What's on: Mad March, Diving with Sir David, Ben Quilty
InReview
InDaily’s hit list of events and shows, including highlights from the Adelaide Festival, Fringe and Writers’ Week, Red Hot Chili Peppers and other music acts at Superloop 500, a VR experience with David Attenborough, and Ben Quilty’s exhibition launch.
Adelaide Festival
The Adelaide Festival launches tonight, with the free official opening night concert – National Geographic’s Symphony for Our World – taking place tomorrow in Elder Park. The concert will see National Geographic images of nature projected on large screens, accompanied by a live score performed by the Adelaide Festival Orchestra and a 40-member choir. Also showing from tonight, at the Festival Theatre, is Barrie Kosky’s inventive opera The Magic Flute. Produced by Kosky’s Berlin-based Komische Oper and co-directed by Suzanne Andrade of British performance company 1927 (which presented the live theatre-animation hybrid Golem at the 2016 Adelaide Festival), this contemporary production of Mozart’s famous opera combines live action with hand-crafted animation (read more in this InDaily story).
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Other opening week highlights include Gravity & Other Myths’ circus show Out of Chaos, Australian play Counting and Cracking, and South African music-theatre production A Man of Good Hope. This year’s Adelaide Festival comprises around 130 theatre, dance, music and visual art events and runs until March 17. View all InDaily’s Adelaide Festival coverage here, and our summary of the program here.
Adelaide Fringe
Bourgeois and Maurice are performing at the RCC Fringe. Photo: Tony Kearney
Highlights for the third week of the Fringe Festival include comedian Fiona O’Loughlin’s show Gap Year at the Thebarton Theatre (tonight only – tickets still available); ’80s-inspired a cappella group The Magnets at Gluttony (given a five-star review by InDaily); fierce and funny feminist cabaret-comedy show Fringe Wives Club – Glittery Clittery in the Garden of Unearthly Delights, and anti-consumerist gospel choir performance Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir: EARTHALUJAH! and British musical comedy act Bourgeois & Maurice at the RCC Fringe. Port Adelaide is also hosting its annual Port Fringe street party this weekend, with live performances across two stages plus food and markets. On Thursday at the RCC Fringe is a one-off concert celebrating human rights and civil liberties featuring Russian feminist punk group Pussy Riot (see our review of them here), Indigenous band Yothu Yindi and punk singer and rapper Ecca Vandal.
See the full Adelaide Fringe program here and view all InDaily’s Fringe coverage here, including 10 top shows which are new to Adelaide in 2019.
Adelaide Writers’ Week
Photo: Peter Hoare
Writers’ Week will kick off tomorrow in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, with this year’s festival featuring free sessions with more than 70 guest authors. Highlights this weekend include Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission former president Gillian Triggs (tomorrow), who will speak on her recently-published memoir Speaking Up; ABC journalist Leigh Sales (Sunday), who will reflect on the role of the media and her novel, Any Ordinary Day, and Nigerian author Oyinkan Braithwaite, who will speak alongside Annaleese Jochems on the role of the “wicked woman” in modern literature. Read InDaily’s interview with Writers’ Week director Jo Dyer here.
Superloop 500 concerts
Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. Photo: Thomas Frey / EPA
Indie-rock singers Amy Shark and Vance Joy will headline Superloop 500 post-race entertainment tonight at Victoria Park. Tomorrow, rock band Jet and punk-rock group The Living End will perform, while Sunday night’s finale performance will be headlined by American rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers, who will perform for the first time in Australia in 12 years. South Australian acts will also perform on stage each night as part of the post-race entertainment. Purchase tickets here.
Great Barrier Reef VR experience
Photo: Atlantic Productions
Take a dive through the Great Barrier Reef with globally beloved natural historian Sir David Attenborough as part of this virtual-reality experience at the South Australian Museum. The 25-minute, 360-degree VR tour takes place in a bright yellow Triton submersible with Attenborough at the helm explaining the curiosities of the world’s largest coral reef. To complement the experience, the museum will display scleractinian coral specimens, which have until now remained behind the scenes. The exhibition launches today and runs until July 14. Read CityMag’s interview with SA Museum director Brian Oldman here.
Ben Quilty exhibition
Ben Quilty, The Last Supper, 2016.
The first major survey exhibition of Australian artist Ben Quilty’s work will be launched tonight in galleries 23, 24 and 25 at the Art Gallery of SA. The exhibition – called Quilty – extends from his early reflections on the initiation rituals performed by young Australian men, to his experience as an official war artist in Afghanistan, and his campaign to save the lives of Bali Nine pair Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. It also includes works inspired by Quilty’s visits with author Richard Flanagan to Lebanon, Lesbos and Serbia; his revisions of the Australian landscape, and portraits of himself, his family and his friends. To celebrate the exhibition’s launch, Australian hip hop-group The Herd and solo acts DyspOra and Elsy Wameyo will perform on the gallery’s forecourt from 6pm. The gallery will also host guided tours from 5pm of both Quilty’s work and its broader collection
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