Melbourne Patron

I'd never heard of SummerSalt Festival or Exxopolis until a friend suggested we go. I'm a sucker for anything to do with light and colour, so of course I said yes. Turns out SummerSalt is an outdoor arts festival, held between 23 January and 21 February this year, comprising music, art, theatre, dance and art events, in and around the Arts Precinct . It is a collaboration between a number of arts bodies, including the ABC , Arts Centre , ACCA , Chunky Move , Malthouse Theatre , Recital Centre , MSO , MTC , NGV , Australian Ballet and Victorian College of the Arts . (Phew!) Exxopolis is a luminarium (another thing I'd never heard of, but I sure as hell am going to research more on these things now) created by Architects of Air in Nottingham, UK. AoA is headed up by Alan Parkinson , who has been experimenting with ' luminaria ' since the 1980s. Essentially, they are carefully designed, inflatable, tent-like structures, creating internal burro...

White Night , according to its website, was conceived in Paris in 2002 as Nuit Blanche , and has since expanded its program to over 20 other cities worldwide. Melbourne was the first Australian city to hold a White Night in 2013, and the inaugural event attracted over a quarter of a million attendees. City of Melbourne's White Night 2014 flags I first heard of White Night just before its Melburnian debut last year, but was sadly unable to go. I was entranced by my friends' pictures, posted on social media, of well-known public spaces transformed by light and colour - much like scenes you'd find at one of my favourite Melbourne events: the annual Gertrude Street Projection Festival . But White Night, as I understood, was bigger (being held across a number of public spaces), longer (running for 12 hours, from 7pm to 7am), more central (being in the CBD), and offered an array of further attractions. Despite not understanding the name at all (white? but it's so colo...