Ten years after launching as a bold winter experiment, Beaker Street Festival is entering a new era.
The Hobart-born science and art festival will celebrate its 10th anniversary from August 6–17 with a sweeping reimagining of its program.
This year’s program will headlined by the Australian-exclusive premiere of VAST: Where Sound Meets the Cosmos at the historic Theatre Royal.
“A decade in, we’re redefining and reimagining,” founder and creative director Dr Margo Adler said.
“At a time of reckoning and reinvention for humanity, this year’s theme, The Second Act, is a provocation to interrogate our assumptions, invite debate, ask harder questions, and reaffirm our connection with each other, in real life.”
The festival will expand beyond traditional venues into theatres, museums, bars, nightclubs and public spaces.
Events will include dark-energy music experiments, Antarctic encounters, conversations on psychedelics and neuroplasticity, cold case criminology and fermentation feasts.
“We continue to blur the lines between science, culture and nightlife,” Adler said.
“In Tasmania in winter, science isn’t something you observe, it’s something you step inside.”
Composer of VAST Constantine Koukias said the experience would immerse audiences.
“I imagine the audience hanging weightless in the dark, drifting between unseen galaxies while their own heartbeat quietly locks into the music’s undertow,” he said.
“It isn’t a spectacle to look at, but a vastness you disappear into.”
The festival attracts thousands of science enthusiasts from all over Australia.
The full program launches on May 28.
