Under the Blue Moon Festival
Sydney's dark-alternative community will meet under a Blue Moon.
By Dee Pelling
Paint your lips black, renounce the sun, remove two ribs and don
your tightest corset: the goth grannies, zombies and vampiric nurses
are coming together for Sydney's dark-alternative Under the Blue Moon
Festival.
"It's an event like no other, a week where the dark side meets the
magical, where being outlandish is applauded, misfits are celebrated
and normality is turned on its head like a great big bat," says
Stephanie Calkin, festival creative director.
Promising tricks and treats, the festival will launch at the
Sandringham Hotel on Thursday 25 Sep, with exquisite burlesque starring
lady monsters, life size puppets performing surgical operations and the
anarchic Toy Death creating their peculiar music with the aid of
tortured electronic toys (including Barbie, Jesus and George Bush -
it's enough to give you nightmares).
Trade your wares at Swap and Sell Gothique, while the fetishistic
and fiery fashion show Lunamorph will beckon Prada-shunning devils.
"Our audience will enter a fascinating, subversive and risqué world
where fashion comes to life. Think burlesque, divas and piratical
fiends," says the show's producer, Liz Evanov. If only Laura Ashley had
been as forward thinking.
For the more unconventionally devout, St Luke's Anglican Church in
Enmore will host Australia's first Gothic Mass, ensuring communion will
never be the same again (cue Hammer Horror organ music and Marilyn
Manson in the pulpit).
TJ Adams will be offering tours of their historic funeral business,
which has been caring for the departed and their loved ones since 1895.
Not to be outdone, Simplicity Funerals will play host to several free
and diverse lectures including History of Corsetry, The History of
Victorian Sleight of Hand and The Archaeology of Death. Alternative,
gothic and underground art will decorate the shops, galleries and
sidewalks of Enmore Road and King Street.
Under the Blue Moon Festival is on Sat 27 Sep-Mon 6 Oct around Newtown and Enmore.