Gold Coast Festival of Lights
The dazzling Gold Coast Festival of Lights is a celebration of Chinese culture, featuring spectacular large scale light instillations, live cultural performances, traditional Chinese handcrafts and cultural cuisine.
Opening at the Gold Coast for the first time in 2016, the Festival of Lights will illuminate the Gold Coast Broadwater Parklands with over 20,0000 lights as part of the stunning Chinese silk lantern light display. Celebrating Chinese culture, the festival features a staggering array of large scale light installations to explore, nightly live cultural performances, Chinese handcrafts, food stalls and children’s activities.
The vibrant light displays, some of which are an impressive 60 metres wide and 15 metres high, come in all shapes and forms, including Chinese zodiacs, Chinese dragons, dinosaurs, flowers, insects, a wide range of animals including a grove of pandas, Chinese Opera figures, as well as beautiful Chinese sculptures and arches. The fantastic visual display can be explored on foot, accompanied to an ambient music backdrop, a true sensory experience.
Over 20 Chinese artisans worked for over 6,552 hours to create 532 lanterns for the Gold Coast Festival of Lights. Over 30,000 metres of silk, 40 tonnes of steel and 20,000 light globes have been used to create the dazzling light scale installations, some 15 metres high and up to 60 meters long.
Every night, there will be regular special Bian Lian performances featured on the main stage. Bian Lian, which translates literally into ‘Face Changing’, is an ancient Chinese dramatic art that is part of the Sichuan opera, one of the China’s oldest local operas in the Sichuan province. The festival will also feature acrobatics, contortion, balancing acts, cultural dances and live sugar paintings – a unique form of art for producing artistic pieces entirely composed of sugar, created while you watch.
Tickets start from $14 and the festival runs from August 26 to October 3, nightly from 6:00 pm. Bookings are available online or at the gate.