Why Bendigo? Keys to a culturally receptive regional city

Avant-garde isn't the monopoly of cities. The Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) found a vital regional centre was the ideal place to push boundaries.
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Finnish group defunensemble will perform at BIFEM 2015. Photo: ​Ville Mattila.

When you start a festival and ensemble dedicated to exploratory music, and you locate them in Bendigo, you get two questions. 1.What is exploratory music? And 2.Why Bendigo?

The first answer is easy, and isn’t ‘to buy a vowel for our acronym’. Exploratory is the device we use in Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) to dismantle the archaic etiquette between composer, performer and audience for newly-composed concert music.

To present ‘exploratory’ work proposes no single reading, no particular frame, but assumes that an intelligent listener will, through exposure to virtuosic interpretation, be able to generate their own response to the varied sonic experiences our festival offers. It is this absence of frame and reading that bonds the audience to the performance.

Since starting BIFEM in 2013, we have also found that it is neat marketing to avoid the now audience-pejorative terms like experimental and avant-garde, which have themselves codified (some say calcified) into fixed, stylistically bound sub-genres. And the word ‘contemporary’ is a simulacra, or even shorthand mockery, for pop.

The second question is more complex, and can’t be answered with a map. For thousands of years the Dja Dja Wurrung people, who remain traditional custodians, cultivated the rich natural resources of the region. Modern Bendigo was founded on exploration.

Writ large in the imagination of the Victorian era, the world descended into its many gullies in search of gold, and Bendigo made many people rich. Bendigo transformed from gold rush bust to industrial powerhouse, then as manufacturing scaled back, the city retooled to focus on the niche and the innovative.

Bendigo is home to the nation’s fifth-largest bank, and without question its most socially ethical one. An architecturally rich city with exceptional public spaces and facilities, it is almost perfectly positioned at the very centre of Central Victoria. At 150km north west of Melbourne, it’s easily accessible, and yet far enough away never to have lost its sense of identity to the ever-sprawling, ever culturally-fragmented state capital.

More than two decades ago, the people of Bendigo undertook the challenge of unifying six separate shires and boroughs. The emergence of the City of Greater Bendigo – covering some 3,048 square kilometres – sowed the seeds for the city’s current status as cultural tourism darling, to the delight and the envy of most Australian regional cities.

Today, this ‘Bendigo Effect’ is fostered by a dynamic city council department – aptly called City Futures – that covers performance, exhibitions, food and wine, sports, business conferences, festivals, hubbed around core tourism infrastructure and some dynamic individuals.

Strongly figured in this cultural achievement is undoubtedly Karen Quinlan, whose redefining curatorial positioning of the Bendigo Art Gallery has been an Australian visual arts game-changer. Successive blockbuster exhibitions and a remarkable permanent collection testify to Quinlan’s stewardship of a gallery that makes a trip to Bendigo reliably rewarding.

This year saw the opening of the Ulumbarra Theatre, a radical transformation of the old Sandhurst Gaol including a state-of-the-art fly-tower 1000-seat theatre. It is a breathtakingly beautiful re-invention that turns an historically dead zone of the city into a thriving heart.  To say it has been embraced is an understatement: six weeks after opening, 25,000 people had been through the theatre.

Bendigo’s cultural receptiveness has also seen the early success of the Bendigo Writers’ Festival since 2012, the Bendigo Blues and Roots Festival and so many other events emerging in and around the city, diligently supported by The Capital Venues and Events, the Bendigo Art Gallery, the council and the business community of Bendigo.

Not bad for a regional city with an urban population of around 83,000 people.

After 20 years of wishing for better conditions to present the music and musicians I admired, I find myself in a city where hard work and ideas are rewarded.

The inaugural BIFEM in September 2013 was a bet not just on great artists and great work, but also a bet on the people of Bendigo. Last year, as box office grew by 200%, that bet  is paying off.

I was fortunate to be in Rotterdam recently as BIFEM was finalist for the Classical:NEXT Innovation Award alongside Lucerne Festival and London’s Southbank Centre.

The forthcoming publication of Marcus Westbury’s book Creating Cities, as well as the well-trodden ideas of Richard Florida that Westbury reprises, remind us that innovation is not a function of capacity: innovators create capacity.

But for cultural capacity to have meaning, there must be spark in the act of presentation when an artist, a work and an audience collide in a spirit of openness and exploration. In Bendigo and at BIFEM, you’ll find that spark.

Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
4 – 6 September 2015.
Information and tickets at bifem.com.au

David Chisholm
About the Author
David Chisolm is the founder and festival director of the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM).