Fairfax Festival Blog Two: Welcome Back!

by Jane

I’ve arrived in the temperamentally weathered Swan Hill for this year’s Fairfax Festival. As I wrote back in July, the Festival brings together kids from around regional and rural Victoria and New South Wales for four days of games, workshops and rehearsals before, this year for the first time, they’ll take over the main road of Swan Hill with the YES Fest.

The kids will be working with artists based in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, doing workshops including Shakespeare, sound art, improvisation, and human pyramids. This afternoon we began with group theatre sports to crack the ice. It turns out if you walk around a room pretending to be a roster while a hundred teenagers also pretend to be a rooster, you begin to feel like you’re in high school all over again. Apparently, I’d also shunned the exact mechanisms of how to play ‘Big Booty’ from my mind, only for them to all come flooding back this afternoon.

I’ll be blogging all week from the Festival, bringing you my observations about the day, my experiences of taking part, and hopefully some interviews with the kids and staff involved. It’s my first time being invited to blog an event like this  – and Fairfax’s first time inviting a blogger – so where the week takes us, we’ll just have to wait and see.