Adelaide Festival
This UK-based ensemble – a selection of players from the full Chineke! orchestra – has debuted at the Adelaide Festival with an exuberant and delightful program, the centrepiece of which was a specially-commissioned work from one of Australia’s most important musicians and composers.
Visual Art
Three disparate worlds are currently contained within Samstag Museum’s walls: two compelling audio-visual installations by eminent British artist Isaac Julien, and a realm of uncanny, biomorphic entities created by Australian ceramicist Helen Fuller.
Showing in the Adelaide Railway Station’s north eastern concourse, this exhibition of work by an impressive and diverse collection of mid-career South Australian artists is a must-see on the festival program.
With dazzling stagecraft and an extraordinary solo performance by Eryn Jean Norvill, this screenshot of Dorian is a Wilde ride.
Call it what you will – masque, oratorio or pastoral opera – but Handel’s Acis and Galatea is a gem from the Baroque that needs only a little tender love and polish to win it over to any modern audience.
In this COVID-era adaptation, an in-person experience designed to foster intergenerational connection transforms into an online version powerful enough to cure our collective Zoom fatigue.
Festivals
A large crowd gathered at Adelaide Writers’ Week to hear fearless campaigner Grace Tame speak about her personal experience and Australia’s time of reckoning. In another popular session, Trent Dalton took to the stage to talk about love.
Visual Art
Sebastian Goldspink’s visceral and compelling curation of works by 25 contemporary Australian artists fulfils the tricky task of weaving together the manifold preoccupations of our unsettled times, opening up portals to transcendence, and offering hope through our interconnectedness and resilience.
For a man who smoked the crystallised venom of the Sonoran Desert toad, the so-called Mt Everest of psychedelics that filled his head with a wild rush of exhilaration and terror, author Michael Pollan was a reassuringly measured guest at Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Intimate and immersive, The Nightline is a theatre experience like no other, allowing a glimpse into the secret world of those who are awake while the rest of us sleep.
Emma Beech pores over the photographic record of her life in a hilarious and heartfelt family history lesson.
Solène Weinachter and Kip Johnson enthral as Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, now middle-aged and in need of marriage counselling.
Books & Poetry
Two very different but powerful forces were under the spotlight at Adelaide Writers’ Week yesterday with talks traversing ‘arrogance and entitlement’ in the AFL and the opioid crisis gripping America.
Adelaide Festival
With more than 60 performers, bodies flying across the stage and a score melding choral singers, fiddle, pipes and yidaki, the Adelaide Festival’s official opening spectacular was, indeed, ‘macro’.
Two former Prime Ministers walked onto a stage bearing grudges. It’s not the setup for a joke but the double act of Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd at Writers’ Week in a packed session that delivered as much withering wit and vitriol as expected.
The Pina Bausch Foundation, École des Sables and Sadler’s Wells do the impossible, transcending phenomenally high expectations to bring together old and new in two deeply immersive works of gut-wrenching beauty and genius.
This rarely-seen Russian satire of power and folly is brought to the Adelaide Festival Theatre stage with humour and brilliant imagination.
Moving and momentous, Watershed – The Death of Dr Duncan is that rarest of new works: an intensely local story that should reverberate wherever it is performed.
Billowing brightly-coloured sails suspended from the façade of the Art Gallery of SA herald the opening today of the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State – a showcase of work by 25 leading contemporary artists from across the country.
Adelaide Festival
The 2022 Adelaide Festival is close to hitting its box office target of $4.3 million as it officially opens today, with the artistic directors promising a stimulating line-up of shows despite the ‘Herculean’ challenges posed by the pandemic.
Adelaide Festival
Local circus company Gravity & Other Myths will reach new heights with an Adelaide Festival opening night show that blends Indigenous Australian and Scottish culture in a gravity-defying celebration of the spirit of place.
Girls & Boys showcases the commanding talents of Justine Clarke as she traces a relationship from its dreams and achievements to the bleakest depths of domestic violence. It is a tour de force.
Immersed in near-darkness and wearing headphones with 3D sound, the audience at Blindness is plunged into a plague like we’ve never known.
From politics to literature, there’s plenty to look forward to – and choose between – at this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week, writes our regular Diary of a Bookseller columnist. She shares her five must-see sessions.
As the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art looms, Sera Waters is setting sail into her family’s colonial past from her studio in Stepney.
Festivals
With the Adelaide summer festival season kicking off this week, we asked some of InReview’s writers and critics to share their must-see Festival and Fringe shows and events – from theatre, comedy, music and dance to visual art and literature.
Adelaide Festival
Leading British actor Juliet Stevenson returns to the Adelaide Festival – in voice only – in a unique thriller about a pandemic of blindness told entirely through immersive sound in a darkened theatre. It is a bleak story, the director tells InReview, but also one of bravery and hope.
High-profile advocate for survivors of sexual assault Grace Tame is among more than 90 new guests added to the line-up for this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week in its full six-day program.
The Nightline is theatremaker Rosyln Oades’ paean to the alternate world that blooms after dark, and it sheds a gentle light on the social undercurrents that bind us together and push us apart.
Acrobat Jascha Boyce, a co-founder and director of SA contemporary circus company Gravity & Other Myths, is performing in the Adelaide Festival’s free outdoor opening night spectacular Macro in March.
Out the back of an old church in Prospect, Ray Harris is working to build South Australia’s arts community – come hell or high land values.
Festivals
Planning for this year’s Mad March events remains on track despite the constantly evolving COVID situation, with both the Adelaide Festival and Fringe reporting strong ticket sales, and the 2022 Fringe official guide hitting the streets today.
Adelaide Festival
Fifty years after the killing of Dr George Duncan spurred a tragic but galvanising moment for gay rights in South Australia, a musical tribute premiering at Adelaide Festival seeks to memorialise the man – and maintain the rage.
SA arts and culture news in brief: A new public art commission by Guildhouse, plus other opportunities for artists, writers, curators and photographers; 2022 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature shortlist announced, southern suburbs theatre saved, career boost for local sculpture artist, and AF’s Summerhouse playlist.
Adelaide Festival has unveiled a 2022 program featuring Australian and international artists in more than 70 events, including a free opening night acrobatics and music ‘extravaganza’ at the Oval, Patricia Piccinini’s soaring Skywhales, a major dance work performed by 38 dancers from 14 African nations, and an oratorio about the 1972 murder of law lecturer George Duncan.
The 25 Australian contemporary artists selected for the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art have been announced, with curator Sebastian Goldspink promising Free/State will be a biennial for the times, ‘reflective of a nation still in the throes of grappling with its past and defining its future’.
The centrepiece of the 2022 Adelaide Festival will be Barrie Kosky’s new production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel, an opera the celebrated director says is weird and wonderful – part fairytale, part psychological drama and part political satire.
