Chinese New Year

Just when you thought all the New Year celebrations were done and dusted, those lunar calendar-following folk at Chinese New Year Festival are just getting started. The annual festival, bursting with free entertainment, art, food, tours, competitions and kids activities, is upon us once again and this time it's all about the rabbit.

"The Year of the Rabbit is really exciting," enthuses Gill Minervini, the festival's creative director. "This is the 12th festival that I've directed, so I've actually gone through every zodiac sign, and I think that the rabbit is the most exciting of all. It's a really happy, energetic, positive and free-thinking sign."

The festival's centrepiece, the Twilight Parade on Sunday 6 February, is where the significance of the sign is really explored. "We are able to have a lot of fun with this year's parade," says Minervini. "The tiger [the 2010 zodiac sign] was very strong, protective and aggressive, but this year there are lots of happy, just totally entertaining entries."

Traditionalists take note: Minervini and parade director Jerry Snell's take on the symbol is broad, contemporary and more than a little whimsical. "I was particularly interested in looking at the rabbit in both Western and Asian cultures, so we are doing a lot of blending of those. It's such an accessible and well-known animal in both cultures. We've been playing around with everything from Bugs Bunny to the rabbit in Chinese mythology."

Minervini and Snell are responsible for producing one third of the parade's entries. Another third is comprised of entries from Sydney's Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean communities and the final third comes courtesy of guest performers from the Chinese province of Hubei. "This will be the sixth year that we bring out performers to be part of the festival. We've had performers from Beijing, Guangdong and Henan in the past and it's great because each province has a distinctive cultural basis. The performers will be like nothing we've seen before."

Hubei is well known for wudang, the martial arts style made famous in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and that, along with the music, art, and aesthetics of the province, will be a key component of the parade.

In the festival's 15 years it has grown exponentially in size and is now sitting pretty as the largest celebration of the Lunar New Year outside Asia. "The huge interest reflects the population of Sydney and our place in Asia," says Minervini. "After the British settlers, the next wave of immigrants was the Chinese community in 1850 for the Gold Rush. This is one of Australia's oldest cultures and also one of the fastest growing communities. The festival is well placed to reflect that and is a great interpretation of Sydney's diversity." Erin Moy