The Freo Street Arts Festival

30 March 2013

Fremantle (also known as Freo) has an annual Street Arts Festival - this year, it coincides with Easter weekend.

Just a note about Freo as a nickname - somehow heaps of things here in Australia have nicknames, and some of them end in "o" - like "doco" for documentary film.  Or the Pengo Café, instead of the Penguin Café.  Other items end in "ie" - like breakfast is brekkie, or biscuits are bikkies.  Postmen are posties, biker gangs are bikies.  You get the idea.  So, Fremantle being such a long same, it gets shortened to Freo.  Because Fre-ie is just too weird.

Okay, so the Street Arts Festival - all kinds of street performers and buskers are scheduled for a variety of locations across the town.  Street artists (as in graffiti artists) are assigned walls.  Mimes and statues are assigned streets.  Musicians, acrobats, singers, dancers, all scheduled into time slots and locations.

It was great fun!  We found that most of the performances today were either on the main street (South Terrace, dubbed Cappuccino Row) or in the park by the waterfront - and we actually knew the two areas.  

We made a huge loop to be able to maximize our performance viewing - we started with very good Spanish guitarists; moved on to this creative angelic statue (he/she was handing out glitter to the kids); there was some funny music/mime troupe; then the rope/sash acrobats, where I caught a mime in the audience; more statue people; a Spanish singer and two tango dancers; rides in the park, including a huge Ferris wheel (and no, we didn't go on); and a show not yet open, robotic life-size dinosaurs!   

There was also an area dedicated to various ethnic foods - we skipped that, but I loved the giant paella pans - they were large enough to feed a small village!

 

We had dinner by the marina, a lovely fish and chips meal.  We went with the senior special, so it included tea or coffee and a small cup of gelato - such a deal, along with this beautiful view!

Then we headed back to the train/bus station, walking along the beach walk - all kinds of odd sculpture.  There was this funny dog made out of disks of metal, looking like he was waiting for his person.  And over by another concert, I found a strange plastic squiggly sculpture - I don't know how to describe it, squiggles looking like recycled glass (but really plastic, I checked) hanging from a grid and attached at the bottom of the grid - looking more like a kelp forest than anything else!  Just, kind of strange!

We didn't get to see any of the graffiti artists or street painters.  We agreed to make it an early night, since we leave on the train for Adelaide tomorrow morning.

But it definitely was a fun event!