10 Minutes with… DreamBIG creative producer Georgi Paech
Georgi Paech is the festival director of the DreamBIG Children’s Festival. She speaks to Business Insight about curating a festival and bringing young people into the city.
You’ve been in your current role with DreamBIG since 2022. What attracted you to it?
My very first job in the arts was working on the Come Out Children’s Festival, which is now called DreamBIG, where I was taking artists out into regional libraries to teach kids how to make their own books, and I worked sort of on and off as a freelancer for the festival for producing the opening event and the Big Family Weekend.
I think it’s really important for young people to be able to engage with the arts, see performances, but also be creative themselves, and my background is very much in production and producing large-scale events. So, it seemed like a really natural fit, with my passion for young people, as well as the skills that I have, from working on lots of different events over the years.
DreamBIG is specifically curated for young audiences in a state where we’re never short on festivals. Why do you think it’s important to have an event deliberately to celebrate children and their interest in the arts?
While there’s so many incredible festivals in Adelaide and South Australia, this is the only festival that really concentrates on a young person on their interests and particularly with DreamBIG, we have a really strong focus on participatory and interactive events. We sort of are trying to show every child in South Australia that they are creative, whether they know it or not.
The DreamBIG festival brings kids and young people to the city. Do you agree that having positive memories of being in the city and having a children’s festival as part of the city’s culture will encourage them to use the city and contribute to its economy into adulthood?
I think so.
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If we think about the way that we as adults engage with festivals, think of WOMAD, we’re surrounded by heaps and heaps of people, and you’ve got such great memories of feeling like you’re connected to a community, connected to the people around you. I think that’s what DreamBIG does, by bringing thousands of children together. Particularly on days when we have schools that come in, where we might have several thousand school students here at the festival centre at one time. There’s this feeling of something bigger than yourself happening.
I think that they’re the landmark moments that we remember both as a child and as an adult. I hope that it will create really positive memories around the Adelaide Festival Centre and coming to performances and engaging with the arts that will carry on throughout the rest of their lives.
There’s a range of free events on the program. Why is it important, especially when targeting families, to have a variety of price points?
It’s always been really important to DreamBIG for many, many years that we have a lot of free events. So, we have a big flagship event called the Big Family Weekend where about 70 per cent of the program is free and families can just come and drop in and out of events. They don’t have to book anything, which I think works for a lot of families where they’re not sure exactly what their kids are going to be interested in. Even with our ticketed, paid performances, it’s important to me to keep it at as low of a price point as we can, so then any family feels like they can come along.
What goes into the act selection for DreamBIG, and what are the key qualities you look for when curating a program?
Particularly this year, which is the 50th anniversary of the festival…for some young children, the idea of 50 years is kind of unquantifiable, but they understand the idea around birthdays. We really want to have a strong sense of joy and celebration, for them to really feel like there’s a party going on.
Something that’s really important to me is that every child feels welcome at the festival, no matter their background.
Accessibility and inclusion is a really big part of the program. Both in terms of representation, like making sure that we have people on stage or people facilitating workshops that come from a range of backgrounds, whether that’s cultural, and also from the disability sector as well.
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Also, we’re thinking about the experience for children coming to the festival who might not be used to coming to a festival before, and how we can help parents and teachers best select the best events for the children under their care. There’s a lot of time that’s spent on our access resources, so parents feel really empowered when they come that they’re picking the right event for their family.
How did DreamBIG embed inclusion in its programming?
One way is this year we have a really great show called Mini Spin, which is actually performed by three deaf dancers. The whole show is in Auslan, with some interpreting just at the front. You don’t have to have any knowledge of Auslan, but it just sort of exposes young people to this whole different way of expressing yourself that they might not be used to, and it’s accessible both for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community as well as hearing children.
From a business perspective, why is it important to cater for a variety of access levels?
I really just want every single child that comes to feel like they’re welcome, that this is a place that they’re supposed to be.
Do you have a personal favourite part of the festival this year?
I think for this year, for the 50th birthday, we’re bringing back a beloved tradition that hasn’t occurred for DreamBIG for many, many years, which is the parade.
Come Out used to always start with a parade, so we’ve brought it back for this year and as part of that we have created a whole lot of resource packs that have gone out to schools and taken artists out to 30 different schools, including regional schools. I myself got to go out to Streaky Bay and Whyalla and Port Augusta and work with students in those schools on how they can come up with elements of their own for the parade.
We’ve also got lots of amazing theatre shows as well. One of my favourites is Imagine Live, which is the adaptation of the beloved picture book by Alison Lester. I think I probably read it as a child – I know I’ve read it to my daughter. It’s a really beautiful retelling which uses the frame of a grandchild and grandmother reading the book to each other, and then it comes to life on stage.
We also have a really beautiful retelling of the fairy tale The Princess and the Pea, but from the point of view of the princess. So while she’s standing in the dark and in the rain, knocking on the castle door wanting to be let in, the princess is an adventurer and an explorer – she’s driving the story, rather than the story driving her.
