This year the Australian Open serves up tennis as you’ve never seen it before – part rock concert, part cabaret, part circus. Welcome to multimedia sport.
The tennis circuit is often likened to a travelling circus, but this year’s Australian Open is taking that concept and flying with it like an errant trapeze artist. The traditional Melbourne summer pastime of going to the tennis is unlikely to be the same again thanks to a hugely ambitious entertainment project designed to take the first grand slam of the season and turn it into a cultural festival. Mixing acrobats, rock bands and burlesque theatre with the backhands of Roger Federer and Serena Williams, it looks set to be a full-blown assault on the senses.
The centrepiece will be a 19th-century big top on the oval between Rod Laver Arena and the Hisense Arena, Melbourne Park’s two main show courts, where visitors will be able to watch the famed New York entertainment extravaganza Spiegelworld, which is coming down-under following its wildly successful three-month summer residence at Manhattan’s Seaport. As part of the spectacle, tennis fans can enjoy Absinthe, Spiegelworld’s somewhat risqué vaudeville cabaret, which has a line-up that includes Ukrainian contortionist Princess Anya, the muscular hand-balancing act Duo Sergio, the Anastasi Brothers with their Icarian Games and perhaps the world’s best-known conceptual burlesque artist, Julie Atlas Muz.
“And what is Spiegelworld?,” asked The New York Times, understandably bemused. “It’s a circus. A nightclub under the summer stars. A beer garden. Some sort of dreamland suspended in time.”
A well-known fixture in the Big Apple, Spiegelworld is the brainchild of Australian entertainment impresario Ross Mollison. Australian Open entertainment project director Vas Katos, the man charged with making the whole thing happen when the tennis tournament gets underway on January 19, points out that the line-up, though international, has an antipodean theme.
“A good way of describing it is to say it’s a celebration of Australian culture, and Melbourne culture in particular,” says Katos. “About a year ago, we had a conversation with Tennis Australia, recognising that a lot of sporting events around the world are introducing cultural festivals within those events, as they attract a wide variety of people. We had the idea for an integrated entertainment festival, and thought it would be perfect for the Australian Open. We wanted to ensure it just wasn’t tacked onto the tennis, though. Obviously the landmarks are there – such as the Rod Laver Arena – but when you walk up you’re also going to see this kind of magical village with a beautiful spiegeltent and these strange structures that will house a DJ, cafes, restaurants and bars, so you’ll enter a totally different place as well as the traditional Australian Open.”
Music has long been a fixture of the Australian Open thanks to live concerts previously held in the Garden Square outdoor area, which sits in the shadow of the Rod Laver Arena and shows matches on a big screen while picnickers and evening revellers socalise below. But this year the musical element is set to provide a far more consistent soundtrack to the tennis, with an outdoor stage in the Spiegelworld area for musicians such as Clare Bowditch, Diesel, Renee Geyer, Tex Perkins, Mark Seymour, Abby Dodson and The Audreys. Also, a concert series for the finals weekend called A Day On The Bassline will see rock and pop acts playing in the Hisense Arena, which in past years has been rendered redundant by the time the last two days of the tournament roll around. Some acts are still to be confirmed, but the roster already reads more like a line-up for the Big Day Out than for the Australian Open. On Saturday January 31, the night of the women’s finals, Pete Murray and Evermore will be in concert at Hisense Arena, while on Sunday February 1, A Day On The Bass Line, features The Cat Empire and Gabriella Cilmi.
While most of the entertainment is free to those with tickets and ground passes, tickets for A Day On The Bassline are sold separately (just under $70 per ticket), though included will be a ground pass so music lovers can keep up with the tennis on the big screen. A finals ticket in the Rod Laver Arena itself, incidentally, costs $290.
Providing something for punters to do in between matches is not the only investment being made. As part of a multi-million-dollar upgrade, players will have a new restaurant and gym this year. Prize money is also up, to a record pool of $21m, with the singles champions to win more than $1.5m each. No wonder tournament organisers are so keen to give their customers more reasons to buy tickets.
“This is why we have put so much work into expanding and improving the off-court entertainment this year,” says Tennis Australia chief executive Steve Wood. “We have some world-class acts lined up for the finals weekend concert series. The addition of Spiegelworld and the many quality entertainment options that come with it will only enhance the festival nature of the Australian Open.”
“People can come at lunchtime and see all this free entertainment,” says Katos. “We’ve got 40 acts and five different entertainment precincts over two weeks. I think it’ll be something that hasn’t been seen before in Australia. Because tennis is unique in the wide range of people it attracts, across a big age range, we could provide really diverse entertainment. The Australian Open is already the most successful international sporting event in the country, attracting more than 600,000 people last year. Now we want to add value to that experience.”
The mix of sport and entertainment is nothing new – as anyone who watched the impossibly lavish opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics can testify – though tennis has remained more set in its ways. The US Open night matches are about as showbiz as tennis gets and come adorned with a range of celebrities in the stands and sudden bursts of rock music at each change of ends, prompting fans to dance in the hope of being featured on the big screen. Yet there is nothing at Flushing Meadows that comes close to the festive cultural explosion about to be unleashed on Melbourne Park. This will be tennis as if directed by Baz Luhrmann with a touch of Liza Minnelli’s Cabaret and a rock festival thrown in.
The only question is, with so much going on, who is actually going to be watching the tennis? If Federer, Williams and the rest really want to make an impact on this year’s Australian Open, perhaps they had better be prepared to take up juggling or hang from a trapeze. A circus, indeed.
Source: Qantas the Australian Way January 2009