The program, launched today at Adelaide Town Hall, was initiated by former artistic directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield and is being presented over 17 days from March 3-19 by Festival chief executive Kath M Mainland and new artistic director Ruth Mackenzie, who say it has “something for everyone”.
“I see my role as enthusiastic spruiker for the program initiated by Neil and Rachel,” says Mackenzie, a British arts leader who arrived in Adelaide from London last Friday to take up her new role. “The international quality of their festivals more than doubled audiences over the past six years and it leaves our new team well placed to continue their legacy.”
Adelaide Festival artistic director Ruth Mackenzie. Photo: Andrew Beveridge
Mackenzie says the 2023 Festival will be the first one back to full strength since the challenges posed by the pandemic over the past few years, with a “full range and line-up of artists from around the world, and of course audiences from around the world as well”.
It includes Healy and Armfield’s trademarks, including an operatic centrepiece in the previously announced Messa da Requiem – performed by 36 dancers from Switzerland’s Ballett Zürich, the 80-strong Adelaide Festival Chorus, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and four soloists – and a particularly dynamic line-up of theatre works and shows sharing Australian First Nations stories.
The Festival will once again host a free opening night outdoor concert, this time presenting Spinifex Gum, the collaborative project featuring music by Felix Riebl and Ollie McGill (of The Cat Empire) and singers from Cairns-based Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander choir Marliya.
Spinifex Gum was originally commissioned by the Festival and premiered as part of its 2018 program. Mackenzie says it is coming back “bigger and better” in 2023, with the choir to be joined by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and singer-songwriter Emma Donovan for a fully orchestrated show in front of up to 10,000 people in Elder Park on March 3.
Other music highlights include a one-off concert by New Zealand singer Lorde at Adelaide Oval (announced last month); the first-ever Australian performance by Spain’s Escolania de Montserrat, founded in the 13th century and known as the oldest continuing boys’ choir in the world; and the fifth Festival appearance by America’s Kronos Quartet.
Kronos (who will also play at WOMADelaide) will celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2023, and Festival associate director Rob Brookman told a media briefing that their Festival Theatre concert will comprise a “typically eclectic and wide-ranging program” including the world premiere of a new Australian work inspired by outback bird calls, and a set with Iranian vocalist Mahsa Vahdat based on classical Persian poems.
“They [the quartet] first visited us in 1980, back when the idea of a string quartet smashing out Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ was more than a bit revolutionary, and they’ve continued to be amongst the world’s greatest musical innovators and collaborators over their 50-year history,” Brookman says.
Kronos reimagines the string quartet experience. Photo: Nacion Imago
Composer Nigel Westlake and singer-songwriter Lior’s new work, Ngapa William Cooper, will be one of 11 world premieres at the Festival and is inspired by revered Yorta Yorta elder and political activist William Cooper, who in 1938 led a delegation from the Australian Aborigines League to the German Consulate in Melbourne to deliver a letter of protest about the Nazis’ Kristallnacht wave of violent anti-Jewish attacks. Lior and Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung singer Lou Bennett (co-founder of Tiddas and Black Arm Band) will be joined by the Australian String Quartet for performances at the Adelaide Town Hall and UKARIA Cultural Centre.
The 2023 Festival program sees the return of the Chamber Landscapes program at UKARIA at Mount Barker Summit, while the line-up of contemporary music gigs moves to the new Hindley Street Music Hall and will include a night of live music set against director Guillermo del Toro’s dark fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth.
A major drawcard of the theatre program will be The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a fresh transformation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic mystery brought to the stage by the same creative team from Sydney Theatre Company that was responsible for the extraordinary stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of the hits of this year’s Adelaide Festival.
Actors Matthew Backer and Ewen Leslie perform all the roles in the new show which, like Dorian Gray, is directed by Kip Williams and blends live performance with filmed action and recorded video technology. “The intensity this combination brings to the storytelling is, if anything, dialled up in the new production, which hurtles towards its climactic moments with compelling force,” critic Hew Griffiths wrote in The Conversation during The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’s Sydney season.
The Dutch theatre company that brought the epic Shakespearean cycles Roman Tragedies and Kings of War to the Adelaide Festival will also return in 2023 – this time with an adaptation of American novelist Hanya Yanagihara’s equally epic and much-talked-about modern-day classic A Little Life. Presented by Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (formerly Toneelgroep Amsterdam) under the direction of Ivo van Hove, A Little Life centres on a man haunted by his traumatic history, with Kath M Mainland – who saw it in Edinburgh – saying she found it “gruelling, challenging, utterly compelling theatre” (read more here).
