Melbourne's biggest arts festival wound up on Sunday night after a 17-day run that saw a diverse program of almost 100 events featuring 1000 artists from 23 countries.
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The 29th annual Melbourne Festival program featured 15 world premieres, 21 Australian premieres and six works commissioned for the festival.
Audiences were as varied as the acts, with shows for pre-schoolers, a concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl featuring Mihalis Hatzigiannis that united Melbourne's Greek community and a stream of circus performances featuring local and international acts.
This year's festival also had reduced ticket prices and a wider program of free events – part of creative director Josephine Ridge's vision for the annual event to be more "inclusive".
Final ticket sales and figures are yet to be officially tallied, but Ms Ridge told Fairfax Media she was "delighted" with the response this year.
"I feel like we've really engaged in the way we wanted to with Melbourne," she said. "I'm sure [reduced ticket prices] made a difference for some people, and this year we've presented a much wider free program, not only in our own hub but in the Queen Victoria Gardens as well, which has been fantastically well attended."
Ms Ridge said the breadth of this year's programming meant the arts festival had reached new groups of people.
"With the free program, for example, in partnership with Multicultural Arts Victoria, we've been able to give the stage to young, emerging performers from a range of different cultural backgrounds, and they obliviously bring with them their own communities and audiences."
Ms Ridge said feedback across the festival had been positive, but the show that seemed to touch most people was Western Australian arts and social justice company Big hART's Hipbone Sticking Out, a work inspired by the 1983 death of 16-year-old Yindjibarndi youth John Pat, the catalyst for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
"Since the show opened, on a daily basis people are coming up to me and wanting to talk about it because it was dealing with incredibly important issues ... and doing so in a very impactful and poignant way," she said. "It was an enormously important work and quite central to the entire program."
