Cracking Safes at WOMADelaide

Matt Connell continues his reflections on his experience of WOMADelaide 2009. His previous account can be found here.

Friday 6th March: 'No worries, we'll be able to use an oxy-acetylene blowtorch to cut into the safe tomorrow in time for your gig'

Was I dreaming? No, what a bizarre day this was for me, dominated by 'DJ Disaster Narrowly Averted.' Having locked all my valuables, including my precious CDs, into the hotel room safe, I was perturbed, but not unduly, when on Thursday evening I couldn't open it. A few hours later, when two duty managers and an engineer still couldn't get into it, I really began to worry. A pointed remark to the effect that I'd travelled 12 thousand miles for this gig and now my CDs were sealed in an reinforced metal box resulted in the 'assurance' about the blowtorch. So, I spent the night tossing and turning with nightmare visions of an Ocean's Eleven safe job resulting in a pile of melted plastic and DJ egg on my face. But, thank goodness, the next day a locksmith cracked the nut without any blowtorch and delivered my tunes into my shaking hands. The Hilton gave me a champagne breakfast and some drink and taxi vouchers to make up for the stress. Thus fortified, I was able to go ahead and played a blinder using all the loverly equipment that was installed in the Picture Palace without a hitch by the site crew. The soundsystem was really tasty and sounded sweet. It was a real pleasure - and a great relief - to finally get some sounds on!

More importantly, the main attraction - the painting of the hoarding - proceeded apace, and as the public flooded onto the festival site we began to get a steady stream of interested people staying to watch the painting for a while. Many people were keen to chat about their experiences of India and of Bombay films, and enjoyed reading all the exhibition information and looking at the collection of original film artworks. It was particularly interesting that people of Indonesian or Malay extraction (of which there are quite a few in Australia) had fond memories of these films, and of painted hoardings, because the films and the culture associated with them were exported all around South Asia, not just within the Indian sub-continent.

(Photo credit: Matt Connell: all rights reserved.)

Jai Ho

Matt Connell continues his reflections on his visit to WOMADelaide. Earlier reports can be found here and here.

Thurs 5th: Had my stereotypical cultural imaginary of Australia as somehow being a bit 'Wild West' shattered today - the culture of Health and Safety is even more pervasive here than in the UK. I cut my finger (using a saw), and had to fill in a form to get a plaster (Action Taken to Prevent a Reoccurrence of the Accident = 'be more careful next time….'). But, joking aside, a big event like this has to take H&S matters very seriously - a chat with one of the site electricians revealed how one of his electrical inspections at another event discovered a bare wire contact with a tent frame that would have electrified an entire row of stalls if it hadn't been spotted - and with up to 70,000 members of the public expected to visit over the weekend, everyone is keen to make the site as safe as is possible.

The artists are continuing their outlining and underpainting of the hoarding - which is combining a classic Bombay film image (of the suffering heroine of Mother India pulling a plough) with an image referencing the recent box office smash Slumdog Millionaire. The Slumdog sweep of the Oscars has generated a huge amount of publicity in India, and has come at just the right moment for the Bombay Picture Palace at WOMADelaide - there seems to be quite a buzz around what we are doing, which is really nice. Although Slumdog is not of course strictly a Mumbai film, most of the crew for it were in fact from the Mumbai film industry. The Hindi phase 'jai ho' ('victory'), which forms the lyric of the climactic song from Slumdog Millionaire, is fast becoming our team catchphase and acting as an endlessly re-inflected lingua franca as preparations accelerate in anticipation of opening to the public tomorrow. Yesterday, I heard this song blaring from a record shop in downtown Adelaide, which was fantastic.

