Sam Wright

Local rocker turned festival showrunner, Sam Wright tells us that he’s been an avid consumer of music and the arts since he was a child visiting WOMADelaide with his parents.

“Early days of WOMADelaide was when I could still go for free, so 12 and under. Playing music was obviously a huge attachment to coming down to the city and playing gigs in bands that I was in. So, yeah, I’ve been very lucky to have art and culture in my life pretty well since age 10, I guess, where it became really, like, core to who I was, who I saw myself as.”

WOMADelaide was the pied piper that initially lured Sam out of the Barossa and into what would become a flourishing career in Adelaide’s festival landscape.

“I hadn’t quite witnessed anything like a festival like WOMADelaide. Arriving in that kind of space, into that huge, amazing Botanic Park and hearing the distant sound of crowds and music that I’d never heard from another place in the world, it just seemed like a pretty amazing community to be part of.”

Primed to love music for most of his life, the allure of a festival that celebrated community, musicians, and art was hard to resist. So hard, in fact, that Sam accepted a volunteer role with WOMADelaide helping artists.

“I loved WOMADelaide so much [that] I volunteered for them, and I think that was the first year I moved down to the city. I got a volunteer gig packing artist bags. Then, I was offered an internship in publicity at WOMADelaide, and that was the platform which I launched from to then work on a whole bunch of festivals.”

Sam found himself behind the scenes instead of on stage, stating that he “really enjoyed throwing the party”. This revelation led to Sam creating a festival of his own.

In 2019, Sam founded ‘Illuminate Adelaide’ with co-founders Rachel Azzopardi and Lee Cumberlidge, with the intention of filling the gap of winter events in Adelaide.

Their goal was to create a unique light festival that would inspire attendees while showcasing local talent in new technologies. For some installations, cutting edge 3D mapping technology was used to create immersive interactive experiences that altered the way attendees connect with familiar spaces. In the Botanic Garden, elaborately constructed light features were erected in different areas, effectively transporting event-goers to a whole new world.

“If the art is really, really good and it’s accessible to a lot of different people, people can have that connection to it more broadly. There’s nothing more universal, I think, than light and dark. Everyone can understand that as a concept and gravitate towards it like moths to a flame,” said Sam.

Discussing what makes Adelaide a great festival city, Sam attributes it to the city’s history, forward-thinking nature, and the continuous presence of festivals.

“You know, they built the Adelaide Festival Centre to support the Adelaide Festival in the ’60s. I think it’s a mix of both the people that make it happen but also the fact that it has become part of the city’s DNA.”
There’s also the generational aspect, with families passing down their festival experiences to their children and grandchildren, creating a sense of tradition and support.

“We’re seeing this really beautiful history of families kind of embedded in these events, and they take them seriously. They love them. They support them. They buy the tickets. So I think as long as we have the audience invested and loving it and coming back every time, then we’re always going to be a great festival city, for sure.”

The layout of Adelaide makes it easier for festivals to take over the city and gain visibility. Sam uses this to his advantage when planning the installations for Illuminate. “You can walk from one side of the city to the other in 20 minutes, so if you’re taking over a city it’s pretty obvious. People know it’s Festival time, they know it’s Illuminate time, they know it’s the car race time,” he said.

Sam’s sensitivity to the effect of artistic events on the morale of community members becomes apparent when he discusses the role festivals play in bringing communities together. His love for festivals comes from the idea that they show what a community could be. By allowing people to connect and celebrate together, festivals expose the capacity for members of a community to embrace one another.

While acknowledging the role technological advancements have played in Illuminate, He also feels that technology has contributed to creating walls between individuals. Festivals provide an opportunity to break through those barriers by providing real-time shared experiences.

“When you think about it, we’re all fairly isolated throughout the week. We do our jobs, we might go out to a bar or whatever, and we come home and we close our doors. I think a festival allows us to kind of embrace the stranger, embrace the people we don’t know, and be a bit more open-minded in how to celebrate one another and ‘love thy neighbour’.

I think the festival breaks down the wall between you and someone else. You can have a shared moment with 20,000 people standing around you and really kind of revel in that.”

When reflecting on his journey to becoming the executive producer of Illuminate Adelaide, Sam credits his learning experiences with mentors and various festivals he worked.

The guidance and wisdom shared by experienced professionals, which shaped his understanding of the festival world, helped Sam create one more reason why Adelaide is the charmIng, wholesome city that it is.

With visionaries like Sam committed to uniting the community with Illuminate and similar festivals, the future has never looked brighter.

 
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This article is part of the Festival City Stories series, a collection of reflections about Adelaide made by the people who make this a festival place. The project was funded through the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Arts South Australia, Arts Recovery Fund, and delivered in partnership with the State Library of South Australia. 

Written by: Christian Best

Photography by: Declan Hartley-Brown