By Lewis Jackson
HOBART, Australia (Reuters) – Visitors to Hobart will find fine food and wine, quaint architecture, and in winter, buckets of blood, bare bottoms and a two-storey teddy bear with lasers for eyes.
For two wintry weeks in June, music and arts festival Dark Mofo turns the capital of Tasmania, an island state the size of Sri Lanka roughly 200km (125 miles) south of the Australian mainland, into a mecca of the odd and offbeat.
The city of a quarter million swells to accommodate visitors with more than 100,000 tickets sold. Dark Mofo culminated on Thursday as two thousand swimmers stripped off and waded nude into the icy river Derwent on the winter solstice and shortest day of the year.
“We were pretty frozen when we got out but the fire warmed us up, it’s lovely,” said Helen Golding who travelled from Sydney with friends for her fifth year at the festival. “There’s lots of comradeship, it’s an electric sort of atmosphere.”
Now in its 10th year, the festival has a long history of controversy. Police initially banned the first winter solstice swim for public indecency. A 2017 show by Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch featuring an animal carcass and rivers of blood outraged animal rights groups.
A year later, it was the turn of Christian groups, offended by glowing red inverted crosses dotting the skyline.
This year was no different. In an Australian exclusive, famed Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger retold Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in a two-hour all-female performance of sex and blood.
In one scene, 20 nude dancers wet with paint and human blood writhed slowly across a blank canvas, painting with their bodies.
Elsewhere in the city, “Spectra” by Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda lanced the night sky with a giant beacon of light 15km (9 miles) high. At a “Night Mass” held over two consecutive weekends, three city blocks were cordoned as 15,000 revellers danced all night in the shadow of a six-metre (20 foot) tall, laser-eyed teddy bear.
The festival is run by the city’s Museum of New and Old Art, a sprawling concrete and rusted steel complex 10km (6 miles) upriver from Hobart. Founded on the fortune of professional gambler David Walsh, Australia’s largest private museum is dedicated to themes of sex and death.
(Reporting by Lewis Jackson; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
