Multidisciplinary Dark Arts Festival WINTERWILD Returns To The Otway Coast
Southern Otways will provide a backdrop for ambitious music, food and arts programming.
Dark Arts Festival WinterWild will return to Apollo Bay on August 12-14 + August 26-28 bringing live music, theatre, gourmet food, outdoor performance, installations, beachside bonfires, comedy, swims and cemetery tours to the dark heart of the Otway Coast. Beyond the glitz of Lorne, the untamed, rugged landscape of the Southern Otways will provide a backdrop for ambitious music, food and arts programming destined to bring adventure-seeking audiences to the far reaches of the Great Ocean Road.
Amyl and The Sniffers, Cash Savage and The Last Drinks, Emma Donovan and the Putbacks, ORB, Kee'ahn, Leah Senior and Floodlights head up music programming, ensuring the talent on offer rivals even the country's biggest festivals in integrity and stature.
Both weekends will feature a Wild Feast on the Apollo Bay foreshore with fresh local produce cooked with dizzying immediacy on open fires in the elements. Apollo Bay Fishermen's Co-Op bring hibachi grills, cauldrons and open flame to the village feast. Dine on fresh crayfish, abalone and scallops mere metres from the wharves where daily catch is hauled from the ocean.
Each day indoor and open-air performance art abound, including the ominous outdoor spectacle The DogWatch. Local artists partner with internationally renowned producers like Aphids Theatre, Long Prawn and Finucane & Smith as the Otways community lend their time and talents to ensuring the town comes alive with magic and mystery throughout the dual-weekend event.
Comedy gets a guernsey this year, along with cemetery tours conducted by the local historical society, Qigong, sunrise cold water immersion (no wetsuits allowed!), group somatic sound walks, healing workshops, and yoga combined with live music by the sea. Plus an ocean amphitheatre built to behold a late night water polo match held in an inky, ten-degree ocean with illuminated balls as giant stingrays pass underneath.
Suffice to say, WinterWild boasts the kind of fantastical programming that often defies description.
WinterWild's programming is not for the faint-hearted in any sense, with full intention to embrace the elements instead of hiding from them. Flanked by rainforest and wild ocean, the thick fog of the 'Otway Blanket' descends on Apollo Bay at night and WinterWild has every intention of celebrating -instead of shunning - its master.
'We're stoked to be emerging from two years' hibernation with the biggest WinterWild yet" says Festival Director Bill Hurley Fraser. "The unique nature of the Otway Coast has always been our guiding force, and every corner of this year's vast festival program highlights that, showcasing some of Australia's best musical talent, genre-bending performance art and incredible local produce cooked on beachside bonfires - all underpinned by the elements of the local environment at its extreme."
Previous incarnations have been described as 'dark, wild and a little bit dirty' .
Do you dare?
Full program live and tickets on sale Wednesday 8 June 9am at winterwild.com.au
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