In an outdoor car park in Sydney's Tempe, right under the temporarily quiet flight path, Casey Donovan belts out a cover of David Bowie's Heroes dedicated to the pandemic's essential workers. In lieu of applause, the audience – a grid of 50 or so sedans and SUVs – respond with blaring horns, flashing high-beams, and waving windscreen wipers.
Casey Donovan performs a drive-in concert at Robyn Webster Sports Centre, Tempe.Credit:Louie Douvis
In what organisers billed as "Australia's first drive-in concert", Donovan, who hadn't performed live onstage since her run in Chicago: the Musical was shut down by coronavirus restrictions in mid-March, sang for just over half an hour. She bantered with car passengers via Zoom, and quipped about NRMA's response time if car batteries – amid the endless blinking headlights and stereos channelling the onstage noise through their FM bandwidth – ran flat.
"It was bizarre, but bizarrely good," says Donovan. "I lost a lot of work over the last couple of months, so I'm on a high. It was nice to be out of the house and performing again."
Organised by Drive-In Entertainment Australia – a newly formed subsidiary of events company Action Reaction Entertainment, which before the pandemic focused on "brand activations and corporate events" – the free gig was the first local demonstration of a concept that's found favour in the US and Europe in recent weeks. The company has official dates planned for NSW in July, with Victoria and other states to follow.
Donovan says drive-in gigs could offer respite to a local music industry decimated by ongoing social distancing restrictions and already tiring of that go-to quick-fix, the livestream.
"This is better than a livestream. For starters, you're not in a room just by yourself," she says. "Sure, people are in their cars, but you have that real interaction: people wind down their windows and scream out to you... It's much better than an online performance."
Guests watch on from their vehicles as Casey Donovan performs.Credit:Louie Douvis
For movie exhibitors, where the concept already has a lingering tradition, drive-ins remain a logical reaction to ongoing COVID restrictions. While Event Cinemas, operators of Sydney's last remaining drive-in, the Skyline in Blacktown, await state government approval to re-open, other companies have begun embracing the space.
In March, anticipating the writing on the wall for local live events after seeing the coronavirus' rapid spread in his native France, Vincent Hernandez – founder of the popular Mov'in Bed Outdoor Bed Cinema – shifted the company's short-term focus. Next week, Mov'in Car Outdoor Car Cinema will launch in the rooftop car park of Moore Park's Entertainment Quarter with a screening of Dirty Dancing.
"For me, it's a way of bringing entertainment back to a bit of normality in this very strange time, in the sense that you can still go for a night out," says Hernandez of the company's drive-in shift, a pivot that Melbourne's Hot Tub Cinema will also launch in July with their new Drive-In Movie Club. "We are seeing big families book cars which will be very fun, and I think there will be a lot of romantic dates nights which we've been missing for sure."
Hernandez is confident that the drive-in's current moment is more than just a novelty.
"I think drive-ins are one of those things that we forgot existed for a little bit but that now make a lot of sense," he says. "It's going to be interesting to see how many people re-discover the joy of that."
Robert Moran is a culture reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
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2020-05-21 09:08:00Z
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