What to do while waiting for the LUMA lights festival
The June long weekend in Queenstown was always a difficult proposition for the resort town.
Too cold for lazing by the lake, too warm still to ski. The off-season was traditionally a sleepy time for Wakatipu. That was until 2016, when the early evenings and dark skies were seized as a blank canvas for artists.
Despite a difficult pandemic, which has seen on-again, off-again schedules for many events, Queenstown’s light festival says it is back and brighter than ever.
The Southern Light Project is an arts festival that invites visitors to see a different side of the tourist city. Installing illuminated artworks around the town to bring tourists in during the “dark period” for the resort town, the focal point of Luma is the Queenstown Gardens.
From 5pm nightly, over the course of four and a half hours, a series of artworks and musical installations will transform the waterfront into a giant light show.
Despite a last-minute cancellation last year due to Covid-19, festival Chair Duncan Forsyth says he looks forward to welcoming back this highlight of the early winter calendar.
As well as an expected 50,000 visitors, this year marks the return of contributors Angus Muir from AMD, SILO and aerialist Emma Vickers of Fantail Creative.
“There are more than 40 installations and about the same number of artists,” says Forsyth, although he is purposely keeping visitors in the dark about some of the lineup.
Despite the celebrated New Zealand performers involved, there will be no “names in lights”. Instead, the event is treated as one large installation, for visitors to get lost in.
Visitor participation is not only encouraged, it’s part of the experience, say the festival’s organisers. With illuminated costumes and pop-up artworks, appearing throughout the long weekend, there’s a lot of local enthusiasm for the event.
LUMA in the Queenstown Gardens as seen from the waterfront. Photo / Supplied
“There are a dozen or so ‘guerilla artworks’ and surprises planned as well,” says Forsyth. “It’s very organic.”
Part of this is down to the Lumify fringe festival which was held in 2020 and again in 2021, encouraging Queenstown residents to light up their homes, after the main festival was cancelled under Covid-19 restrictions.
One of the biggest changes this year, apart from the return to the public venue, is the focus on music.
Mike Hodgson, from Kiwi electronic duo Pitch Black, has been appointed the director of music for this year. Sound systems and live bands will be on hand to add to the experience.
Tim Buckley says this has given the festival more scope for performances.
“We’ve moved away from our family-focused beginning,” he says. “Although we’ll keep plenty of that family-friendly appeal, we’ve expanded with places that are darker, more adult.”
During the 2021 festival, among the installations, were spectacular moments of performance. Some like aerialist Abigail Rose’s Moth drew huge audiences of all ages, waiting for performers to emerge from cocoons as pūriri moths suspended from the forest canopy. Elsewhere, the award-winning Church of the Crooked Cross by Angus Muir, Mike Davison and Peter Hobbs was no less brilliant but definitely on the darker end of the spectrum.
Featuring stained-glass windows celebrating the seven deadly sins and a church choir performing renditions of the Rolling Stones - it was worlds apart from the other installations.
Dark arts: Church of the Crooked Cross at the LUMA art festival Queenstown. Photo / Supplied
With DJs and performance areas hidden throughout the 16 hectares of Queenstown Gardens’ woods and lawns, this year’s programme is set to change throughout the evening.
“It starts at 5, so you’ll not see the same thing at 9pm,” says Forsyth. Although there are some familiar contributors and partners who have taken part in previous years, each night will offer a slightly different programme.
Towards the later part of the evening, the performances will get darker and more disorienting.
“We have given artists permission to ‘make things strange’,” he says.
One returning performer is aerialist Emma Vickers. Last seen at Luma in 2019 directing the performance Into the Shadows, elevated 10-metres above the forest floor, Vickers says there will be something new to see every night.
