Clothing the Loop: Circular Design Festival with Alison Plevey

The Clothing the Loop: Circular Design Festival is a meeting point for fashion, activism, performance, and purpose. A multi-faceted event celebrating sustainability across industries, Australian Dance Party and co-producer Keli Studio are reinventing this event for its new venue at the CIT Woden Campus.

Alison Plevey, the Director of Australian Dance Party, gave us some insight into the history of ADP and the development and evolution of the Clothing the Loop: Circular Design Festival.

Australian Dance Party is turning 10 this year, congratulations! Tell us about the early days for ADP. How exactly did ADP come into being?

I imagined and founded ADP in 2016, with a vision to generate opportunities for professional dance artists and choreographers to create and share unique work that connects to place and weaves in political, social and environmental ideas. I was inspired to build a community of dancers here in the ACT, develop career pathways and invite audiences into unique experiences of dance that have to power to create change.

On your website it states, “ADP shares a unique voice through one of the most vital art forms harnessing dance as a means to imagine positive futures, inspire awareness and change.”

Can you describe the link between the work you do as a dance company and the Clothing the Loop Festival? And what was the impetus for creating this event?

Through projects such as Clothing the Loop, we invite opportunities for audiences, artists and thinkers to come together on an issue that requires a cultural shift, a whole of community response – to reduce waste and damage to our planet.

Art is an incredible tool to communicate, to develop understanding and to connect to feelings and spark action! Clothing the loop integrates live performance, with practical activities, parades, workshops, talks and tours. By utilising multiple modes of engagement and entry points we aim to build a groundswell of activity focussed on circular design, and develop pathways to cultural change.

Can you tell us more about the circular design process, and why it is the main focus of this year’s event?

Circular design involves implementation of design processes that considers a product or services life cycle from raw material, to creation, to disposal. This may involve processes of life cycle mapping, energy use considerations, raw material selection, transport, packaging, repair, recycling, reuse and biochemical processes (eg. biodegrading or remaking) to avoid damage to the environment.

The processes instill ethics of care and valuing of the objects and processes we are a part of economically, socially and personally, and reject a culture of single use disposability.

What is your favourite part of the Clothing the Loop Festival? And what do you hope people will take away from the event?

My favourite part of Clothing the Loop is the collision of creative people, designers and the community coming together in different ways, with their different skills and identities, to express the same thing, care for the environment.

Find out more about the Clothing the Loop: Circular Design Festival and purchase your tickets here.

The Clothing the Loop Festival is held on the opening weekend of the Craft + Design Canberra Festival, Friday 6 November and Saturday 7 November 2026, and is supported by the Canberra Institute of Technology, the ACT Government and the Craft + Design Canberra Festival.

Images: Ghetto Media

Words: Marisa Cartland