Magic start to Festival Centre's 2015 season
InReview
The Illusionists will return in January to work their magic as part of a program of 211 performances unveiled today in the Adelaide Festival Centre’s 2015 season.
It’s the third instalment of the popular show, this time reborn as The Illusionists 1903 and promising to “transport audiences back to the golden age of magic” with eight new performers – The Immortal, The Eccentric, The Daredevil, The Showman, The Conjuress, The Clairvoyants and The Maestro.
Other season opening shows on the Festival Centre’s 2015 program include the previously announced Thriller Live! concert tribute to the music of Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five, as well as a So Frenchy, So Chic live performance at Her Majesty’s Theatre by indie pop singer Emilie Simon and French/Finnish The Dø, and a new Horrible Histories stage show titled Barmy Britain.
Sessions, a popular series which for the past few years has enlivened the traditionally quieter month of January with live music in a cabaret-style setting at the Space Theatre, is being reinvented as Sessions on the River Deck. A Festival Centre spokesperson says the move will take advantage of the venue’s new open-air space, with live performances from 5pm on Friday and Saturday nights from January 2-February 1 (the line-up has not yet been announced).
A packed dance program in 2015 will begin in May with the New Zealand Dance Company’s Rotunda (above), a work created to mark the ANZAC centenary with choreography that is said to integrate “shadow play, mace twirling, a 20-piece South Australian marching band, and a fusion of Maori tradition with dynamic contemporary dance theatre”. The same month will see the premiere of a science-fiction-inspired dance work by choreographers and dancers Lisa Griffiths and Adam Synnott.
There will be performances mid-year by The Australian Ballet (Giselle and Shakespeare’s The Dream) and the Sydney Dance Company (De Novo), as well as a 50th anniversary gala production by the Australian Dance Theatre.
The Festival Centre season launch offers a taste of what’s in store for new artistic director Barry Humphries’ first Adelaide Cabaret Festival from June 5-10, including the premiere of a tribute to two Australian music legends – baritone Peter Dawson and songwriter Jack O’Hagan – starring Teddy Tahu Rhodes and narrated by Humphries.
Other performers revealed ahead of the full Cabaret Festival program launch in April include Grammy-winning singers Lisa Fischer and Karrin Allyson, French fusion group Paris Combo, and concert pianist Anna Goldsworthy.
In an announcement timed to coincide with the Festival Centre season launch, Adelaide-based theatre company Brink Productions revealed it will be presenting the world premiere of a new adaptation of Patrick White’s 1964 short story Down at the Dump in the Space Theatre in October. The new show, also featuring the Zephyr Quartet, will be titled The Aspirations of Daise Morrow.
“The Aspirations of Daise Morrow is about seizing the day and not letting the bastards grind you down,” says Brink artistic director Chris Drummond. “It’s masterful storytelling, filled with magic and wonder.”
The Come Out Children’s Festival will open in May 2015 with a free community event featuring the Mighty Choir of Small Voices walking across the River Torrens Footbridge singing “Eagle Rock”. The nine-day festival will comprise 550 performances, exhibitions, workshops and other events, including an adaptation of Andy Griffiths’ and Terry Denton’s book The 26-Storey Treehouse; Brisbane circus company Circa’s Carnival of the Animals (pictured below); Dead Puppet Society’s puppetry-storytelling show Argus, and Scottish company Curious Seed’s Chalk About – a show that uses dance, dialogue and chalk drawings to look at issues like family and origins, nationality and gender, and self-expression.
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A highlight of the Festival Centre’s music line-up will be The Legendary Count Basie Orchestra’s 80th anniversary tour performance at Her Majesty’s Theatre in May, with other classical concerts including a series of intimate shows by violinist Niki Vasilakis, and the Morgans International Piano Series headlines by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Ingrid Filter.
One of the final shows on the 2015 calendar will be composer Lyle Chan and the ARIA-nominated Acacia Quartet’s An AIDS Activist’s Memoir in Music. The memoir is inspired by Chan’s time as an AIDS activist during the peak of the epidemic in the early 1990s, and contains portraits of his activist friends who have since died.
The full Adelaide Festival Centre 2015 season – including previously announced shows such as Michael Palin Live on Stage, State Theatre Company’s The Importance of Being Miriam (starring Miriam Margolyes), and Adelaide Festival play Black Diggers – can be found online.
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