The Melbourne Festival’s AD explains that audiences in the city, and in Australia, inspire him to go further and harder.

The Melbourne Festival opened last week with events as diverse as Taylor Mac’s The Inauguration, Brenda Rae’s Glories of the French Baroque, Please Continue (Hamlet), Under Siege and more. With the Festival now well underway, Limelight caught up with Artistic Director Jonathan Holloway to find out how it’s all going.

“Incredibly well so far, actually, and it’s beautiful because you spend a couple of years thinking about it and then a year really putting it together as a team,” he says. “Tanderrum [the Festival’s opening ceremony and Welcome to Country] was exquisite, and owned by the First People. It was the Kulin Nation who after five years have taken it on, and it’s theirs, and you just watch them enjoying it and it’s perfect. And then [on the second night] we had four or five shows that went really, really well, so people seem very excited.”

Jonathan HollowayMelbourne Festival Artistic Director Jonathan Holloway. Photo © Sarah Walker

This year’s Festival is Holloway’s second as AD – so was there anything he...