Trish Hansen

If You’re Going to be Good at Something, Let’s be Good at Festivals

It was in Trish Hansen’s first career as a registered nurse that she saw the value of arts. Not only did the arts “shift kids’ perspectives in managing their own conditions” but it added “value to their lives in so many different ways.”

Working to establish the Arts and Health program at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Hansen wanted “kids to find sanctuary and play as part of their health care experience.”

From there, Hansen moved to Arts SA as the Manager of Public Art and Design and later founded Urban Mind Studio and Kindred Australia.

Hansen finds that “festivals say a lot about what matters to us most, what has meaning for us as a collective group of mostly strangers living in cities – the things that we celebrate, the things that we grieve, the things that make us happy.”

As a festival presenter with the DreamBIG Children’s Festival, Hansen says “it’s the true test of the idea is if you can simplify it in a way for children to understand which doesn’t detract but adds to its beauty.”

Her first experience of presenting still stays with her: “I really deeply felt the magic.”

The presentation, Being In Space, reframed the Bicentennial Conservatory Building at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens as a spaceship. “We invited kids to come along during the DreamBIG Fe stival to imagine that they had just discovered a galaxy far, far away, they were about to take off to explore it.”

“And watching thousands of kids come through this experience and try and make sense of how they would want to be in space invited them to have a conversation with their future selves. And seeing some of the transformations in kids during that experience was really compelling.”

For Hansen, a festival is “the coming together of people to celebrate and share particular experiences.”

Being a South Australian, she is “deeply grateful that we live in a city that takes festivals seriously because I think it’s fundamental to us as a democracy to have these various platforms to express and explore diverse narratives, and I think that’s something that we do really well. And if you’re going to be good at something, let’s be good at festivals.”

Relating festival spaces to her work with children, Hansen says, “the more we understand some of these beautiful things that come from the arts the more we can shift what we offer kids that are experiencing disadvantage that are less around languishing and trying to fill gaps and just straight into flourishing, offering them quality experiences in supported ways that are suitable for them.”

“We know that, for children and young people, especially those experiencing disadvantage, that arts experiences can help them develop their own self-identity. It can help them creatively express themselves and process really difficult emotions and really difficult traumatic experiences. It can help them find sanctuary and relief.”

As for the future, Hansen hopes that festivals are “available to everyone, that everybody that lives here feels welcome and worthy” because “festivals are essential to who we are as humans living together, and especially in cities which are constructed mainly of strangers.

So having things that we can share in celebration or in grief, whatever it is that we’re honouring through a festival, I think is a fundamental platform for peace and dialogue and civic cohesion.”

 
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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: Katerina Bryant

Photography by: Alex van de Loo