Tathra's artistic director Lindy Hume reflects on the themes of the 2021 Four Winds Festival held in Bermagui on the Far South Coast of NSW

As a Tathra local Ms Hume felt it was a beautiful opportunity to do what she loves, all from her own home town. As an internationally acclaimed director, she has been the artistic lead such festivals such as Sydney Festival and Perth International Arts Festival.

The Bermagui festival was held at the Four Winds' stunning outdoor venue, the Sound Shell. There was live music, dance, Indigenous culture, poetry, theatre and film presented in the stunning amphitheatre with its natural backdrop of 30 acres of open bushland.

Although Ms Hume usually directs much larger festivals and is often working within theatre spaces, she said that she found it to be an interesting challenge to fit everything into one weekend at one venue.

"I wanted to give people a sense of that multiple experience, the diversity of experience so I started with the four hero moments.

The hero moments she spoke of were the Candelo musicians and the Yuin performers, then the Iliad read out loud over three nights, the Sydney Dance Company's performance on Saturday afternoon on the Sound Shell stage and then the final performance by Nigel Westlake and Lior on Sunday.

"They were the four and once I put those four pieces together I just started to populate the rest of the program with a range of things, from string quartets to The New Graces [a country music group from Candelo].

"I wanted equal voices for local and visiting voices and different kinds of experiences.

"The Iliad is an example of visiting voices, so it's an ancient story but sitting in this very ancient, even more ancient landscape.

"Throughout the day, we tried to integrate local artists. For example, Patrick Dixon who is a local actor that lives in the Murrah who was reciting yesterday a Ginsberg poem."

Ms Hume said that the main idea for approaching the integration of different languages into the performances was to give it a bicultural and bilingual sense of coming together.

"The idea of the festival being a place where people's shared humanity is what's celebrated."

"Lior singing in Hebrew and Arabic at the end of the festival in Compassion, connected very much with people singing in the Dhurga language and in English, so that bookending the festival with this idea of coming together and looking for common ground.

"The whole theme of the festival was reconnect, because of the timing of the festival, there are going to be things in the air of coming back to a more normal world.

"The pandemic isn't over but we are allowed to and very privileged to be able to come together again in that beautiful site and that beautiful day and I think that the idea of reconnect is something that resonated with people.

"So when I asked artists to respond to those themes, they were very forthcoming with that idea, that they felt they could respond to and reconnect and that's where some of the musical repertoire came from or some of the poetic repertoire," said Ms Humes.

"It's a response to the last year, we are acknowledging that there's been a rapture in people's lives and they've been unable to reconnect, but now being able to reach towards each other again."