THE sense of excitement is palpable at the Four Winds office in Bermagui as its inaugural creative director, Lindy Hume, takes over the reins for the 2021 and 2022 Easter festivals. 

Hume is one of Australia’s best-known festival and opera directors, with stints heading up Sydney Festival, Perth International Arts Festival, West Australian Opera, Victoria State Opera, OzOpera and Opera Queensland, but she’s no stranger to Canberra.

In 1991 she directed Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” (Cinderella) at the Canberra Theatre for the now-defunct Opera ACT, then in 1995 she directed “A Dinner Engagement” by Lennox Berkeley and “Three’s Company” by Anthony Hopkins for the chamber opera company, Stopera. 

It was while directing “La Cenerentola” that one of the singers introduced her to the south coast. Five years later, she put a deposit on a block of land which gradually became a house to which she and her husband eventually moved.

She took on arts advocacy as chair of South East Arts and on the board of Regional Arts NSW and has made herself very much a part of the Tathra community, whose losses in the fires of 2018 she describes as “stuff you don’t need”.

These days Hume is dashing between engagements as the director of the biennial festival “Ten Days on the Island”, which runs throughout Tasmania until March 21, and Four Winds, coming up over the Easter weekend from April 2-4, so she’s been cutting it fine. 

As for the newly-invented title “creative director”, she says it was her decision.

“What I’m doing is I’m curating a festival, not just an artistic program, but a whole experience for that week,” she says.

She’s even found herself tracking down gin cocktails – as they say, somebody’s gotta do it.

“I’ve decided to mix things up this year so that the festival becomes something more than just the advertised program,” she explains. 

So, as well as classical inclusions like the Goldner String Quartet, The Muffat Collective, cello suites by Timo-Veikko Valve, piano by Stefan Cassomenos and a program of all-female composers, she’s turning it into a multi-arts event. 

“I’m just not the same sort of animal as those who have directed ‘Four Winds’ in the past, who’ve been mostly instrumentalists… (think Chris Latham, Genevieve Lacey, Paul Dean and James Crabb) I can program music and I have done, but that is not my best offer.

“I felt the festival should be more general – some may disagree – but people have been through a whole lot in the last 15 months and I want to show our shared humanity.”

One of her centrepieces will be William Zappa‘s “The Iliad – Out Loud”, a venture first seen at Canberra’s Street Theatre, where director Caroline Stacey suggested the title to Zappa before he took it elsewhere. 

Four Winds has an amphitheatre, the 2000-person capacity outdoor Sound Shell, where Hume believes they can create “the Greek experience”. Actors Blazey Best and Linda Cropper will join Zappa, with oud player Hamed Sadeghi and Michael Askill on percussion. One of the three performances is free, but you still have to register.

Another favourite initiative this year is a hook-up with Candelo, south-west of Bega and a catchment area for musicians. Musician-storytellers from the village will join Yuin artists in presenting vocal and instrumental music for the free festival opening event, “Things Are Looking Up: Songs From Yuin Country“ – “there’ll be a nice sense of unity”, Hume believes.

She praises the Four Winds Aboriginal creative producer Cheryl Davison for her work with the organisation, and says, “I take it as a serious task for all our cultural undertakings to be underpinned by Yuin culture… We need to understand that there are stories and music that are part of this natural environment”.

Another innovation is Hume’s introduction of Rafael Bonachela’s Sydney Dance Company show, “Cinco”, now extended to include seven dancers performing, for the first time, to live music played by Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows string quartet in full daylight – a completely different experience from a theatre performance, Hume notes.

Her final pièce de résistance is “Compassion”, created by Nigel Westlake and Lior and performed in Hebrew and Arabic text.

“That was to have been in the Opera House but now it’s coming to Bermagui,” Hume says.

“How lovely is that?”

2021 Four Winds Festival, Barragga Bay, Bermagui, Easter weekend, April 2-4. Free shuttle buses available from Bermagui. Book at fourwinds.com.au