The Ground Beneath Us Festival

The Ground Beneath Us Festival was established in 2022 as a platform to integrate distinct and diverse performances, support the creative and psychological wellbeing of artists and audiences and drive cultural change through conversation, curatorial innovation and collaborative partnership development.

Future Vision

The vision of the festival is to grow capacity to broaden and diversify the program, employ more artists and arts workers, build administrative support, networks and partnerships to help sustain and augment the impact and reach of the program. Through links with schools, universities, regional communities and, over time, international artists and organisations we aspire to share ideas, perspective and artistic processes that promote artistic and educational innovation and community wellbeing by reframing the role and purpose of the artist in society.

First run in 2016 as a summer school supported by BEMAC, the Creative Fusions program has had various iterations in Brisbane, regionally and in schools over the past eight years, most recently rolling out as a months long regional program in Roma, Western Queensland supported by QPAC. The underpinning philosophy of the Creative Fusion program is one of inclusion, openness and creative experimentation and intercultural collaboration. Our programs are generally open to people of all ages, backgrounds and skill levels. While this will remain the case there will be a focus on developing youth in the next series which forms part of The Ground Beneath Us Project.

Vision

As SAOs longest running music program Creative Fusions has mentored and employed over 30 artists from diverse stylistic and cultural backgrounds since its inception. The extensive research, experimentation and practical application forged through this process has led to the establishment of a highly sophisticated methodology for intercultural collaboration that balances tradition with cultural sensitivity and empathy whilst gently encouraging and supporting artists to share, adapt and make space for one another to generate new contemporary ideas, sounds and creative modalities.

We feel the time is right to evolve this knowledge into a more established and resourced youth ensemble program and The Ground Beneath Us Project 2025-26 will play and important role is facilitating this. Through a reimagined model, developed with the support of BEMAC and CLUSTER ARTS, Creative Fusions 2025-26 will focus on developing cohorts of creative young artists from diverse backgrounds to form small ensembles with the view to potentially establishing a larger Contemporary World Orchestra in the future.

Since 2018 SAO has been developing programs and creative residencies that integrate diverse modes of practice along the lines of the Creative Fusions method for music. Here artists from across a spectrum of disciplines including; music, dance, theatre, performance art, visual art and more are brought together to collaborate, improvise, experiment and build new works for presentation in festivals. This approach has been explored through the BrisAsia Live Creative Residency since 2018 and The Ground Beneath Us Festival in 2023.

Vision

The vision for this program is to work closely with Cluster Arts to design a new residency linked to The Ground Beneath Us Festival. The residency will see SAO and CLUSTER ARTS work together to develop a new show based on the Colour Theory Project, an innovative, multidisciplinary performance exploring the intersection of arts, spirituality, and holistic well-being, focusing on the transformative power of art from diverse cultural traditions worldwide.

The long term vision is to establish and international artist residency program with links to The Ground Beneath Us and other festivals, events and organisations.

Would you like to show your support for The Ground Beneath Us?

Tax deductible donations can be made via the festival’s Australian Cultural Fund platform. Your donation will assist with cost across a range of areas, including production, marketing & administration, and research & documentation.

We invite you to make a donation towards this festival to help assist with cost across a range of areas:

• Production, marketing and administration costs (including research & documentation)
• The project will employ over 20 artists, 12 arts workers, an assistant producer and documentary film maker.
• The project will generate new music, musical forms & stories, multimode artworks, disseminate ancient wisdom and contemporary research.
• The project will support growth of a world class music festival that links artists from across cultures and genres with researchers, community leaders and the general public to develop and promote ideas and perspectives that will nurture our culture.