White Night Reimagined 2019

White Night Melbourne has gone through a few changes this year. Now called White Night Reimagined, it is being run over three nights during the winter on 22 - 24 August 2019 from 7pm to midnight (2am on Saturday) instead of over one whole night in the summer. The footprint is also smaller, with the program mainly contained to three park precincts: Birrarung Marr, Treasury Gardens and Carlton Gardens.

I started my White Night evening tonight in Treasury Gardens, which was themed the Sensory Realm. It was one of the few sites that had large scale light projections, which were done on the building facade of 2 Treasury Place by DAE White Night and The Electric Canvas in a piece called Sensoria.

There were a few experiential pieces in the Gardens, but considering the time constraints of the night I wasn't willing to waste time waiting in line. The other pieces I liked were the audio-visual installation Cluster by Playmodes Studio and the human brain like Synapse by Jack Burton, Monica Lim, Josh McAuliffe and Patrick Telfer.

My next stop was Birrarung Marr, which was themed the Physical Realm. The absolute highlight was the Dutch street theatre company Close-Act, who had The Odd Platoon and Drummers roaming through the crowd strapped to bobbing cranes and the 40 minutes long acrobatic performance Globe, where they performed on a globe shaped scaffolding structure as well as in the crowd.

My last stop for the evening was up in Carlton Gardens, which was themed the Spiritual Realm. This precinct was pretty similar in scale and scope to last year. I really liked the Spirit Creatures by The Lanternist, which were similar to animals done at the Taronga Zoo for Vivid Sydney.

The Guardian by A Blanck Canvas was a giant roving puppet that looked like a lion. Awakened by Balooga Entertainment was another giant puppet, this time of a meditating spiritual being that had audio-visual components.

The big attraction though was the Mad Max Fury Road vehicles, light projections on the back of the Royal Exhibition Building and live performance in the Melbourne Museum forecourt. The vehicles were spread around so you could get an up close look at them, and the performance had people dressed as the characters get up onto the vehicles. However, because it was so spread out it was a bit hard to follow and see all of the performance.

My final stop on the way out was for the neon Love Triangle by Carla O'Brien and the aerial performance Loved by Acrobatica.

Overall the crowds weren't too big on the first night and I managed to cover pretty much everything in around four hours. This is not the White Night of old though, and with limited time you have to make choices about what you want to see and try to time things so you don't miss any performances. It felt more like Vivid Sydney than the all encompassing White Night experience, which I think is an unfortunate development. Who knows what will happen when it is merged with the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2020.