youarehere : interview with creative producer, David Finnigan

In theory, a lot of things could be great – I got pretty psyched for peanut butter flavoured ice-cream for a while there, before realizing that peanuts and milk are an ungodly combination, and are likely to form the consistency of something akin to muddy glue.

Similarly, although the concept of a festival like YouAreHere, which has been taking over the Canberra CBD for the past few weeks, is a great one, it’s easy to see how it could have all gone disappointingly pear-shaped. Luckily for us, and for creative producer David Finnigan, however, that just wasn’t the case. If anything, YouAreHere is like a rainbow flavoured Paddlepop – a little left-of-centre, but just so freaking good.

You can read more about the exact nature of YouAreHere in my earlier article, but to give you a general idea, the festival is a ten day art, theatre and music affair, with events held in abandoned shop-fronts and other venues all over the Canberra city centre.
Now seven days into the madness, I caught up with David to have a quick chat about the festival, and the nature of independent arts events in Canberra more generally.

30 seconds into our conversation, and it’s pretty clear that David is still reeling from the success of the festival so far. Events have garnered tons of local attention, turnout has been fantastic, and what’s more, people seem to be having a lot of fun – which is really what it’s all about.

‘Really, the whole thing is just going extraordinarily well,’ David says, sounding pretty chuffed. ‘We’ve had almost triple our estimated audience for everything so far! We’re still a bit staggered by how much people have taken on the festival, and come to things. It’s stunning, we feel a bit dazed about it!’

With a range of different events spanning across the ten days, the success of YouAreHere really lies in the diversity of options present for festival-goers. There’s a mix of relaxed, chilled-out music events, and more hands-on, interactive theatre performances, as well as tons of visual art exhibitions and shows to enjoy.

Some of David’s highlights so far demonstrate the unusual nature of the events, such as the Overhead Projector Jam that was on this past Monday.

‘A girl called Michaela Dabson curated the event, and it was just really nice. We had about five different projectors set up in the space, and there were all sorts of materials, like water, colouring, detergent, oil and just toys, essentially,’ David explains. ‘The audience came in and played with the projectors, and there was some lovely music, and then the music turned into a sort of jam for all the artists as well. It was a really lovely event, just sort of chilled out. You don’t get to do that very often.’

Despite the success of the festival, however, David isn’t certain that it will be run again in coming years, or at least, that it could ever be run in the same way.
‘I have this fear that people will go, “Oh, that was good – let’s do it again!”, and try to replicate [the festival] in 2012. And of course, 2012 is a completely different thing to 2011, the same things that worked in 2011 wont work, and it’ll just fall apart,’ David says. ‘I think if it were to happen again, it would have to be very different, and what would be different about it, I don’t know.’

The difficulty is getting the necessary feedback to really gain an idea of the successes and failures of the festival as a whole. David worries that, although they’ve received a lot of positive feedback about YouAreHere, constructive criticism might be harder to gather.
‘If you’re at the heart of a festival, you’re inevitably going to see all of the good sides to it, because you’re naturally in that space. But all of the people who feel left out, or all of the people who have negative experiences, it’s a bit harder to see those aspects.’

One concern is that the festival hasn’t managed to reach or represent enough different groups from the Canberra arts community. Although involvement in the actual coordination of the festival has been pretty equal in terms of gender (the Assistant Producer of the festival is Yolande Norris, local writer/curator/editor/producer extraordinaire, and tons of other fantastic women are involved as coordinators), representation in terms of female performers and artists has been less apparent.

‘The gender representation is completely fucked,’ David agrees, clearly troubled by the fact. ‘In fact representation across the board is problematic – you can tell that it was curated by a white guy!’

This is hardly a problem unique to YouAreHere though, and in fact, is bemoaned by many a local creative organization. Lip struggles with it regularly, when we try to host events and hire female musicians or performers – where are all the girls? It’s questions like these that will need to be looked at, if the festival is to continue on next year.

Despite these concerns, and regardless of whether YouAreHere becomes an annual event or not, the festival has managed to brighten Civic for Canberra citizens over the past week, and can be considered an all-round success by organizers.

David can’t help but gush a little, when it comes to acknowledging his team of fellow coordinators.
‘It’s been incredible working with this team! Everyone has gone above and beyond, the artists have been fucking rad, and the audiences have been amazing,’ he effuses. ‘This thing kicked off about a 100 days before it started, there were 100 days were it went from zero to being a festival. It just wouldn’t have been possible without this much good will and support from every direction, so I guess in one respect we’re definitely feeling the love.’

YouAreHere is certainly evidence that, with the right amount of love and care, from little things, big things really do grow.

Check out more stuff on YouAreHere, including pics and vids, here!