Before diving into this review I first want to broadly acknowledge the growing importance of smaller, locally focused niche festivals in the complex array of distinct and coexistent identities finding unique expression in different cities across the world (if such a thing as identities of place can actually exist, may be not, who bloody knows/cares?). I’m not trying to encourage some jingoistic national pride here, but I am unequivocally hopeful for the decline and ultimate fall of excessively large and prohibitively expensive festivals like Big Day Out and Soundwave. These are festivals where a bill of international-superstars-from-places-way-cooler-than-whatever-your-bullshit-town-is (Brisbane, in this case) reaffirm why we should all be buying into some decentralised, universally relevant cultural product that conveniently reaffirms historical, socio-political and hierarchical divides, without giving much of a damn about what’s happening in whatever place they’re playing, or at least what could be happening with the right kind of collective willpower. They’re also pretty god-awful really, but that’s the kind of blatantly unqualified opinion that this Zed reporter only allows to slip glibly in at the end of their more earnest critical efforts. In any case, Australia-wide, and across the rest of the world I’m sure, mini-fests are both responding to and helping build locally interested, locally relevant and locally run programs that celebrate and showcase what’s going on in your town that are probably worth your time and attention. Backbone’s 2high Festival is exemplary of this kind of independent, local effort. Although this was the first year I had heard about it and decided to head along, I’m stoked to discover that it’s been running annually since 1994; here’s hoping it still has a long life ahead of it.

A self-proclaimed festival of art, science and ideas, what compelled me to head along to the three day affair at the Metro Arts was the promise of so much more than what I already knew I was interested in and would enjoy. A diverse selection of theatre and artistic performance, community interest panels, radical feminist workshops, scientific discussion and presentations, all running into and around one another while bands play back to back in the common area outside each of the dedicated rooms. What struck me as most unexpectedly enjoyable, though, was the visible majority of on-the-ground coordinators being comprised of younger people. Only in retrospect did I discover that Backbone Youth Arts quite intentionally devised a way of organising and operation that actively encourages contribution and fosters the training and mentorship of young and aspiring people, both performers and industry personnel. Say what you will about the aspirations of any young person who wants to be involved in the biz (I sure do, quietly, without further mention here), I think it’s really awesome that here is a place that hands the reigns over and centralises the perspectives and capacities of younger people rather than cynically leaving them out in favour of the inevitably more correct and capable adults (by and large, these are the bitter and apathetic sadists trying to turn huge profits on the aforementioned big festivals and assuring our slow and painful cultural demise in the process). When we live in such heavily normative social orders that see young people only in terms of what they lack in comparison to middle-aged superiors, themselves increasingly lacking in grace, wisdom and insight but desperately clinging to authority and control of our collective conscience, it is refreshing to see a cultural program so willing to abandon the presumed correctness of those orders. 2high fest was made so much better by not abiding by the conventional conditions of success, professionalism, authority and propriety, and even just walking through the multi-levelled milieu of the Metro Arts Theatre I felt so much more relaxed than I could have at a more decidedly commercial and regimented undertaking. The volunteers milling unhurriedly about in abundance were all really polite and helpful; there was no obvious security presence and it quite was evident that none was needed, and despite the smallness of many of the Metro Arts' many nooks and crannies, it was relatively easy to find a place where most people weren’t in the times when it was needed. Probably if there was anything that could have benefitted the general setup of the festival it would have been some food stalls to abate the inevitably fruitless drift around the city for something cheap and passable to eat at night (peri-peri chips are still shit, it turns out). All said though, organisationally 2high was pressing all the right buttons for me and I would absolutely endorse it to anyone loosely interested in the ethical or philosophical principals that underpin the efforts to entertain people, and priced at under thirty dollars for a weekend pass, I’m looking forward to forming a newfound loyalty for it in the coming years.

In regards to the actual productions on offer over the three days, I have to admit with regret that I wasted most of the opportunities to take on the feast that was available to me, and only ended up spending one out of three days at the festival. With pop up installations from local Indigenous activist and poet Sam Watson, a feminist focused mixed-media performance, micro-fictions of unknown scientists and an hours long intense performance piece called Sisyphus, I sadly only managed to take in the latter and couldn’t manage to settle in for the duration of the gruellingly repetitious performance of that particular myth (although between you and I, I reckon I got the gist of it pretty well without making unrealistic demands on my concentration). I turned up to a gender-diverse collective zine workshop, but then realised that it would kind of require my being social and I just wasn’t ready for that at the time. I furtively scanned a pretty incredible little installation of the science and political history of glitter and then slunk out of the basement, visions of some more fabulous and glitter-laden alternate-me replacing the laughably repressed introvert that I felt my self to be at that moment. Thankfully, 2high obviously created the sort of space that didn’t demand that you do anything or be anyone that you weren’t up for, and so I could quite happily sit and read for a while, listening to whatever band was playing at the time instead of trying to live out an idealised fantasy of self-actualisation that I might have thought I otherwise should be. More than once, on account of my internal wandering, I was thwarted by my own poor observance of time in arriving late to lock out performances; I was pretty livid that I had missed a much anticipated sex politics forum after staying five minutes too long in a fairly dull presentation on the science of music that seemed to focus entirely on looking at musical sine waves. Earlier on in the same room I had sat through what was a lukewarm panel discussion on scientific texts that changed the world, until I was only saved in this by the final speaker’s focus on Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (I let out a solitary but redemptive whoop in wholly partisan support of the humanities). I recognise that for most people, scientific discourse is very much in vogue, and there are significant grounds to justify the public embrace of scientific practice, but – without resorting to some reactionary cliché about how there are some questions science just can’t answer – to be honest, I remain largely indifferent to the global science public relations project and I just don’t see scientific enquiry being a faithful provider of meaning and purpose in my life. I mean, when I encounter the impossibly profound, unfathomable drifting of a cloud the absolutely last thing on my mind is how the fuck it works, and I don’t think that’s such a bad thing, you know? Anyway, that’s totally inconsequential to this review except in that it speaks to the multiplicity of identities that ought to be found or projected onto a city like I mentioned early on. As long as scientists and I can exist in the same spaces with at least some nominal sense of equal worth and value despite divergent trajectories of dreaming and purpose, then I think there’s hope for us yet. Despite my poor effort of attendance over the weekend, 2high really had a lot to offer without being too pushy, pedantic or pretentious; I’m definitely looking forward to it next year and recommend it to you too. Until then, it’s time for me to clumsily tie this haphazard review to a close and go get some sleep then have another think about things. If I figure something out, I’ll be sure to let you all know.

- Ben Stimpson