Behind the scenes at the ramshackle destination where the festivalgoers let their hair down - and handle giant cockroaches
On the first Sunday of Adelaide festival two ceremonies took place at the festival nightclub, Barrio. In the first, a local couple were married by an exuberant Ghanaian celebrant, with the aid of a bottle of bio-oil "so the ring can slip on easily" and 95mls of good old-fashioned Jamaican rum "to help us get in the spirit of things.""No not you, Isaac," scolded celebrant Dorinda Haffner, as the couple's authentically over-excited eight-year-old son made a lunge for the bottle.
The wedding of Michael and Valli, a graphic designer and a local government worker, was followed by a public signing of the register and private dinner for 40 in the Barrio's exclusive dining area, the Naughty Room. While the wedding party were toasting the bride and groom, a second ceremony brought the Lord Mayor of Adelaide onstage to receive the keys to Barrio from the club's own first citizen, who goes by the name of Mayor Fruitcake. "I've not had a good time with keys of the city," said the Lord Mayor, rattling a set of outsized toy keys. "I swear I'm not on performance-enhancing drugs – and make sure you vote in the local election."
Welcome to Barrio, where reality and fantasy blend so seamlessly that that it's hard to know which of the mayors is more implausible. This apparently ramshackle improvisation on a shanty-town theme, nestled between the state parliament building and the municipal theatre, is where a festival that is otherwise tasteful to a fault goes to let its hair down after hours.
Now in its second year, it's the work of producer/director team Geoff Cobham and Ross Ganf, who came up with the format after a chance meeting with Mayor Fruitcake, a baker from the Adelaide suburbs who just happened to have six bars in his shed (stay with me).
Cobham, whose background is in lighting design, conceived the idea after a travelling scholarship allowed him to tour Europe's most happening venues. "I saw lots of big opening events, with thousands of people, and discovered only a few people were actually enjoying themselves. Music wasn't enough. They wanted to have a very personal experience, but within a group."
He is responsible for engineering a venue whose corrugated iron and cow-skull wackiness is in fact carefully designed. A partition might be made of safety-mesh studded with plastic cups, but it is artfully placed to create the illusion of intimacy for a crowd of thousands. The lighting might look like a string of naked bulbs – indeed it is a string of naked bulbs – but, combined with discreet uplighters in buckets, it makes the plain glamorous, the ordinary exotic.
The barrio theme came from an interest in conservation. Whether in Brazil or India, shanty-town dwellers are the original recyclers, says Cobham. "They take all the detritus from the cities and turn it into a house. You go to the poorest slum in India and the children are all sent off to school looking immaculate. I don't know how they do it, but they do."
He met Fruitcake when he was looking for a jetty for another project, and "Fruity" happened to have one in his back yard. "When I went to see him, he had a tin shed with six bars his friends had built, each one serving a different sort of alcohol." The bars are at the centre of Barrio, scrupulously rebuilt by the friends. Fruitcake is not only Mayor but "master of collection", who goes to the tip with a truck every Thursday. "He'll say 'they have lots of plastic crabs. Do you want them?' I'll say hell yes," says Cobham.
Fruitcake, aka David Harding, is an evangelical salvager whose life seems to be a shaggy dog story come true. He traces his bar collection back to a visit to London in his early 20s nursing a broken heart. There he met a flatfull of Aussie travellers with birthdays on consecutive days. Naturally, this miracle of numerology had to be celebrated in a unique way, so the friends expelled Fruity from his shed in order to construct the perfect hexagonal party experience – one which continues every May to this day.
There's more than a touch of the ancient mariner about Fruity as he fixes you with a beady eye and tours you around his bus seats and church pews (the latter saved from the church where his father once preached).
In a Barrio context, he appears no more eccentric than the Irishman who greets him with a brandish of his Liquorish Allsort boxer shorts - "I think I'll be Soviet boyfriend tonight". But the difference between Fruitcake and Dubliner John-Paul Hussey is that Hussey is one of the club's few professional "hosts", an actor with a knack for improvisation and a love of burlesque.
Most of the "performers", as Ganf explains, are not professional actors at all but ordinary people drawn from a rich community of local monocultures. On the second club night of this year's festival, a bunga-bunga theme brought South Australia's fetishists out in force, but it's not always so titillating. Thursday's Phobia Night featured a local conservation group, Bugs 'n' Slugs, who exhibited a collection of creepy-crawlies (not being entomomophobic, I got to handle a giant cockroach). Last year's events included a bake-in by the South Australian Country Women's Association and an End of the World night with the Voluntary Euthanasia Society.
But now for the up-close-and-personal bit: Barrio is among most "alive" theatre experiences I've had – one that challenges the nature of both theatre and experience. I shed a tear for newlyweds Michael and Valli, I played along with my own parody wedding to a glass of riesling, under the ministry of hosts "Crystal Healing" and "Crystal Meth". I enjoyed the Cooper's lager and noted that the brand-name registered with me, despite Barrio's claim to be a marketing-free zone. I devoured the delicious Afgan biryani provided by the pop-up chefs of Thursday's Naughty Corner feast. But when it came to a food fight supervised by evil clowns, I made my excuses and left. Perhaps I'm a touch coulrophobic: slapstick always makes me want to bolt for the exit. I hope Fruity and friends will forgive me. Reported by guardian.co.uk 21 hours ago.
