Scott-Norman was announced as Ballarat Cabaret Festival’s new artistic director on Thursday. 

“I want to help the Cabaret Festival to be alluring, be a bit of a beacon of ‘this is awesome’,” Scott-Norman says.

“I don’t think that it hasn’t been awesome I think it’s been getting the bat signal out high enough so Melbourne can see it.”

This year will also mark her fifth as mentor director of Federation University of Australia’s Arts Academy annual Cabaret Season.

“I’ve found it incredibly fascinating working with the music theatre students.

“The stuff that is interesting is always in the crevices and the shadows and our dark emotional recesses, the stories we don't want to share.”

The all-round entertainer, critic and vinyl record collector will be up in Ballarat next week for White Night.

“I like Ballarat and I think I’ve been lucky enough to take over at the time where Ballarat is becoming cool.

“I think Ballarat is getting groovy, it’s happening, it’s got traction so I think I’m in a great position to say to people ‘come up be part of something really fun’.”

Scott-Norman, who was one of the founding members of the Victorian Green Room Awards Cabaret Panel, says cabaret is “all the great things”.

“It was like the shoots were coming up through concrete and now it’s a jungle, I would never have foreseen that it would happen so heartily.

“I’ve shifted my affections over to cabaret from comedy.

“Cabaret just contains all of the magic, it means performers are engaged with the audience, they’re constantly present so you don’t get the sense of the fourth wall being up which means that it’s a live, it’s telling stories through song.

“The more you are on stage the more the audience gets from it, it’s sexy, it’s brassy, it’s funny, it’s clever, it’s all the great things.”

Scott-Norman is also a published author of two books about bullying and has 20 years’ experience as a radio broadcaster with ABC radio and 3RRR.

She takes over from outgoing artistic director Graeme Russell.

The Ballarat Cabaret Festival will run from October 5 to 8 and will launch in the second half of 2017.