As the highly anticipated MTN Bushfire festival approaches, excitement is building for a weekend filled with diverse musical acts, vibrant performances, and a celebration of creativity and inclusivity.
To give you a deeper look into what makes this festival truly unique, we had a chat with the Festival Director Jiggs Thorne who shared exclusive insights into the inspirations behind this year’s festival, and what festivalgoers can look forward to.
The festival’s theme, “FIREWORKS: Fire at Work,” sounds exciting. Can you explain how this theme comes to life at the festival and how attendees can get involved, like with the Bring Your Fire Volunteer Week?
[JIGGS THORNE]: MTN Bushfire’s ethos and clarion call to action, ‘Bring Your Fire’, explores the transformative power of the arts to inspire and illuminate individuals to ignite collective action to tackle the burning issues of our time. In 2024, Bring Your Fire finds expression in the MTN Bushfire 2024 theme: FIREWORKS. “FIREWORKS” represents Fire at Work. It manifests fire as action, dynamically presenting festivalgoers, partners, sponsors and traders with the opportunity to bring their fire for sustained positive impact and legacy for the communities we live in. FIREWORKS is about active service in the spirit of Bring Your Fire.
This year, MTN Bushfire will bring the spirit of FIREWORKS to life with an exciting new volunteer initiative. The festival is launching the inaugural edition of the Bring Your Fire Volunteer Day, which will be held every year in June in collaboration with partner organisations, including UN agencies in Eswatini. Festivalgoers will be able to sign up for a day of service with these organisations on online festival platforms, as well as at the Bring Your Fire Zone during the festival weekend. Sign up opportunities will become available on festival digital platforms shortly.
Tell us more about the changes we can expect at this year’s MTN Bushfire festival, like the bigger Golden Lounge and more stages? What inspired these updates and how do you think they’ll make the festival experience even better?
[JIGGS THORNE]: We strive to improve the customer experience every year. After so many years, it’s safe to say that one can’t experience the full multi-layered festival in only three days! This year, the Main Arena has been considerably extended while the Golden Lounge has almost doubled in size and now incorporates walks through some of the indigenous gardens at Malandela’s. The campsite environments have been greatly expanded too, with even more permanent ablution facilities. More parking space has also been added to the festival.
Perhaps most exciting of all, the festival will boast 8 stages this year! Apart from the revered Main Stage, House On Fire Amphitheatre and Ballantine’s Firefly stages, the newly-added Bring Your Fire Zone Stage will enjoy a full programme, and this year the KidZone has a Wilderness Stage in its new, expanded area, to complement its African Safari theme. On top of all this, festival partners Heineken, Jägermeister, and Corona will all bring their fire with three performance and entertainment stages of their own. Festivalgoers will have to prepare for a wide-ranging feast of music to suit every taste, and the MTN Bushfire festival app is highly recommended for scheduling the acts that guests will want to see. These are just some of the highlights of the wealth of fresh experiences awaiting festivalgoers in 2024, complementing the festival’s celebration of diversity, spirit of inclusion and atmosphere of tolerance that keeps festivalgoers – also known affectionately as Fire Starters – coming back year after year.
With so many stages and diverse acts, it sounds like there’s something for everyone at MTN Bushfire. Can you share how you choose the artists and make sure there’s a good mix for everyone to enjoy?
[JIGGS THORNE]: MTN Bushfire has a unique sound. We’re not interested in putting out commercial music, we’re interested in curating an authentic one-of-a-kind experience. There is always something exciting and new to explore at the festival. We actively celebrate diversity and achieve this with a very eclectic programme which in turn supports a diverse audience: Our festival attendees reflect over 60 nationalities. We are a family-friendly festival, and we look for artists who share our Bring Your Fire values and encourage inclusion and unity. Our festival is designed to bring people together to share and celebrate their differences and it starts with our programme. We take special care to ensure gender diversity, promote local musicians and bring in exceptional international acts.
We pride ourselves on our unique, eclectic and authentic programmes that showcase old favourites as well as hidden gems our audience may never have thought to listen to before, such as hosting a Theremin musician last year. As a festival of music and the arts, we also showcase a number of artists and entertainers from other disciplines, such as comedy, theatre and even the circus. It is also important for us that our guests get involved, so interactive drumming and ceramics workshops are on the programme this year.