On the first Sunday of Adelaide festival two ceremonies took place at the festival nightclub, Barrio. In the first, a local couple were married by an exuberant Ghanaian celebrant, with the aid of a bottle of bio-oil "so the ring can slip on easily" and 95mls of good old-fashioned Jamaican rum "to help us get in the spirit of things.""No not you, Isaac," scolded celebrant Dorinda Haffner, as the couple's authentically over-excited eight-year-old son made a lunge for the bottle.
The wedding of Michael and Valli, a graphic designer and a local government worker, was followed by a public signing of the register and private dinner for 40 in the Barrio's exclusive dining area, the Naughty Room. While the wedding party were toasting the bride and groom, a second ceremony brought the Lord Mayor of Adelaide onstage to receive the keys to Barrio from the club's own first citizen, who goes by the name of Mayor Fruitcake. "I've not had a good time with keys of the city," said the Lord Mayor, rattling a set of outsized toy keys. "I swear I'm not on performance-enhancing drugs – and make sure you vote in the local election."
Welcome to Barrio, where reality and fantasy blend so seamlessly that that it's hard to know which of the mayors is more implausible. This apparently ramshackle improvisation on a shanty-town theme, nestled between the state parliament building and the municipal theatre, is where a festival that is otherwise tasteful to a fault goes to let its hair down after hours.
Now in its second year, it's the work of producer/director team Geoff Cobham and Ross Ganf, who came up with the format after a chance meeting with Mayor Fruitcake, a baker from the Adelaide suburbs who just happened to have six bars in his shed (stay with me).
Cobham, whose background is in lighting design, conceived the idea after a travelling scholarship allowed him to tour Europe's most happening venues. "I saw lots of big opening events, with thousands of people, and discovered only a few people were actually enjoying themselves. Music wasn't enough. They wanted to have a very personal experience, but within a group."
He is responsible for engineering a venue whose corrugated iron and cow-skull wackiness is in fact carefully designed. A partition might be made of safety-mesh studded with plastic cups, but it is artfully placed to create the illusion of intimacy for a crowd of thousands. The lighting might look like a string of naked bulbs – indeed it is a string of naked bulbs – but, combined with discreet uplighters in buckets, it makes the plain glamorous, the ordinary exotic.
The barrio theme came from an interest in conservation. Whether in Brazil or India, shanty-town dwellers are the original recyclers, says Cobham. "They take all the detritus from the cities and turn it into a house. You go to the poorest slum in India and the children are all sent off to school looking immaculate. I don't know how they do it, but they do."
He met Fruitcake when he was looking for a jetty for another project, and "Fruity" happened to have one in his back yard. "When I went to see him, he had a tin shed with six bars his friends had built, each one serving a different sort of alcohol." The bars are at the centre of Barrio, scrupulously rebuilt by the friends. Fruitcake is not only Mayor but "master of collection", who goes to the tip with a truck every Thursday. "He'll say 'they have lots of plastic crabs. Do you want them?' I'll say hell yes," says Cobham.
Fruitcake, aka David Harding, is an evangelical salvager whose life seems to be a shaggy dog story come true. He traces his bar collection back to a visit to London in his early 20s nursing a broken heart. There he met a flatfull of Aussie travellers with birthdays on consecutive days. Naturally, this miracle of numerology had to be celebrated in a unique way, so the friends expelled Fruity from his shed in order to construct the perfect hexagonal party experience – one which continues every May to this day.
There's more than a touch of the ancient mariner about Fruity as he fixes you with a beady eye and tours you around his bus seats and church pews (the latter saved from the church where his father once preached).
In a Barrio context, he appears no more eccentric than the Irishman who greets him with a brandish of his Liquorish Allsort boxer shorts - "I think I'll be Soviet boyfriend tonight". But the difference between Fruitcake and Dubliner John-Paul Hussey is that Hussey is one of the club's few professional "hosts", an actor with a knack for improvisation and a love of burlesque.
Most of the "performers", as Ganf explains, are not professional actors at all but ordinary people drawn from a rich community of local monocultures. On the second club night of this year's festival, a bunga-bunga theme brought South Australia's fetishists out in force, but it's not always so titillating. Thursday's Phobia Night featured a local conservation group, Bugs 'n' Slugs, who exhibited a collection of creepy-crawlies (not being entomomophobic, I got to handle a giant cockroach). Last year's events included a bake-in by the South Australian Country Women's Association and an End of the World night with the Voluntary Euthanasia Society.
But now for the up-close-and-personal bit: Barrio is among most "alive" theatre experiences I've had – one that challenges the nature of both theatre and experience. I shed a tear for newlyweds Michael and Valli, I played along with my own parody wedding to a glass of riesling, under the ministry of hosts "Crystal Healing" and "Crystal Meth". I enjoyed the Cooper's lager and noted that the brand-name registered with me, despite Barrio's claim to be a marketing-free zone. I devoured the delicious Afgan biryani provided by the pop-up chefs of Thursday's Naughty Corner feast. But when it came to a food fight supervised by evil clowns, I made my excuses and left. Perhaps I'm a touch coulrophobic: slapstick always makes me want to bolt for the exit. I hope Fruity and friends will forgive me. Reported by guardian.co.uk 21 hours ago.