Creative arts festival launches in Perth
Perth, Western Australia, Australia
A festival Avondale hosts to explore, encourage and celebrate faithful creativity has launched at a youth rally in Perth this past weekend.
Manifest co-convenor Nathan Brown speaks during multi-sensory worship experience Tragic.Beauty.True. at the youth rally in Perth.
Credit: Lesleigh Bower.
The rally (November 1-2) included a short film showcase, creativity workshops and a multi-sensory worship experience presented by Master of Arts (Research) student Nathan Brown, alumna Joanna Darby and friend Lidia Nowicki. The three presented Tragic.Beauty.True. at the Manifest Creative Arts Festival in March this year.
“I’ve been to more than 30 youth rallies in the past seven years and I can say the Manifest youth rally was the best existential worship experience I’ve enjoyed,” says Pastor Terry Johnson, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Western Australia, who invited Manifest to lead the rally in his previous role as the church’s director of Adventist youth ministries. “The juxtaposition of the philosophical, theological concepts of tragedy and beauty were stark and thought-provoking.”
The church needs to invest more in creativity, says Terry, who ordered copies of Manifest: Our Call to Faithful Creativity—which Nathan and Joanna co-edited and then launched at Manifest this year—for his team. “God is the biblical personification of creativity and we are made in God’s image, which means our church and worship experiences should be far more creative.”
Manifest, presented by Adventist Media Network and Avondale College of Higher Education, returns for a fourth year in March next year. It is offering up to $1000 for the best entry in each of six competitions—filmmaking, photography, choral and instrumental music composition, song composition and writing. The festival will also feature a performance and presentations by Searchlight Theatre Company (UK), a writers’ retreat and keynotes from writer and artist Becky De Oliveira (USA), and a concert by former Gabe Reynaud Award recipient Robert Wolfgramm.