Get Ecstatic!

Supersense: Festival of the Ecstatic returns to Arts Centre Melbourne in August for its third iteration. And it’s got even more excitement in store.

A Norwegian master yoiker. A seashell-turned-harp-string-bow. A 1,300-year-old tradition of hypnotic trance music from Morocco. A Russian feminist political punk collective. A cycle of lullaby rituals performed in more than 25 languages.

Perhaps not your typical idea of an ensemble of offerings inside the luscious interiors of Arts Centre Melbourne.

And yet, those performances – and so many more – have all been part of Supersense: Festival of the Ecstatic, a three-day festival of immersive music and performance that has taken over Arts Centre Melbourne’s less familiar spaces and venues every two years since 2015. The festival returns this August for its third encounter with Melbourne audiences.

“Supersense effectively turns Arts Centre Melbourne inside out, creating new and imaginative pathways through the building,” says David Anderson, Arts Centre Melbourne’s Head of Contemporary Performance. “Performances and installations use our entire venue – presenting headline acts on our main stages, while using rehearsal rooms, backstage and operational spaces as flexible, interacting performance venues.”

The dramatic and unexpected festival was created in association with Melbourne-raised curator and performer Sophia Brous, who saw an opportunity for immersive performance that is unexpected in its environment.

“Supersense seeks to explore work that draws on revelation, transcendence, provocation, enlightenment, joy and ritual communion,” says Sophia. “It explores our universal hunger for ecstatic experience…creating a conversation between all parts that you can step into and discover over three days.”

This time, however, it brings a further twist.

Supersense 2017 at Arts Centre Melbourne. (Photo credit: Mark Gambino)

The city’s iconic annual White Night event – a 12-hour festival of lights, projections, art and music across Melbourne’s CBD each February – announced that in 2019, the festival will take place over three consecutive nights in August: the same weekend as Supersense.

This gives Arts Centre Melbourne a unique opportunity to collaborate with White Night to add another layer of revelatory performance to an already jam-packed celebration. As many of Melbourne’s familiar inner city landmarks are transformed into unexpected and reimagined sites, so too are Arts Centre Melbourne’s interiors. It’s a natural fit.

It also means that for one night only, Supersense will open its doors for free, providing a unique, transformational offering to align with the exploratory ethos of White Night.

“It is such a privilege to create this in a city like Melbourne – a city that is so overflowing with breathing creativity and activity each day all across the city, with wickedly smart and curious audiences!” says Sophia.

For Arts Centre Melbourne, Supersense brings with it an opportunity to support new and often underrepresented forms of creative performance.

Arts Centre Melbourne has always seen itself as an industry leader in Australia’s performing arts industry. And, as the way audiences experience live performance continues to evolve, so too does the role of organisations like Arts Centre Melbourne.

“It’s really about challenging us to reimagine what role a great centre for the performing arts plays in the cultural lives of Victorians in the 21st century,” says David. “The arts and creativity have to reflect who we are as a community, and we need to be able to offer local audiences and visitors an experience that is distinctly Melbourne at the same time.”

The festival has also been a revelation for Arts Centre Melbourne team members, who get to witness how patrons take in the free-floating nature of the performance spaces.

“I had a fabulous interaction with a patron who just couldn’t get his bearings,” says Jeannie Van de Velde, a Venue Supervisor at Arts Centre Melbourne. “He said that his ticket said ‘State Theatre’, but he had been to the State Theatre many times and that this wasn’t the State Theatre,” she says. “I took him to the edge of the stage and drew back the curtain to give him a glimpse of the splendour of the State Theatre auditorium as you view it from the stage. His face completely lit up as it suddenly became real to him, that he was on the stage that he had viewed so many times from a seat in the audience.”

The richness of the experiences on offer at Supersense meant that so many of the faces of patrons wore expressions ranging from poignant melancholy through gaping awe.

It’s a sentiment echoed by Sophia.

“Nothing can ever replace the impact of being in a space and experiencing art and expression of absolute beauty and divine wonder,” she says. “It’s what some call ‘Stendhal syndrome’, the dizzying rapture of being in the presence of art of profound force. I think I have an addiction to this feeling – and I know many, many Melbournians share it.”

Stay tuned for more on the 2019 edition of Supersense here.