Until this weekend, I had never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As a millennial, this is kind of on a par with admitting you’ve never seen Dirty Dancing or West Side Story – there are particular cultural products that shape a generation, and Buffy has had a profound impact on mine.
So I decided to remedy the situation, and at 10:30pm on Saturday night, I lined up with 350 other people outside the Sydney Opera House Playhouse for my first-ever late-night Buffy binge.
The Buffy Binge-a-thon (six episodes in total, with snack and conversation breaks) was held as part of the inaugural Bingefest, a Sydney Opera House festival that premiered over the weekend. Replete with cat videos, podcasts, memes, arcade games and cult content of all kinds, Bingefest was firmly targeted at web-literate under 40s.
The festival’s events were a combination of traditional panel discussions, screenings and participatory events, including dance classes and interactive art. Headliners included podcast gurus (Serial producer Julie Snyder, Radiolab host Jad Abumrad, and Community creator Dan Harmon) as well as performance art from Shia LaBeouf and collaborators Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner. The latter demanded not only time and commitment from the participant audience, but stamina too: the event took place between midnight and 6am, and required participants to queue on the stairs outside the Joan Sutherland Theatre for hours with no guarantee they would ever make it to the front of the line.
The Buffy Binge-a-thon required a similar level of commitment, albeit in the more comfortable surrounds of the Playhouse. Curated and interspersed with commentary by writers and editors of US entertainment site The AV Club, the Binge-a-thon was billed as both a celebration for “scoobies” (Buffy fans refer to the vampire-fighting team as the “Scooby Gang”) and a great intro for newbies – but standing in the queue of backpacks and Buffy tees, I felt like something of an outsider.
That sense of otherness wasn’t helped once in the theatre itself, as effusive cheering accompanied the opening credits and the on-screen entrance of particular characters. The vibe was very much “sleepover with your best pals”, and I began having flashbacks to a midnight premiere of a Hayden Christensen-era Star Wars that I once attended, in which I nearly got myself impaled by a plastic lightsaber for laughing at an inappropriate moment, and wondered if this time I was going to fall foul of a replica stake.
The episode selection was somewhat puzzling. We were shown the second half of a two-part episode, but not the first. A recurring character met a dramatic end, which seemed very significant for Buffy – but none of the preceding episodes gave a sense of why this character was so important, so it was hard to care too much.
Still, Buffy is eminently binge-worthy television, and it didn’t take long to understand why. The characters range from kooky to creepy to charismatic and kick-arse; the dialogue is fast and sharp; there were some legitimate “boo!” moments, and I yelped aloud at least twice.
The insider vibe of the Buffy event could be considered emblematic of Bingefest as a whole: either a great attraction or a terrible turnoff, depending on which side of the fence you fell. If you were familiar with the way social media users had appropriated the story of Harambe the gorilla, for example, attending an event titled the Harambe Memorial Service (not actually a memorial service, but a wide-ranging meme retrospective) might seem like a good time on a Saturday afternoon. On the other hand, it could seem arbitrary and a bit alienating, like an “in” joke you’d been left out of.
On Sunday, I decided to stick with the solo girl power theme and headed along to the Rihanna vs Beyoncé dance class, where Amrita Hepi, a Bundulung and Ngapuhi dancer, choreographer and activist, was teaching excerpts of the video clip choreography from Work and Sorry respectively.
The class was part dance party, part workout, part body-image therapy: “This is a shame-free zone,” Hepi said at the beginning. Later: “This is your crotch. You can touch it. It’s yours forever.” As anyone familiar with the video clips in question will know, crotch-touching is kind of a necessity here; the choreography is all hips and butt.
It likely takes more than one dance class to truly throw off the shackles of self-consciousness, but Hepi is the kind of person you want around when you do: her openness and enthusiasm is infectious. “This is all about taking up space,” she said, as she urged us to throw all our weight into our legs and jiggle like our lives depended on it.
• This article was amended on 20 December to correctly note capacity of the Playhouse
