DreamBIG Children's Festival is set to celebrate its 50th Anniversary at Adelaide Festival Centre this year.

On the program, popular stage production Fancy Long Legs will showcase the talent of proud Yuwi Burra and South Sea Island descendant, Waveney Yasso.

Featuring original songs by Yasso, Fancy Long Legs is a vibrant musical adventure based on the picture book by tinsel and craft icon Rachel Burke. Fancy is a spider who loves to create but struggles to stay focused on her creative task of web-building. With the support of her spiderling friends, she goes on a beautiful journey to find her own style and make something no one else can.

This uplifting story takes a sparkly and relatable look at neurodivergence, staying true to yourself and finding friends who love you and celebrate your differences.

DreamBIG Children's Festival aims to place its young audience at the centre of fresh, inventive, imaginative and inspiring arts experiences. More than 2.5 million children, families and teachers have participated since its inception (as Come Out Festival).

Now in 2025, Yasso's musical expertise and skills will be showcased to a new range of festival goers in May this year.

"I was approached by Naomi Price and Rachel Burke having released a children's album the previous year. I write music and perform often in Magandjin (Brisbane) and was keen to jump on the project. Little did I know that the lead creatives would be so warm and open throughout the development process," she said.

"I was able to workshop an Acknowledgement song with them and created a piece that is now a permanent part of the opening of the show that I am really proud of. It's an honouring of Country and a thank you to the First People of this place which is especially important and as the show travels, we tread lightly."

When it came to song production, Yasso said the creative development process involved delving into each Spiderlings' personality and trying to reflect that through the feeling of each song.

"Working alongside the Rachel Burke for ''Rachel Burke's Fancy Long Legs'' was an absolute dream. The songs are a real celebration of each unique spider and Fancy who is such a creative spider moves through stages of celebrating her creativity with 'Fancy Free', to feeling her bigger emotions in 'Big Feelings', and learning how to construct a web in an instructional 'How To Do It' tune," she said.

"The creative development process involved delving into each Spiderlings' personality and trying to reflect that through the feel of each song. We first planted the seeds of each character upon meeting and as I drove to and from the creative development, ideas would pop into my head and I was able to expand on those over the following weeks.

"Rachel, Naomi and I met during creative development for a few days to establish the scenes and flow of the show. We were able to identify where a song or musical element would be helpful. The mood of a scene is sometimes established by a song or musical component so it was important to understand the purpose of every song. I took notes of everything our creative team wanted the characters to say in each song whether it was silly, or a throw away remark and I was able to chip away at the list while composing and crossed out each line as I was lyric writing."

While the songs came together quite quickly, Yasso said great effort and thought went into ensuring the songs embodied comfort.

"The songs came together quite quickly, with the big ballad revealing itself to me in 3/4 time. I wanted it to feel like a hug, when someone sways and pats you on the back to comfort you and I think it was the quickest song to come together for me. The other songs began to groove once I was able to write bass lines that locked in and after the backing vocals were in, I felt like they all fit in to place," Yasso told Style Up.

"Watching the cast embody the characters and sing my music was such a lovely feeling. They are able to bring the works to life in their own way. The songs have been recorded and I am looking forward to releasing them in the coming months. There's a few little Easter eggs hidden in the tracks and it was a lot of fun for me to build the songs the way that I hear them."

Dedicated to preserving language, songlines and history through art, Yasso's participation in Fancy Long Legs is just one of many ways the musician continues to fuse both her culture and craft.

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