Gold Coast's cultural future plotted in shifting sands Louise Bezzina, artistic director of the Bleach surf and cultural festival, says the 2018 Commonwealth Games have opened up opportunities for the arts community. MARRYING one of the world's great art museums to the pulsating hit by South Korean star Psy may seem like a quick route to divorce. This, though, is the image Gold Coast mayor Tom Tate wants to encourage for his back yard. "Guggenheim Gangnam style" is the way he describes the long-mooted cultural precinct he wants to build on the coast. "We want it (to be) on the international level of the Guggenheim (but) with Gangnam style," Tate says. It means we are serious about the arts, but fun, because that's what we are on the Gold Coast. The plan to build a cultural precinct, expanding on the existing Arts Centre at Evandale, was a key plank of Tate's election campaign last year. Estimated to cost between $250 million and $350m, the precinct would include an arts museum to house the Gold Coast City Art Gallery's overflowing collection, an outdoor amphitheatre and a "living arts centre," including a new 400 to 500-seat theatre. The mayor wants the precinct to be completed by the time the city hosts the Commonwealth Games in 2018. Tate's vision -- though still unfunded -- builds on the cultural groundswell that has been developing on the Gold Coast for two years. Locals are proud of the success of Rabbit + Cocoon, a new artist-run initiative at Miami that offers studio space to artists and holds a monthly night market with live fashion parades, performances and pop-up stalls selling artists' wares. Opera Australia wants its first "opera on the beach" performed next year on a stage built from sand. And as professional surfers power up to compete in the Quiksilver Pro at Snapper Rocks next week, the arts community is preparing for tomorrow's opening of the second surf and cultural festival Bleach. Louise Bezzina, the festival's artistic director, says there are growing opportunities in the arts and the community is readying itself to be on the world stage during the Commonwealth Games. "The Games have opened the door for so much more opportunity that Bleach might not have had," she says. In five years Bleach will have a good pool of creatives who can work on the festival or be part of the Games celebrations. Bezzina, 31, was formerly a producer at Brisbane Festival under Lyndon Terracini, now artistic director of Opera Australia. When she moved to the Gold Coast in 2011, she was asked by Connecting Southern Gold Coast, an organisation set up by the council to promote economic growth in the region, what she thought of the idea of a festival that combined surf culture and the arts. "The whole surfing community had been wondering why there wasn't a festival levering off the (surfing) World Tour starting at the Snapper Rocks iconic site," Bezzina says. I could see a real opportunity for the Gold Coast to have something that was really unique. Bleach is held on the coast from Burleigh Heads to Coolangatta and features coastal-inspired arts events such as music, film, visual arts and performance, as well as purely surf-oriented offerings such as talks on the surf business. Next year Bezzina hopes to stage OA's opera on the beach as part of the festival and is working with Terracini -- whom she describes as "the master of wheeling and dealing" -- on the project. Plans are yet to be finalised but the opera is expected to be an adaptation of a classic work injected with a Gold Coast flavour, performed on a stage made of sand built by the community using buckets and spades. Keen to promote Bleach as the festival where Gold Coast culture can be showcased in the lead-up to the Games, the council has increased its funding from $55,000 to about $200,000 for this year. The festival features a project called The Longest Wave, based on local surfer Damon Harvey's 1.5km ride from Snapper Rocks to Kirra in 2002. An exhibition of historical coastal photographs, a guided coastal walk and a series of sculptures have been shaped around the story for this year's festival. Bezzina says the guided walk could be offered as an activity for tourists during the Games, along with the exhibition, which could teach visitors about the area's past. The festival's relationship with the existing Arts Centre could also lead to collaborations with the proposed cultural precinct, which would expand the facilities at the venue. A children's play, The Surfer and the Mermaid, was produced by Bleach and the Arts Centre for last year's festival and is featured again this year. Bezzina says it became the first professional theatre production from the Gold Coast to be exported interstate when it was picked up by Sydney's Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre and shown at the Bondi Pavilion last year. Bezzina says better facilities would result in more sophisticated collaborations and help the festival sell more work interstate. "Any work I'm commissioning in this festival could be adapted and put into a cultural precinct," she says. The precinct is a place where development could happen and we could take it in the festival, or vice versa. The council will open a competition next month, inviting architects from across the world to submit designs for the precinct. Three shortlisted teams will be given $250,000 each to make detailed plans. Tate has yet to get funding for the precinct but plans to approach the federal government and opposition, as well as the state government. For the Gold Coast City Gallery, located in the Arts Centre, the new arts museum can't come soon enough. An exhibition of the Basil Sellers Art Prize, a biennial competition for sport art, is being promoted at the gallery as a warm-up to the Games. In the corner of the gallery where the exhibition is displayed, temporary shelving has been built to store works from the gallery's collection that did not fit in the storeroom. The result can be jarring: a Wynne Prize-winning work from the collection by landscape painter William Robinson hangs near the entrance to one of the centre's cinemas. This is the type of work that gallery staff would like to see given a more central focus as part of a new exhibition space. A new museum would provide more opportunities for mid-career artists, says Mariam Arcilla, co-director of Rabbit + Cocoon. Housed in industrial sheds at Miami, Rabbit + Cocoon has about 40 residents who work in music, design, visual arts and other disciplines. Arcilla says she co-founded the organisation in 2011 so emerging artists could build their practice in a like-minded community on the coast. "We lost so many friends and colleagues to bigger cities -- it's the usual story," she says. There were a lot of designers and artists who were about to pack their bags and leave, but then we started the initiative and they pretty much unpacked them. Another creative venture, Crown Studios, opened at Burleigh Waters last Friday. Megan Eddy, 42, started the venture in an industrial estate, where she runs a hairdressing salon, when the adjoining studios became available. She hires studios to "anybody and everyone," but the initiative is particularly suited to the music industry, with facilities for recording, rehearsing and styling for music videos and photoshoots. These are the kind of grassroots projects that prominent Gold Coast painter Victoria Reichelt, 33, credits with building the cultural groundswell on the Gold Coast. And the momentum, she says, shows that building a cultural precinct is vital. "I see the cultural centre as a good thing for the Gold Coast and if the Commonwealth Games moves that along, then that would be great," she says. All the infrastructure and people are in place, they just need this great venue. Bleach opens tomorrow and runs until March 3.