Deanne Bullen

Adelaide is a long way away from Deanne Bullen’s childhood home in rural Western Australia. But when she arrived here as a young woman in the late ’70s, she was quickly adopted by the city’s arts scene.

The educator, writer and arts worker found her foothold in Adelaide while studying dance and theatre at university as part of her liberal arts and teaching degrees.

“I love the community of theatre, just the friendships that you build,” says Deanne. “I just loved being involved in the theatre as well, and learning about it.”

Deanne was welcomed as an actor and an assistant director in university and community theatre productions, but her early experiences of Adelaide’s festival scene were not nearly as friendly.

“I think when I first found out about festivals it felt like it was for others to be involved in,” she says. “But I think… as they’ve grown and evolved, they’ve really been much more inclusive of everybody.

“WOMAD has always been a part of that events calendar and a family thing, [since] when that started. I think that definitely has been a really big thing in making festivals available to lots of different people.”

The gradual opening out of festivals has brought Deanne in its wake. While she spent much of her career working as a teacher and in curriculum development and government roles, she always maintained a strong love of the arts.

Slowly, that love began to shift her career trajectory. In the late 2010s, Deanne was asked to create education resources for local arts companies including Windmill Theatre and No Strings Attached, which led her to a similar job at Adelaide Festival.

“My dream job,” she says. “[I was] working on looking at the shows, making the connections with the curriculum for teachers and then developing ideas and activities for teachers to do before they brought their students to a show, and then things to do after the show as well.

“So, that really… brought my two loves together, my two passions for writing and theatre, and a whole range of different [arts].”

Since beginning the work of helping young people to connect with festival experiences, Deanne has had a series of deeply satisfying and revelatory moments.

In 2021, she spearheaded the Adelaide Film Festival’s inaugural Youth Jury, in which young people from around the state assessed a huge variety of films and allocated awards to the best.

She’s also sat with and guided countless student audiences through their first experience of an arts performance – something that has never lost its magic.

“I think that for me that’s the magic for young people and children and theatre, that you get taken to another place,” she says.

“Like when you read a book, you go to another place and you think about other things and you wonder and you consider and you process. And you get to really think about things that you probably wouldn’t [normally] get to think about.”

For Deanne, this richness of ideas and the introduction of new concepts and perspectives is what makes festivals special.

She sees every festival in Adelaide as an opportunity to import new ideas and discussions that can help shape the future of our city and our world.

“It’s a really rich tapestry that it’s provided and that we’re exposed to so much that we would never have got exposed to …It makes us have different conversations,” she says.

But the process of helping young audiences connect with Adelaide as a festival city is not without its challenges.

Deanne is anxious that festivals can remain out of reach for some populations, particularly because of admission costs. She’s enthusiastic about lateral ideas that could open the festival experience to even more young people.

“There’s countries that are actually doing it… I think it’s [for] their young people in their teens, [they provide] free tickets to go along to festival performances,” she says.

“How wonderful would that be?”

While Deanne labels this kind of shift as more of a fantasy than a likelihood, she is undeterred in her passion for finding other ways to make young people feel at home in Adelaide’s festival landscape.

With her dedication and expertise in creating education resources that help young audiences navigate festivals, she’s making sure that no-one ever feels the sting of exclusivity that accompanied her early festival experiences.

And at the same time, she’s building a bridge between the expansive world of art and ideas that festivals foster and the audiences and thinkers of the future.

“When you bring those young people along, you’re bringing them along for a lifetime,” she says.

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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: Farrin Foster

Photography by: Sia Duff