Bachelor & Spinsters Balls take place regularly across rural Australia. These events were originally designed to overcome distance, formalised social congregations providing an opportunity for locals to meet potential life partners. Over time the gatherings have dissolved into chaos and anarchy­ – punctuated by an urge to disconnect from the established. This new path is not something uniquely Australian, similar events play out with near identical trajectories across the Western world – Midsummer celebrations in Sweden, the Spring Break calamities in the US… franchised days of rapture, endlessly repeated.

Today, B&S balls are symptomatic of a certain apathy towards times gone and indeed what lies in the future. How do we authentically relate to the past? How does this inform our identity, our traditions, and the way in which we belong? Without that connection back in time, can we form an idea of what the future should hold? In The Ball the steadfast pattern of confusion and disorder begin to reveal something else entirely. Chaos becomes both a representation and metaphor for living only in the now with an intensity and joy that perhaps suggests that life is forever and neither yesterday or tomorrow matter.

See our Q&A with author, Ingvar Kenne.