Had a lovely moment today when I invited an Indian taxi driver on site to have a look at what we are doing. On chatting to the artists and soaking up the atmosphere he was quite moved, and rendered palpably homesick for his family in India. He said he loved the venue, and was proud to see 'his people' doing something great in Australia. This was very satisfying, because despite the heartfelt efforts of committed organisations like WOMAD, the whole world music/cultural festival scene is of course prey to the sceptical accusation that it provides a merely 'orientalist' frission of novelty to white middle class audiences without providing any real cultural authenticity or engagement. We'll see what the public make of it all tomorrow….
(Photo Credit: mikecogh. Permissions.)

Constructing a Festival

Matt Connell continues his reflections on his visit to WOMADelaide 2009. Find out about earlier stages of the process here.

Wednesday: The artists (a team from Studio Balkrishna in Mumbai, led by Mr Balkrishna himself) have really cracked on now: with the hoarding gridded up they set to mixing the paints. The concentrated powder pigment was mixed with linseed oil and cobalt drying solution (to speed up the drying time so that the finished hoarding can be hung at the end of the festival). The resulting paints are astonishingly vivid. Then, once a small sacred 'om' had been jotted on the surface to dedicate the painting, outlining of the figures commenced, with rapid progress being made.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have been decorating the marquee with coloured cloth, garlands, and Indian fabric decorations. Festival marquees tend towards the anonymous white cube look, and our challenge is to convert this into a vibrant space redolent of the sub-continent, in which to hang the Bombay Picture Palace collection of original posters and Bolly oil-on-canvas advertisments. The other task has been to begin technical liaison with the various wings of the site crew: electricians, lighting and sound crews, in order to ensure that the correct DJ equipment, lights and PA are successfully installed. I am responsible for this liason, as I am the most technically minded of the team. Thankfully, the WOMAD crew seem very efficient and helpful, so I am not anticipating any problems. But this equipment will be the last thing to be installed, so we won't really know all is ok until the last minute.
(Photo credit: mikecogh. permissions.)

WOMADelaide: the Bombay Picture Palace

Matt Connell continues his report from the WOMADelaide 'Sounds of the Planet 2009' festival, highlighting some of the complex 'behind-the-scenes' processes involved in producing cultural events like festivals.

The festival opens to the public on Friday. It's now Tuesday, and on site preparation in the beautiful Botanical Gardens in Adelaide is well underway, with stages going up and a real bustle about the place. There has been some heavy rain - v.unusual, and most welcome - firstly, because they need the water in South Australia, and secondly because usually the main problem at festivals here is dust. So long as it clears by the weekend, everyone is happy for some dampness now. Having survived a few very muddy festivals in the UK, it certainly feels strange to be happy about rain!

The Bombay Picture Palace tent is up, and decoration has begun. The main task for the team has been to check that the complex set of rigging kit, artists materials and shipped exhibition items has been correctly assembled. The process of long range ordering of materials by the Mumbai artists , which has taken place via the Charity Shop DJ team in England communicating with the WOMAD group in Australia, has involved various translation issues and the potential for 'chinese whisper' communication distortions. In fact, as everyone gathered around the boxes and crates and began checking everything off, everything was more-or-less as hoped for.

Building on the detailed organization by the CSDJ team in the UK, the WOMAD team over here in Australia have done wonders getting several hard-to-source items, and the relief of the Indian artists was palpable as they could see that they were now equipped to to what they've come to do. One of the more interesting aspects of this was their need for dry powder pigments, to be mixed and blended with linseed oil on site, to produce their own paint. This way of working is now more-or-less unheard of outside India, with almost all European, American and New World artists using pre-mixed paints - so tracking down the right powders and potions was quite a tricky task. Everyone is happy. The space is taking shape nicely, the shipped exhibition items have arrived (including the Bombay Picture Palace collection of Indian film posters, hoardings and paintings).

Prep work on the 'Bolly' hoarding that will take shape over the course of the festival will begin in earnest tomorrow, with the large boards being gridded up using thread and chalk (the chalk is rubbed on a thread which is stretched across the board and then twanged, leaving a dead straight chalkline across the board). The grid will then be used as a guide for penciling in the outline design. I'll let you know about that - and the pigment mixing - in my next post.