Dance, live music and glow-in-the-dark face paint are elements of a new youth event planned for Dubbo.
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The Neon Party is set to bring artists from Dubbo and Wellington to the Midnite Cafe later this year.
It will be curated by the Galaxy Girls, whose creative response to their hometown’s Cathedral Cave has earned them a performance spot at Canberra’s Enlighten Festival at the weekend.
The group of girls aged between 11 and 16 years came together through the Barnados Reconnect program with mentoring and technical guidance from Signal Creative.
The Galaxy Girls’ debut in Neon Caves at Wellington’s SpringFest in September has paved the way for the concept to expand to a whole event at Dubbo.
Signal Creative successfully applied for a $2500 Indent Youth Music Event Development Grant to stage the Neon Party at the Midnite Cafe.
Signal Creative co-director Emma Hoy told the Daily Liberal doing ongoing work with the groups they were engaging with was a “strong part of our ethos”.
“So that’s how the Neon Party came about, and we saw that the Indent grants came up and we’d already… gone to some gigs at the Midnite Cafe...” Ms Hoy said.
“So we thought this would be a really cool opportunity for us to put on a party for the Galaxy Girls where there would be young people performing with a glow-in-the-dark theme, because that’s what we’ve been doing with them so far.”
Ms Hoy said securing the Indent grant had been “completely essential”.
“We wouldn’t be able to put on this event without the grant and it’s really important to empower young people to realise their ideas and have control over the events they’re putting on and just to show pathways, that there [are] really cool venues and stuff like the Midnite Cafe in regional areas,” she said.
The Neon Party will transform the venue.
“It’s going to be a really cool, lots of black lights, and we’re going to activate different performance spaces within the Midnite Cafe, people performing in different areas, glow-in-the-dark face paint, a photo booth, and other cool things, dance performances, but also lots of live music presented by the young people in the region as well,” Ms Hoy said.
The party’s target audience is people aged 12 to 20 years and it was being planned as a free event.
“That’s really important to us because we’re working with a lot of different community groups and we don’t want the cost of attending to be a barrier to young people attending the event,” Ms Hoy said.
Signal Creative works to support women in regional and remote locations in contemporary music development and mentoring.
Faye Wheeler
I have been a journalist for more than a decade and in that time I have been keeping Daily Liberal readers up to date about issues affecting them and what's happening in their community. Throughout my career I have covered a range of rounds and most recently I have been focusing on the business round.
I have been a journalist for more than a decade and in that time I have been keeping Daily Liberal readers up to date about issues affecting them and what's happening in their community. Throughout my career I have covered a range of rounds and most recently I have been focusing on the business round.
