Dance Festival Principles & Framework
A renewed dance festival for Melbourne, developed by Arts House & Dancehouse.
Arts House and Dancehouse are proud to join with the dance community to share the Principles and Framework for a MASSIVE (working title), a renewed dance festival for Melbourne.
The last Dance Massive took place in March 2019. Since that time, the dance community has participated in a long-form conversation about the kind of festival Melbourne needs and aspires towards. People have shared their views in surveys, focus groups, workshops and round table discussions. There have been conversations led by artists, presenters and companies. We are proud to have involved 518 members of the dance communities here and nationwide in the discussion, through a time of significant challenge for our artform and sector.
Now, we have a Principles and Framework that are a joint expression of those ideas.
These Principles and Framework are an open invitation for your organisation to partner with us to create this new festival.
The first meeting of the new Partners for the festival will be held on April 21st from 12pm – 2:30pm at Arts House.
Partners who are ready to commit and proudly embrace these Principles and Framework, and are keen to adopt them into a Memorandum of Understanding, are invited to attend. There will be two paid artist representatives at this meeting. At this meeting, a process for identifying the Artist Curatorium for the festival will be determined and agreed.
After reading the Principles and Framework you will likely have questions. Good! Please join us for this first meeting on 21 April to collectively begin to answer these questions and refine what this festival is and how it will work.
We’d like to extend a sincere thanks to everyone who has shared their passion, ideas and views towards this bright new future. It has been a deeply collaborative – and long! – process to take us here, and we are now very excited to get into the doing and making, together.
Image Credit: Now Pieces (Finalé, 2021), Dancehouse. Photo by Andrew Liu for Pride Productions.
