Mona Foma review – utter nonsense on paper, but somehow it all makes sense

As my Uber pulls up in the empty car park of the Elphin Sports Centre, the driver and I both look around warily, unsure if his map has led us to the right place. “I can take you to the gorge instead?” he offers.

The sites containing art, music and experiences at Mona Foma, the annual summer festival conceived by Hobart’s monolithic Museum of Old and New Art, seem to take one of two forms: large-scale and impossible-to-miss insertions of colour and sound deposited on the town of Launceston – as with Architects of Air, a massive, inflatable maze positioned next to a skate park and rowing club – or they’re like the Centre, a series of video art pieces displayed inside the courts, offices and locker rooms of the sports hall.

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The manager working behind the canteen tells me that on a weekend there are usually thousands of kids running around, bouncing basketballs. (“They’ve been a bit displaced this week,” she tells me.) From the outside – or from the front seat of an Uber in the deserted carpark – you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re far from a brilliant interaction with art.

But inside, the performance of masculinity in Turkish artist Ali Kazma’s Bodybuilders is given a sensory boost when it’s shown on a screen in the men’s change room. Clean and mostly empty, there’s no mistaking the decades of sweat and piss that coat every inch of the space as I perch on a wooden bench that serpentines around the room.

Down the carpeted hall is a cavernous, dark basketball court where Liz Magic Laser’s film Kiss and Cry transforms a pair of young ice-skaters into tiny revolutionaries. “Children cannot be liberated one by one. We must be liberated as a class,” a young girl tells her skating coach. As I watch, children tumble on an exercise mat on the floor, not far from a wall painted with the words “NO ESCAPE”. A sign taped around the centre – including on the door leading into this court – implores fiery parents to remember that “THESE ARE KIDS. THIS IS A GAME. THE COACHES ARE VOLUNTEERS. THE REFEREES ARE HUMAN. THIS IS NOT ... THE NBA!!!”

It’s in this chance collision of art, space and audience that Mona seems to get its kicks. It would be perfectly fine to show these works in a sterile gallery, but the festival’s curatorial team never passes up an opportunity to get a laugh, prod at our more conservative sensibilities or encourage a moment of awkwardness.

During one of the weekend’s two performances of Double Double – an explosive piece of improvisation featuring two drummers and two dancers performing together for two hours – dancer Deanne Butterworth disappears for a moment behind a dividing wall in the space and returns wearing a cap and assuming a new authoritative role. She stands threateningly close to two people chatting in a corner until they’re silenced. She stares down someone checking their phone until it’s pocketed. Then she hurls herself on the floor as fellow dancer Jo Lloyd leaps past her to the frenetic rhythms of Evelyn Ida Morris and Tina Havelock Stevens’ drumming. Wearing a straight face during moments like this seems to do a disservice to Mona’s intentions.

The noise of Double Double’s drumming spills out into the walkway and bounces off a display of the World’s Largest Subterranean Wasps Nest, an exhibition at the Queen Victoria Museum and Gallery around which the festival hub has positioned itself. It’s the placement of the festival over the town of Launceston that strikes me most headily. In some venues – including the Centre – it clings in all the right places, like a silky Brownlow dress over a pair of Spanx, while in others it’s more like an Instagram filter: adding something flashy, but easily removed.

Local tourist attraction The Penny Royal, a fairytale village designed to resemble some indeterminate past in which pirates and mountain climbers lived in harmony, received the Instagram treatment with Hypnos Cave, MESS and Soma Lumia’s remix of The Dark Ride. What’s normally a haunted house-style boat ride through an animatronic version of Tasmania’s convict past now has added lasers and an ambient techno soundtrack. The rickety old boat passes under video art projected onto a wall of water, which serves as a nifty metaphor for Mona Foma, the festival that flourished in Tasmania’s south that is now mapping itself onto somewhere new.

Between the taxi driver who collected me at Launceston airport and claimed no one in the town was interested in attending the festival, and the Centre’s manager who seemed insistent that locals needed to open their minds and get on board with change and the new ideas filtering into the city, the reception of northeners to the Mona-fication of Launceston proved a mixed bag to this mainlander.

Something everyone seemed to agree on was King Ubu, a collaborative puppet show from the minds of Mona Foma and Terrapin Puppet Theatre. It succeeded by both mapping art onto Launceston quite literally: taking place at the First Basin of Cataract Gorge, as people drift past in the chairlift, or perch high on ancient rocks and peer down at the stage. It reflects a vision of Tasmania back onto itself, and onto the thousands of visitors and locals who take to the water or grass around the Basin to watch.

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In updating Alfred Jarry’s 19th-century satire Ubu Roi, Willoh S. Weiland depicted the evil Ubus as real estate investors trying to take control of the state. The opening song references Mona founder David Walsh’s madcap ideas, the recent resignation of Tasmanian premier Will Hodgman and the “art can save us” rhetoric of musical director and festival curator Brian Ritchie. With performances from the tumbling Allstar Cheer and Dance, the City of Launceston RSL Band, and the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre’s Youth and palawa kani language programs, among others, it was a project lovingly of Launceston. And while it might have been full of the kind of things that sound like utter nonsense on paper – such as a king and queen played by inflatable swan-shaped pool toys – much like taking in video art as the smell from a urinal wafts up your nostrils, at Mona Foma, somehow it all makes sense.

• Guardian Australia was a guest of Mona Foma