The Way Out West Festival (or WOW Festival) is on again at Casula Powerhouse until July 21 and is an absolute must for the kids these school holidays.
What’s on at WOW Festival
There are loads of free activities for the tribe at WOW Festival. There are lots of hands on art installations encouraging kids to get in touch with their artistic side. One of our favourites was the #kittenwall inside the Colour Connect Create workshop where the kids (and big kids) could colour their own kitten on a huge section of wall.
There was also a big building called Who Lives Here? with windows where the tribe could draw a picture of a family to go inside the house.
Downstairs there is an entire room with a free workshop called Make in the Switch Gallery, which is dedicated to arts and craft activities including portrait drawing with mirrors, poster design and funky felt making. There is also edible jewellery design!
Another fantastic free experience was Russ the Bus – a bus filled with books for readers of all ages. We grabbed a seat and read a few books as well as had a turn pretending to drive Russ.
Live performances
The WOW Festival is all about the arts in every form, especially theatre and live performance. We caught a show from the Splash Test Dummies which had us all in stitches the entire show. We even talked about it all the way home. Other live performances happening throughout the festival include Lah Lah’s Big Live Band, This Will Not Protect You and Dr Hubble’s Bubble. The live performances are ticketed, so be sure to organise your tickets before you visit WOW Festival.
There are also story telling sessions happening throughout the day which we enjoyed while we grabbed a bite to eat at lunch time.
Hands on artistic experiences
A couple of the art installations were absolute highlights for the whole tribe. The centre piece of the whole festival was called Moving Forest. The minute we walked through the doors of the Powerhouse Museum and saw it all we could say was ‘wow’ over and over. Moving Forest allows the kids to get dressed up in specially created ponchos that match the installation and then explore the colourful artistic wonderland. They can touch the art and there is even a little cave to explore with an Australian theme that I had to ask the kids to vacate multiple times.
Another installation we had a lot of fun with was called Solid Air. The kids grabbed a ball of string and had 15 minutes to take their string, tie it to hooks and then walk it to another part of the gallery, tie it up again and go again. We wove the most beautiful colourful web as well as got tangled up in it too.