We heard the festival will be focusing on being more eco-friendly this year, like with the carpooling initiative. How do you think these efforts will make a difference and why is it important for the festival?
[JIGGS THORNE]: Actually, we have been environmentally conscious from the start. In 2016 we officially introduced our Green Your Fire festival pillar to support our commitment to holding responsible events. It was so successful that we won the ‘Best Responsible Event’ Award at the 2017 World Travel Market African Responsible Tourism Awards. Our green efforts have made a huge difference. Large events like ours can leave a huge impact on the environment when you consider all the waste and carbon emissions created by having thousands of people in the same space for days. Last year we collected over 18 tonnes of waste, of which we are proud to say 75% was successfully recycled, with the help of our festivalgoers. Every year we have to regrow the lawns, for which we use some of the composted food waste from the festival. To cut down on carbon emissions we have a Park n’ Ride shuttle service, encourage car-pooling and have introduced paid parking.
We support various initiatives and workshops around environmental sustainability themes as well. In other words, as a responsible festival, we want to be a leader on the continent in terms of our ‘Green Footprint’ – the extent to which we are actively addressing our environmental impact. Every aspect of the festival considers how it can assist in this, from eco-friendly packaging in the Global Food Village to rewilding farmland by exclusively planting indigenous trees. We recognise that although festivals can generate large amounts of waste, they are also perfect vehicles for raising awareness and stimulating environmental action. We want our festivalgoers, and others touched by our upliftment programmes, to consciously engage with their social and physical environments with the mind-set that we all share this planet, and we must all contribute to leaving it a fit place to live for future generations.
The EU Bushfire Schools Festival sounds like a blast for young people. How does it fit into the festival’s mission and what positive changes have you seen in the participants over time?
[JIGGS THORNE]: The EU Bushfire Schools Festival, sponsored by the European Union, was established in 2010 to counter the lack of an arts programme in the national curriculum. The EU Bushfire Schools Festival is absolutely crucial to us and forms our first level of engagement with developing the arts in Eswatini. With it, we introduce the language of the arts to learners and teachers from all over the country, encouraging imaginative creative expression and showcasing the extraordinary transformative power of the arts to make sense of the world and to heal.
Inspired by MTN Bushfire’s Bring Your Fire call to action for positive social and environmental change, the EU Bushfire Schools Festival is one of the festival’s series of arts development initiatives which have capacitated local talent and created entrepreneurial and employment opportunities in Eswatini’s creative sector. The EU Bushfire Schools Festival facilitates creative performances, workshops, and interactive outreach programs for students as well as teachers. The inclusive nature of the festival has seen 9,720 learners, 616 teachers from all four regions of the country, as well as 63 Facilitators participate since inception. A number of our local musicians have also mentioned they were partly inspired to follow artistic careers by attending the Schools Festival, including Thamsanqa Sibandze, better known as KrTC of Hip Hop, our EU Bushfire Schools Festival Ambassador and Emcee.
CollaboNation launched as an opportunity for artists to work together. Can you tell us more about how it started, why it’s important for artists to collaborate like this and where you see it developing into in about 5 to 10 years from now?
[JIGGS THORNE]: CollaboNation brings African artists together in a series of unique regional music collaborations that create dynamic new conscious music, develop audiences in new territories and forge new market linkages. Through a series of unique music collaborations that weave together Africa’s rich and diverse musical genres, CollaboNation inspires a creative narrative of inclusivity and social cohesion. The impetus for the CollaboNation project came from the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a concept which seeks to actively promote arts mobility and new content creation across the continent. It sought to champion arts mobility at a time when there was virtually none and, in an increasingly digitalised world, it underlines the value of face-to-face interactions.
The synergy between artists from different countries, cultures and music genres coming together and creating something beautiful and inspiring is very special, and CollaboNation allows our audience to share that intimate energy as we chart the artists through their journey. CollaboNation is only in its second year. Ultimately, we aim to make it Africa’s premier collaborative portal to the rest of the world.
Featured Image(s) Source: Supplied
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