Beaker Street Festival set to shake up Hobart

“I imagine the audience hanging weightless in the dark, drifting between unseen galaxies while their own heartbeat quietly locks into the music’s undertow,” says composer and creative director Constantine Koukias.

“It isn’t a spectacle to look at, but a vastness you disappear into.”

That’s quite the sales pitch for Hobart-and-beyond Beaker Street Festival’s first event, VAST: Where Sound Meets The Cosmos — a 360-degree high-tech soundscape bringing to life Hobart’s oldest theatre, the Theatre Royal.

VAST is, however, just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. This year’s Beaker Street Festival (August 6-17) celebrates a decade of “science after dark, cultural collision, and boundary-pushing experiences” with Hobartica at the Antarctic Waterfront Precinct; a Science Street Party and Sexistics (!) at The Epicentre (Market Place and City Hall); Dr Karl live in Burnie; Fermentation Day in Launceston; and Dark Sky Drinks in diverse regional locations.

And there’s a whole lot more.

Beaker Street Festival founder and creative director/CEO Dr Margo Adler says a decade in, the festival is “redefining and reimagining” itself — hence its theme for this year, The Second Act.

“At a time of reckoning and reinvention for humanity, The Second Act is a provocation to interrogate our assumptions, invite debate, ask harder questions, and reaffirm our connection with each other, in real life. Oh, and have some fun too,” she says.

To underline her point, Dr Adler says the events unfolding across theatres, bars, museums, nightclubs, and public spaces will embrace “dark-energy music experiments, Antarctic encounters, conversations on psychedelics and neuroplasticity, cold case criminology, fermentation feasts, music, markets, and late-night moments that stretch well beyond the lecture hall.”

After working in labs in Sweden and Canada, Dr Adler — an evolutionary biologist by trade — moved to Hobart in 2016 to “create events where science and art are the catalysts for human connection”.

Ten years on, the festival “continues to blur the lines between science, culture, and nightlife”. A feast, in other words, for the true Renaissance traveller.

“It’s about staying curious, staying brave, and inviting audiences from across Australia to experience something they can’t find anywhere else,” Dr Adler says.

“In Tasmania in winter, science isn’t something you observe, it’s something you step inside”.

For full details and bookings, see beakerstreet.com.au