Producer of Backbone's '2high' festival in Brisbane, Katherine Quigley started her career in the arts industry at an early age.
Growing up in a family very involved in music, Katherine started with Backbone in high school where she did workshops after school. With aspirations of becoming an actress, her dreams changed when she started studying at the Queensland University of Technology.
“What happened was university. It opened my eyes to the whole industry. Then I got to experience that when I was on the '2high' festival. I actually got to learn how to make a festival, or be involved in events, and what’s exciting about that side of it as well.
“After [university] I was on the '2high' festival coordinating team where I did marketing and that’s where I became more interested in what happens behind the scenes rather than what happens onstage. For me personally, I got really interested in the business side of things.
An annual festival held by Backbone Youth Arts, '2high' aims to put together volunteer festival organisers with industry mentors to make the festival happen. Initiated by Susan Richer in 1994, Katherine says the original aim of the festival was to give young women the opportunity to learn how to work in the arts industry.
“It was very much focused on creating opportunities for young women. Over the years it just evolved and we are a festival that now, and has been for quite some time, for young women and men to learn how to make a festival. And to get that hands-on experience, develop their networks with key artists and with industry people and with their mentors as well.
“But the point of the festival has always been to develop relationships with emerging practitioners and industry professionals. That’s why the festival is called '2high', because it's actually a circus trick where some person stands on someone else's shoulders and that represents the mentoring relationship.
“Everyone has a mentor and it's specific to the area that they’re working in. So that for this year the people that are doing producing have producers that are their mentors, for the people that are doing marketing they have mentors that work in marketing in the arts industry as their mentor.”
With massive funding cuts to the youth art sector, Backbone was one of many organisations that lost out and the '2high' festival has been hit hard because of it. But by creating a Pozible campaign, the festival is over halfway towards their $8,000 goal to put on 2015's '2high' festival, titled 'Forgotten Treasures'.
With seven sections to next year's festival, '2high' in 2015 is going to be different – in a great way – to previous years.
“This year I made some pretty big changes to how the festival gets programmed. For as long as I can remember '2high' has had a performance programme, a visual arts programme and a music programme primarily. This year, I wanted to look at how we could provide opportunities for emerging artistic directors to develop their own curatorial voice.
“Alethea Beetson is curating an Indigenous Arts programme and it will include a program called ‘The Children’s Monologues’ about stories from children in Cape York and performed in Brisbane by professional actors and in Cape York by the children simultaneously.
Bethan Elsmore“Bethan Elsmore is a cabaret performer and classically trained opera singer, she’s pulling together a programme that looks at new ways that traditional art forms like classical music and opera, and to some extent cabaret, to find their voice in contemporary society within a classical format. So she’s really keen to involve the opera community in that programme.
“There’s a photographer, Josh, and he’s interested in working with emerging fashion designers as apart of the site installation, so we’re looking at collaborating with circus performers and fashion designers to create a human installation at the festival. And abstracting the fashion model in a way.
“The visual arts team, there are a few of them on that team that are working in different aspects of the visual component to the whole festival. Hahnie Goldfinch, the site designer for our festival, came up with the concept of 'Forgotten Treasures' to wrap the whole festival up. That idea came from that fact that we’re working in a space that holds artefacts [The Old Museum].”
Held at The Old Museum, festival organisers have to work on different and interesting ways to display the art as the heritage listed building cannot be damaged by hanging. Other sections of the programme include queer/performance/transmedia, contemporary music and writing, as well as digital cultures which will explore privacy issues and the Internet.
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As well as her producing role at Backbone, Katherine is also the Marketing Coordinator at 'Flipside Circus', a unique circus arts company.
“They’re two of Queensland’s best youth art companies in my opinion. My hope is that there will be some collaboration with 'Flipside Circus' and the '2high' festival and they’ll be involved in providing opportunities for people to play with circus festival.
“I’ve just started an additional project called ‘Backstage Pass’ where we are working with 11 emerging circus performers over 8 weeks and they are developing a new show called ‘Luster’ that will be apart of ‘Wonderland’ at the Brisbane Powerhouse. So I will be working with them around how to produce your own work and who to talk to and how to network. It’s exciting because I haven’t worked in circus as a producer, so this is a good experience for me to step out into that industry as well.”
Flipside CircusWith a life consumed in art, it's easy to see how much Katherine loves what she does.
“What I love most is a can’t stop and I don’t get Mondayitis, ‘cause it’s just apart of who I am. There’s always creative challenges and an abundance of inspiration in all of my jobs, in all of what I do. I am just constantly amazed by the artists that I get to talk to and work with. The ideas they’ve got and how people grow from what that initial idea is to what they end up doing. I love being apart of that process and conversation.
“I see producing as an art form, but it’s taken me a long time to feel like that and step away from seeing the job of a producer as being just like a soft Excel, budget, timelines, and lots of email correspondence to being someone who can be an analyse artist and understand concepts at their very embryonic stages and flesh them out. I see that as my art form.”
Backbone's '2high' festival will be held at The Old Museum from the 9th until the 11th January 2015. Help support to festival via their Pozible campaign which ends on 2nd November 2014.
