Public to get rare chance to sleep in Royal Exhibition Building

It’s one of Melbourne’s grandest and best-known buildings, where Australia’s first parliament was opened, generations of students have sat exams and Dame Nellie Melba once sang.

And next month 600 members of the public will get to sleep overnight inside the Royal Exhibition Building.

For the first time in 81 years people will be able to spend the night in the World Heritage-listed centre, paying $130 per person to listen to ambient and experimental live music, or snooze if they prefer, through the night of August 22.

Elise Peyronnet, the artistic director of the Now or Never festival, which is staging the event, called Somnia, said it would offer a new way to experience both music and the building.

Audience members will be issued camp beds, pillows, eye masks and ear plugs, but they must bring their own sleeping bags.

The performance will start at 10pm with a one-hour performance by Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske.

Then for six hours, American experimental artist William Basinski will perform all four Disintegration Loops albums of electronic music.

At 6am, two Northern Territory Indigenous musicians will play, and breakfast will be served.

One inspiration for Somnia was composer Max Richter’s eight-hour classical piece Sleep, which has been performed to audiences lying in beds in cities such as Berlin and Austin, Texas.

Lord Mayor Nick Reece is keen to attend Somnia, which he said would be “an extraordinary experience”.

He said Basinski is “a global legend and cult figure in electronic music circles, and his Disintegration Loops is a masterpiece”.

Katie Sfetkidis and her partner Marcel Feillafe, artists who live in Melbourne CBD, are excited to have bought tickets.

The pair are fans of Basinski, and Sfetkidis said the event would be “a fun experience, something to remember” and the building had hosted “amazing historic events”.

Museums Victoria historian Dr Michelle Stevenson said the last people to sleep inside the building were RAAF personnel from 1941 to 1945.

During World War I, the Royal Exhibition Building housed soldiers about to depart for overseas, or who had returned from service.

In 1919, more than 4000 people were patients when the building became a hospital during the influenza pandemic, and 392 of those died.

Stevenson said the Somnia event would be cold, but more comfortable for participants than when WWII servicemen slept on straw mattresses.

“It will be an amazing experience – to sleep in the Royal Exhibition Building,” Stevenson said. “So often, when we have events here, the building is filled with stalls or activities.

“But this is a really wonderful opportunity to lie back, look up and enjoy the grandeur of the building, look at the decorative scheme, and think about some of that rich history, as you drift off to sleep.”

The City of Melbourne is providing $2.9 million to fund Now Or Never – a festival “of art, ideas, sound and technology” on from August 19 to 30.

A council spokesperson said the festival was expected to generate more than $19 million for the local economy.

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