Other international theatre highlights are Dogs of Europe, a dystopian story that is part epic fantasy and part political thriller performed by the exiled Belarus Free Theatre (whose members are all political refugees), and Belgian theatre collective FC Bergman’s The Sheep Song, a contemporary morality tale told through movement, visual theatre and puppetry.
Mackenzie says members of the troupe presenting The Sheep Song were mentored in their early careers by Ivo van Hove and their show will be memorable: “My top tip is that in 20 years’ time you’ll be telling people how you saw FC Bergman before everyone else in the world caught up with how brilliant they are.”
South Australian performing arts companies presenting new works at the 2023 Festival include Windmill Theatre, with the previously announced Hans & Gret (a reinvention of the Hansel and Gretel fairytale), and Slingsby Theatre, with The River that Ran Uphill, a show based on the experience of Edgell Junior, a Ni Vanuatu man who was caught up in the devastation wreaked by Cyclone Pam in 2015.
Daniel Riley, artistic director of Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre, has choreographed a new work called Tracker, inspired by the story of his great-great uncle, Alec Riley, a Wiradjuri elder who served as a tracker with the New South Wales Police Force for 40 years at the beginning of the 20th century. The story is being brought to life by a team of First Nations creatives, including award-winning playwright and performer Ursula Yovich, and will be presented by an all First Nations cast at Norwood’s Odeon Theatre.
Rounding out the dance-theatre program are Revisor – a new work by Canadian company Kidd Pivot inspired by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s satirical play The Government Inspector – and Australian company Marrugeku’s Jurrungu Ngan-ga [Straight Talk], which connects the disproportionate levels of Indigenous Australians in custody and the indefinite detention of asylum seekers in Australia’s immigration detention centres.
“It is a howl from the heart which has left audiences at Sydney Festival and Melbourne’s Rising Festival absolutely rocked to the core and was regarded by many as a highlight of both festivals,” Brookman says of Jurrungu Ngan-ga, which blends movement, music, soundscapes, spoken word and projection.
A howl from the heart: Jurrungu Ngan-ga (Straight Talk). Photo: Prudence Upton
Bringing a touch of magic to the Festival’s closing weekend will be the surreal circus-style adventure Air Play, from US company Acrobuffos, which incorporates comedy and physical theatre to pay homage to the power of air – picture flying umbrellas, beautiful soaring fabrics and giant, people-swallowing balloons.
In another family-friendly offering, art and technology studio ENESS will let the dogs out (giant inflatable dogs, that is) at Mount Barker’s Keith Stephenson Park with a free interactive sculptural installation titled Lost Dogs Disco. There will also be a free installation on the Festival Plaza, Unvanished, which uses sculpture, design, soundscape, lighting and augmented reality to encourage visitors to “reflect on the connections between humans, nature and built environments and to understand these relationships from a First Nations perspective”.
Adelaide Writers’ Week’s new director, Louise Adler, says a theme weaving through her inaugural program is the notion of truth: “Do we want truthfulness in fiction or does it only matter in non-fiction? Do novelists owe us the truth? Is the biographer’s task to tell nothing but the truth about their subject? And – does truth even matter anymore?”
The event will see international guests appearing in person for the first time in several years. While the full line-up won’t be announced until January, the free sessions in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden will include UK novelist Alexander McCall Smith, Egyptian-born British food writer Claudia Roden, Irish author Dervla McTiernan and Australian thriller writer Jane Harper. There will also be two ticketed sessions at the Town Hall: one with English dramatist David Hare, and the other a pre-recorded session and live virtual conversation with playwright Tom Stoppard.
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The visual arts program for the 2023 Festival is anchored by a display at the Art Gallery of South Australia exploring American pop artist Andy Warhol’s career-long obsession with photography (read more about that here), and will include an exhibition at Samstag Museum by ceramicist Bruce Nuske and furniture designer Khai Liew, a solo show by South Australian artist Catherine Truman at Carrick Hill, and exhibitions at the Santos Museum of Economic Botany and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.
The full 2023 Adelaide Festival program can be viewed online.
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