SHOWCASE PROJECT
BIG ANXIETY FESTIVAL 2019
The Nelson Meers Foundation supported The Big Anxiety Festival 2019. The Big Anxiety was an initiative of UNSW Sydney in association with the Black Dog Institute and other partners in the cultural, education and health sectors. This festival brought together artists, scientists and communities to question and re-imagine the state of mental health in the 21st century.
A radically new kind of international arts festival, in which every project is an open conversation, designed to promote curiosity, awareness and action, The Big Anxiety presented events across Sydney, tackling the major anxieties of our times, as well as the stresses and strains of everyday life. Whether through hi-tech interactive environments or one-on-one dialogues, their goal was to create the rich engagements we need for our collective mental health.
A HEARTFELT MESSAGE TO OUR COMMUNITY
FROM NELSON MEERS FOUNDATION
We want to reassure the cultural sector that our Foundation will continue to provide strategic support in the challenging circumstances in which we find ourselves. We are doing our best to make funds available – to the extent that we can – to allow us to be flexible and responsive to the critical situation faced by Australian arts and culture.
We are heartened by the way in which the sector has instinctively pulled together, and we know that all our artists will continue finding new and different ways to tell our stories. In a fractured global environment in which so many are experiencing dislocation, isolation and loss, we need these stories now perhaps more than ever before to provide perspective and meaning.
We encourage our project partners to continue communicating with us. Our thoughts are with all of you, your families and loved ones, during this time.
CASE STUDY
URBAN THEATRE PROJECTS: BLAK BOX - A 'TOURABLE' SPACE FOR FIRST NATIONS STORIES
Blak Box is stripped back storytelling - up-close and personal in a surround sound environment. Blak Box embraces the First Peoples concept of ‘deep listening’. In NSW, the word for deep listening is Ngara. In the Yorta Yorta language of the Murray River in Victoria it is Gulpa Ngawal. An Indigenous understanding of deep listening is based on stories, silences and the spaces that lie between.
Blak Box will play ‘home’ to commissioned works and stories by First Peoples artists as part of UTP’s B-Side program.