A year after COVID, Canberra’s Enlighten festival wants to brighten your day (and night)
For seventeen days in March, the spotlight turns to Canberra. Not because of the affairs in Parliament House, but because of the sights, sounds and smells of the Enlighten Festival — one of the region’s most vibrant cultural experiences.
Enlighten gets its name from the stunning visual projections that illuminate the city’s national attractions on each night of the festival. First shown in 2010, it boasts the famous Night Noodle Market, live music, and guided nighttime tours of the capital’s most iconic buildings.
When COVID-19 reared in 2020, the team behind Enlighten was relatively fortunate, with travel restrictions and social distancing measures largely introduced after the festival had wrapped. In the months that followed, the festival and event industry was left reeling by widespread cancellations and a lack of revenue. Peter Milne, the man in charge of building and maintaining Enlighten’s architectural light shows, says that the pressure was on to bounce back in 2021.
‘When we opened last March, none of us could have predicted how the rest of the year would go. We just felt so lucky to be able to do anything at all — so this year, we just wanted to give it our all and show people a good time.’
Milne’s creative company Electric Canvas initially came about as a result of his background in architecture, where he was struck by the idea of creating detailed light shows that could be projected across full-scale buildings. He has since worked on a variety of installations for several cultural institutions, including the Sydney Olympics, NAIDOC Week, and the NRL Grand Final.
Last year, Electric Canvas celebrated a decade-long relationship with Enlighten, and Canberrans will no doubt be familiar with the art projections that light up the city’s most significant landmarks each March. Parliament House, the National Portrait Gallery, and Questacon are among the structures that house these projections, rivalling the spectacle of Sydney’s Vivid and ranging from the artistic to the satirical.
’The bar definitely rises with each passing year,’ says Milne. ‘As the festival’s profile has grown, so have our ambitions, and whenever we manage to pull off a job, it gives us a new ceiling to break through.’
Asked whether his team at The Electric Canvas have full creative control over the projections they craft, Milne is quick to emphasise the collaborative nature of the process.
‘Our relationship with the organisers of Enlighten has always been really positive,’ he says. ‘We know what they want out of the festival — to celebrate culture and community — so having some creative licence really comes in handy in fulfilling that mission statement.’
The overarching theme of Enlighten is the sharing of new ideas, and Milne’s team have certainly benefitted from the evolution of technology.
‘The detail you can get on light projections nowadays is really strong. This lets us be creative and find inspiration in the architecture of the buildings that we’re projecting onto, rather than just looking for big flat square spaces.’
The creative process of putting one of the installations together is painstaking. From the initial idea to the finished product some ideas can take up to three months, with Milne and his team working around the clock in the lead up to the opening night.
Despite this, the opportunity to come up with installations that celebrate the cultural aspects of Canberra’s buildings remains too good to pass up. When asked to pick a favourite, Milne believes that the best is yet to come.
‘The Circle of Light from a few years ago was a lot of fun. We’ve got such a good team that there’s no shortage of creative ideas, and after the difficulties of 2020 we’re excited to share them all.’
A COVID-safe Enlighten will begin on the 28th February and close on the 15th of March 2021.
