For the second time in 12 months, Ballarat Frolic Festival has been upended by COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions.
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In the wake of the extended Melbourne lockdown and increased restrictions, the festival committee has been forced to postpone the Frolic Dark Rainbow winter festival until September.
Frolic Dark Rainbow was planned to take place over the Queen's Birthday long weekend from Friday, June 11 to Sunday, June 13, headlined by the Dirty Rainbow Immersive Art Experience at the George Farmer Building, an old smallgoods factory in Ballarat East.
The festival's key events, the Frolic Cabaret, Dirty Rainbow and the associated afterparty are now planned to take place over September 17 and 18.
Festival organisers met on Saturday morning before ultimately making the call to postpone.
With many artists based in Melbourne unable to make the trip to Ballarat and venues restricted to seated shows in small numbers, festival director Jay Morrison said the Frolic Dark Rainbow was made 'logistically impossible'.
"The Ballarat Frolic Festival met, we considered all of our options with staging Frolic Dark Rainbow under the Regional Victoria restricted activity directions. Unfortunately, under those current directions, the festival just can't go ahead and its current form in June," he said.
"We're hopeful and semi-confident that these events will be able to continue at this later date. We know that there were so many people looking forward to them and that everybody needs something to look forward to on the other side of this lockdown."
Mr Morrison said livestreaming the events was also considered, but fell at the same hurdles.
"The restricted activity directions have capacity limits on the venues which means that the events wouldn't be financially viable," he said.
"We did consider livestreaming the festival, but we still came up against the fact that half of our artists for the festival wouldn't be able to be present which means that it was just too logistically impossible to livestream as well."
Mr Morrison said the committee would reassess the timing and viability of future festivals following the completion of the September events.
"We've spent hundreds and hundreds of volunteer hours on the festival and so it would have been a shame if we had to completely cancel and it may have meant the end of Frolic completely if we did that," he said.
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"We have been financially impacted by this and we will be seeking compensation, if we're eligible, from the government. If we cancelled the festival, we wouldn't have been financially viable to continue in the future.
"We're proudly not for profit and it means that we try and make our events as financially accessible as possible. We don't aim to make a lot of money and to have our festival completely cancelled, the money that we've already invested would be lost which would mean that we would have depleted our reserves, essentially and we wouldn't be able to continue."
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