Especially around the tail-end of my time with The Arts Centre Gold Coast (Now known as HOTA: Home of the Arts), it was not uncommon to see staff opting to forgo the (at the time) traditional staff uniform and instead wear one of the many promotional shirts made by the venue’s marketing team. Especially given my public-facing role in digital marketing and social media at the time, I almost exclusively chose to wear these shirts. Since 2016, these have just been in a box at the back of my wardrobe, but I pulled them out while doing some Spring cleaning. While I am unsure about how interesting these will be to most, please humour me in my little nostalgia trip.
1Miss Saigon
There is a misconception about internships that they are about doing grunt work, getting the office coffee and all that. Perhaps that is true in many places, but The Arts Centre Gold Coast provided so many opportunities during my original 10-week internship. From writing media releases and getting involved in social media opportunities, it even gave me my first steps toward the data analytics field I work in now. But the easy highlight was having the opportunity to talent manage an ABC Radio Gold Coast opportunity on Miss Saigon’s Gold Coast opening night. Sure I was exhausted when I collapsed in my seat to watch the show that evening, but it did serve as a foundation for my following years in Strategic Communications.
2Pop Up Pictures
The marketer is versatile and is ready to jump into any role at any time. This has been very true over my years in marketing, from providing box office / front-of-house support, to holding up a pull-up banner on a windy day for half an hour so it wouldn’t blow over during a photoshoot, and relevant to this case, doing traffic control for the first of The Arts Centre Gold Coast’s Pop Up Pictures movie nights. Going to be frank, I never want to do traffic control again in my life, but it was certainly an experience. Plus while I don’t remember what the movie we were screening was, it was a really fun night!
3The Arts Centre Gold Coast’s 2016 Season
For some venues and companies that are involved in presenting a wide array of shows annually, shows can be bundled together into ‘Seasons’. For The Arts Centre Gold Coast in 2016, they offered more than a dozen shows as part of their 2016 Season, encompassing multiple art forms – which could be purchased in advance as a set of X performances or later as individual tickets. These shirts were first worn for the season launch event on 11 November 2015, and was an incredible night of live performance, and the announcement that The Arts Centre Gold Coast would be putting on a local production of Mary Poppins the Musical in mid-2016.
Above is the promotional video highlighting the full 2016 season, should you be interested in seeing what was on offer that year.
4Gold Coast Art Prize 2015
To be quite honest, I do not remember much about Gold Coast Art Prize 2015 other than I did some digital marketing and social media promotion for it. I do recall the winning work being pretty amazing though!
5Summer at the Cultural Precinct
During my time at both The Arts Centre Gold Coast and at other performing arts venues, some of the most memorable times of the year were during the summer school holidays, where families would flood into the centre for a day of fun activities, shows and more. Summer at the Cultural Precinct was The Arts Centre Gold Coast’s offering – which included free live music on Friday evenings, the aforementioned Pop Up Pictures, weekend activities and more. A particular highlight was the workshops for kids, which offered a variety of opportunities including stage combat, circus arts, vocal workshops (with Luke Kennedy), poetry, instruments and – arguably my favourite – a superhero training academy.
This is the second part in a small ‘Possessions of a Theatre Enthusiast’ series I started back in… *checks* July 2020 with a cast and crew Priscilla the Musical snowglobe, commissioned by Michael Cassel Group and custom made by Queen of Snow Globes for the most recent national tour of the musical. During my spring cleaning, I uncovered a lot of other small but fun memorabilia from my time working in theatre, both given and gifted to me, so hopefully will post more in this series in the coming weeks.
