team, for the Fire Event, and in global political and environmental terms. So any conversations and interactions we have are immediately beyond the usual time of caution as trust is built.

There is another element to this camaraderie. It is that of working under considerable pressure, in the weeks of building and making, and also during show day set up and performance. Once you know how people respond in these situations you know whether you can trust them. A friend from early Neil Cameron days, who was also a fire fighter, compared fighting wild bushfires and working on the Fire Event as equally potent for building trust and forming lasting relationships.

EO Peter Auty.jpg — That fire fighter was Peter Auty, who was Fire Event site manager for Neil Cameron for the first few years I went up there. We became very good friends, and over the years I knew him we talked of many things.
He was President of the Queensland Folk Festival when they first started developing the Woodford Folk Festival, and told me about the 500 year plan. He supported, indeed may have initiated, full consultation with the local Indigenous people, the ongoing regeneration program (that has now become The Planting, a festival in itself) and he was there to solve any un-arts-related problem.
Peter, who has sadly passed now, was one of those people who gave every bit of his being to whatever he was doing; he was endlessly enthusiastic and optimistic. He did Morris dancing, and could sing ancient Irish songs in Gaelic while playing one of his many squeeze boxes. He also had a collection of 17 kilts, many of which he had made himself.
He was living at Flowerdale in Victoria when the Black Saturday fires created madness, and was involved with Landcare and the local Rural Fire Brigade. His vivid telling of that fire story still brings goosebumps to my spine.

It is critical when working with a large crew for a huge audience to be aware of current issues that may be influencing peoples state of mind. These considerations are always included theatrically, sometimes subtly and sometimes emphatically, in the Fire Event.

In 2001, the year of 9/11 when the Twin Towers were bombed killing 2,977 people, Neil felt it was inappropriate to feature a towering inferno as the central piece for the Fire Event. Instead he and his beautiful wife Faridah, designed 7 x 9m high Pillars of Wisdom, and over six weeks teams of artists made them, in 3m sections. Each was given a name intended to invoke qualities of healing for a world shaken with shock about the bombing; Compassion, Respect, Forgiveness, Good Judgement, Kindness, Learning, Faithfulness, and Positivity.

For the most recent Fire Event, Alex Podger had the task of negotiating the question of live fire in a country experiencing the worst bushfires in known history. The site, usually a lush wet tropics rainforest full of wildlife, was tinder dry. Known as Fire Event Valley, it is an extra, almost secret, camping site for the Fire Event artists, and sits right up in the head of the valley just before an enormous forest begins. We felt as if we were sitting in the very jaws of that bushfire dragon just being there. Weaving together the considerations of the festival management, the local fire brigade, his own artistic ideas and processes and the huge expectations for live fire we knew the audience have, Alex came up with such an elegant and powerful solution it brought a standing ovation from the audience. He had become involved with Extinction Rebellion through the year, and as we built the work he talked about how critical activism is in our world, and what that means to us as individuals, how we could interact with it. An important aspect is the ability to accept change, to be flexible and generous with the ways our lives need to change, and he used this aspect in particular to inspire us all to accept a Fire Event without fire - for the first time since it began 30 years previously.

At the point in the show where the fireworks on the main sculpture would usually be ignited, and the bonfire would follow, all 150 of the artistic team ran from different positions down onto the stage to join the main character puppet Emir with huge flags printed with endangered animals, and the symbols of numerous activist groups around the world; Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd, Stop Adani etc. The Volunteer Fire Service, who had been invited just to watch the show after all their years of supporting it, were brought to the front for a moment of recognition for the heroic work they'd been doing fighting the fires. The audience exploded and leapt to its feet. Then Alex said quite simply, into a microphone, We Are The Fire, as we invited the audience down to dance on the stage to the wild gypsy music of Boban Markovic Orkestar.