Stonefest overcomes the wet

By ASHLEY HAMILTON
IN THE beginning, there was the cloud. It was sinister, grey, and it crept across the sky just as Claire Bowditch began to sing. Sitting cross-legged in the grass, happy to be sharing in the Stonefest experience, I eyed the cloud and its friends and sent a telepathic message into the stratosphere. Please Don’t Let It Rain. And then as Bowditch took a bow, Canberra’s drought finally ended.

Woodstock ’69, Homebake 96, Glastonbury almost every year are all festivals that have become legend, in part, because of the wet. Stonefest isn’t quite on the same stage as those epic festivals but the flooded chaos of the mosh-pit during Bliss and Eso’s set wasn’t far off. Unlike the sweltering oven-baked heat of Big Day Out, there was no fear of suffering heatstroke or having my face melt off in the burning sun at Stonefest. Instead, there was rain. Suddenly Stonefest and I were having a conversation.

“Hey, Stonefest!” I was saying .

“I paid more money than is sensible to be here and I haven’t even heard a full set yet. So give me a break and let’s see some sunshine!”

There was silence, before Stonefest seemed to speak back.

“Drop that attitude and put on a poncho,” it said.

And so I found myself disoriented, sweating and struggling to breathe through the blue plastic of my poncho wishing that a crippling heatwave had been forecast for Canberra rather than the Great Flood. The weather didn’t wet everyone’s spirits though, and the over-priced alcohol soon fuelled some childlike craziness. Before Sydney group Bluejuice took the stage, the masses were kept entertained as a strip of plastic and some beer became a makeshift slip and slide.

The fun was encouraged by the sodden crowd, as was mud wrestling and crowd surfing. Girls became human relay batons and were happily passed above the pack of ponchos. When Bluejuice’s lead singer Jake Stone finally took the stage, prancing about in a neon lycra and fur number, the crowd cheered with muddy abandon.

The drinks and the rain also oiled the crowd’s dancing bones. They say dance is the hidden language of the soul – if this is the case then Stonefest was all about learning to say rude words. The girls in the mosh-pit were more rhythmically infused than some of the more muscled up male punters, who hovered on the sidelines like out-of-work bodyguards, tapping their feet and demonstrating that a fear of commitment isn’t limited to relationships. I guess for some people dance isn’t their first language.

Apart from the rain, the day was dampened only by the profane language of those who were too intoxicated to communicate properly. The trash-talk could even be experienced in the toilets, where a range of swear words were published upon the neon-green walls. The haiku poem of “YOU TOSSER” was what many festival-goers would have read upon stepping into the port-a-loo cubicles. Or perhaps they enjoyed the leftwing graffiti that a political science student coked out on No-Doz in the tenth semester of their PhD had written on the bathroom floor before passing out.

“So glad that I’m not in charge of that mess,” one Stonefest volunteer said as they eyed the lengthy toilet line.

“Volunteering at festivals is the way to go. You get to be really involved if you want, and sometimes you meet the bands after they play and after I finish my shift I can go enjoy the festival with my friends. Do you want a poncho?”

The Stonefest crowd was an edgy mix of teenagers, young adults, cool kids and obsessed music fans. There were lots of colourful maxi dresses, crazy sandals and StoneWeek shirts as well as the risky double denim look and a rainbow of ponchos teamed with silly hats and sunglasses. It was without a doubt a university festival crowd. But there were exceptions. Upon dark, several dancers in head-to-toe black spandex suits, known as morph suits, formed a dance circle. Their body-hugging lycra figures blended into the rainy darkness as they danced, attracting strange stares from passing festival-goers.

“When it gets really dark, you won’t be able to spot us at all,” one male morph suit said.

“It’s so satisfying, you can go out and not be famous, but still have people pay attention to you with no strings attached. And when you’re morphing you just feel like you’re part of this community of really awesome people”.

Waving its lanky limbs the morph suit turned and danced off into the crowd, tossing and turning like a rotisserie man-chicken.

It’s extraordinary that the combination of a music festival and a spandex suit has the power to create that kind of social freedom, albeit temporarily. It must be that special Stonefest ‘vibe’ that has to be experienced firsthand to truly understand.