Mix It Up Festival wins national small-business award

25.11.08

Head of International and Agency Channels Retail Banking Services, Commonwealth Bank, Andy Wright presents the Small Business Award to Jill Morgan, Executive Officer, Multicultural Arts Victoria

A music festival that attracted 47 thousand people to watch 800 artists from 23 nationalities in nearly a hundred performance events has won the small business award tonight at the National Multicultural Marketing Awards in Sydney.

The Awards conducted by the Community Relations Commission of NSW are now in their 19th year.

The festival organised by Multicultural Arts Victoria was billed as Mix It Up and celebrated Victoria's cultural diversity. The organisers claim to have greatly increased attendance by people of non-English speaking background at the Victorian Arts Centre for example, in the 25 to 44 age group visits to the centre were increased by one hundred percent.

CRC Chair, Stepan Kerkyasharian said: "This event was all about injecting the new music and performances brought to Australia by immigrants into the main arts agenda and to change attitudes towards multicultural performances away from the stereotypical image of folkloric dancing."

"They wanted the broader community to realise that the arts in multicultural Australia are not just about ballet and classical music," he said.

The organisers say that by conceiving, designing and delivering Mix It Up, they have made a very significant contribution to the awareness of and sensitivity to cultural diversity and its contribution to the performing arts.

"What is being presented today is a far cry from the old folkloric dances from Europe that passed for the Australias new multicultural arts. These days it is about sharing and creating something new that reflects the dynamic of culturally diverse Australia."

"Arts is the way people can easily relate to each other and begin a process of understanding a new culture and the forces that created it. That way we can begin to understand why people of particular backgrounds think or act in a particular way", Mr Kerkyasharian said.

Multicultural Arts Victoria is very much the clearing house that brings talented artists within ethic communities onto the main stage of Victoria's arts scene. It is an advocate for artists from multicultural communities to be drawn into the mainstream.

It is also a broker working on the threshold between the mainstream and traditional and the cultures of Europe, the Middle East, South America and Asia within our society.

"This is pretty exciting stuff. And whilst there are many issues to be faced at the grass roots levels, especially with newly arrived refugees, there is great scope for creative new arts forms to emerge, that are unique to Australia."

"In a marketing sense, when a performer from one community joins into a mainstream event, it opens up a whole network of contracts and marketing opportunities with their own media and tight-knit communities and clubs."

"And that's exactly what Multicultural Arts Victoria is doing."

"They went about marketing this series of performances, Mix it Up,  in a very professional way; building relationships with ethnic media, use of bilingual marketing materials and advertising, targeting of relevant ethnic media and press and taking advantage of publications website and emails lists within communities have all been important tools."

"Over the nineteen years of running the National Multicultural Marketing Awards we have seen people move very comfortably into using all these tools as everyday tools for marketing any event, product or service. And that is very satisfying. Yet we know there are still many managers in all fields still under-selling themselves because of simple ignorance of the tools available in the Australian marketplace. For that reason we continue this work in promoting our multicultural marketing awards from which we all must benefit."  Mr Kerkyasharian said.