FREMANTLE’S South Terrace coffee strip is always busy, but break dancing acrobats, a flame-throwing punk rocking bagpiper, a melancholic bucktooth clown and myriad other street performers took things to a new level over Easter.
FREMANTLE’S South Terrace coffee strip is always busy, but break dancing acrobats, a flame-throwing punk rocking bagpiper, a melancholic bucktooth clown and myriad other street performers took things to a new level over Easter.
The Easter long weekend festivities started as the Fremantle Buskers Festival in, but the event outgrew its name to become the Fremantle Street Arts Festival.
The name is getting recognised across Australia and around the world, thanks to the renewed focus on marketing and developing the event as a crowd-drawing, business-boosting tourism attraction for Fremantle.
This year’s festival had more international acts and drew bigger crowds than ever.
Festival organiser, City of Fremantle coordinator cultural development Alex Marshall, said the increased funding and focus on marketing the event had a lot to do with that growth.
The festival had grown its links with the City of Fremantle’s marketing department since the state government’s event agency, Eventscorp, provided it with funding two years ago.
“This year we have worked much more closely with the city’s marketing department and economic development department,” Mr Marshall said.
“The city’s festivals are great for spearheading some parts of the plans for economic development and destination marketing. The influx of people over the weekend is great for businesses in Fremantle, they all do really well.”
The festival’s artistic director, Brendan Coleman, said having the Eventscorp funding had meant the festival could evolve its line up and attract international performers, thereby increasing international attention on Fremantle.
“What we have now is the world’s best street performers,” said Mr Coleman, who is contracted to the City of Fremantle for three months of the year and is a street performer for the rest of the year.
Mr Marshall agreed, saying publicity surrounding the festival had featured in in-flight magazines, interstate daily newspaper travel sections and through international media as well, which all contributed to more than 100,000 people attending the festival.
“The festival has grown from where it was 13 years ago; it is still essentially the same but the scope and quality of it has been improved untold amounts,” Mr Marshall said.
Visitors had the choice of 140 shows over the four days, an increase of 30 shows from 2010. Mr Coleman put this down to the growing diversity of the program.
As well as 10 international performers from countries including the Netherlands, Canada, Argentina and France, the festival was also about developing opportunities for local performers, Mr Coleman said, pointing to Fremantle’s local youth theatre company Youth Circus.
“Every year they present a work. It is a lovely way of bringing on the next generation, being able to allow them to participate in a high status festival,” he said.
Mr Marshall is also well equipped for his role in organising the event, having once been a juggling unicyclist street performer.
He regularly attended street performance festivals in Europe before returning to Perth and convincing the City of Fremantle to take on developing a festival similar to the ones he toured with.
“I had seen what these festivals could achieve in Europe and the kind of number they brought into the cities, how good it was for the town and businesses,” Mr Marshall said.
He said having a performers perspective made him aware of how suitable Fremantle was to a street festival.
“To have an understanding of the art form and what makes people doing it tick is very important in setting a festival up. It is a combination of the flow of people, the businesses, the streets, the performers that make it work in some places and not work in others.”
Mr Coleman agreed, saying that one of the reasons the festival worked was Fremantle was such a great place just to hang out.
“It has a reputation of being the place you can see the unique, the weird, the wonderful, the diverse, the arty. The festival just accentuates that,” Mr Coleman said.
