Adelaide Festival
Art, nature and history converge in South Australian artist Catherine Truman’s fascinating exhibition of discovery and encounter at Carrick Hill.
Festivals
With just a couple of days left to make the most of the summer festivals frenzy, here are some InReview recommendations from both the Adelaide Festival and Fringe programs – including dance, comedy, music and theatre shows.
PHOTO GALLERY: More than 110,000 WOMADelaide revellers converged on Botanic Park over the long weekend, with headline acts including Florence + The Machine, Sampa the Great and Bon Iver rocking out the main stage – but crowd congestion and long toilet queues also provoked a backlash from some festival-goers.
The Sheep Song is a morality tale reminiscent of Aesop’s fables, depicting how a sheep’s ambition to become human sets it on a troubled journey. This charged quest is boldly presented with highly visual stagecraft.
The Fringe has already sold a record 930,000 tickets and Adelaide Festival has well exceeded its 2023 box office target ahead of the final weekend of South Australia’s ‘Mad March’ festival season.
Alex Frayne and Paul Grabowsky present an innovative approach to art exhibition through the meeting of improvisational music and visual art.
The reliable combination of colour and movement is the key to Air Play, which focuses on skilled miming duo the Acrobuffos and their use of fascinating props.
Adelaide Festival
Jonny Hawkins’ ode to, and example of, well-crafted storytelling brings together little moments from across some well-lived lives to form a beautifully layered and intimate larger picture.
Adelaide Festival
In what could well be the last time we see them, Kronos Quartet gave an astonishing account of the group’s music spanning five decades before signing off with an impassioned plea for women in Iran.
Utterly compelling, Jurrungu Ngan-ga [Straight Talk] is a potent portrayal of the play between power and oppression, and a powerful moment of truth-telling by those unjustly forced to the margins of society.
Australian Dance Theatre’s Tracker is a powerful evocation of the life of artistic director Daniel Riley’s great-great uncle, Alec “Tracker’ Riley, through an ambitious blend of contemporary dance, theatre, and ceremony.
An immense, joyful fresco – that’s how Gratte Ciel director Stéphane Girard describes the French company’s feather-fuelled aerial show unfurling across the night skies over Botanic Park during this weekend’s WOMADelaide.
The north-eastern concourse at Adelaide Railway Station is the unusual ‘gallery’ space for a pair of immersive screen-based works – one of which draws inspiration from an unrecognised principality on a platform in the middle of the North Sea.
Adelaide Festival
Two formidable women – former Australian of the Year Grace Tame and the queen of Australian noir fiction Jane Harper – captivated audiences with insights into their work on the final day of Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Adelaide Festival
Christian Spuck’s imaginative and memorable take on Verdi’s Requiem was enthusiastically received by the opening night audience, with his choreography with Ballett Zürich reinforcing the work’s power.
The rise of the Teals heralded a return to community representation at a pivotal moment in ‘post-truth’ history – and also the rediscovery of the lost art of door knocking – according to speakers at Adelaide Writers’ Week.
The Palestinian author who sparked controversy and the withdrawal of three writers from Adelaide Writers’ Week clarifies her support for the Ukrainian people, while a traumatised child from Elizabeth North finds salvation through reading.
Writer’s Week head Louise Adler thanked the Adelaide Festival board for its support after stepping in at short notice to co-host a session without scheduled Middle-Eastern food writer Claudia Roden.
Eminent UK playwright, screenwriter and director Sir David Hare has had his share of box-office failures, but says a playwright’s job is to keep ahead of accepted wisdom.
Adelaide Festival
One man’s determination not to let injustice go unchallenged is at the heart of this extraordinary Adelaide Festival world premiere.
Adelaide Festival
An old fairy story is revisited with a new kind of witch, a futuristic dystopia obsessed with staying young, and Gret, not Hans, as the prime investigator.
Writers’ Week enthusiasts on a perfect Saturday heard political biographers speak about the hazards of their craft, and crime writers confess they would kill off a character just to get rid of them.
Espionage writer Ben Macintyre, author of Operation Mincemeat, A Spy Among Friends and Colditz, is used to sitting out decades before the truth makes its way out.
The 2023 Adelaide Festival hit an immediate high on opening night, with Spinifex Gum presenting spine-tingling songs that moved the soul and challenged contemporary Australia to get on with the job of reconciliation.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale about the struggle between public virtue and unconscious impulse is brilliantly transformed for stage and screen.
Adelaide Festival
This Australian premiere performance by a 700-year-old choir, from a monastery about to celebrate its first millennium, was a reminder of the Adelaide Festival’s original purpose.
Adelaide Festival
Hanya Yanagihara’s harrowing story of trauma and friendship tests the boundaries of suffering in a four-hour epic performance of A Little Life.
The Art Gallery of SA’s headline exhibition for the Adelaide Festival’s visual arts program provides a thrilling new perspective on the American pop artist superstar whose cultural omnipresence has inspired countless exhibitions, documentaries, and even a cartoon cameo in The Simpsons.
The headline acts may grab attention, but there are plenty of lesser-known music gems waiting to be discovered at WOMADelaide. Festival associate director Annette Tripodi suggests eight must-see artists in the 2023 line-up.
The 2023 Adelaide Festival officially kicks off with a free outdoor concert in Elder Park, as organisers report ticket sales are already at 91 per cent of the total box office target with four shows sold out and several others close to capacity.
Belarus Free Theatre strong-arms art and activism into this fiercely subversive and politically prescient spectacle.
Adelaide Festival
From a tale of love in the time of COVID, to talks about authors who ‘take sides’ and the perils of publishing risky books, these 2023 Adelaide Writers’ Week sessions recommended by columnist Jo Case promise to both captivate and challenge.
Theatre
While the change of leadership at Windmill Theatre signals fresh beginnings, a ‘passion for playfulness’ will remain at the heart of the company which is premiering a new fairytale turned psychological thriller at this year’s Adelaide Festival.
One of the most important new works being presented at this year’s Adelaide Festival is a musical homage to a true Australian visionary – a human rights activist of the Yorta Yorta people who organised one of the only private protests anywhere in the world against the Nazis’ Kristallnacht atrocities.
She’s been a committed festival-goer ever since a pivotal experience as a schoolgirl. Now, in her first outing as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, former publisher Louise Adler asks what truth means to writers in the 21st century.
Ni-Vanuatu man Edgell Junior shares a vivid story of survival amid one of the South Pacific’s most intense tropical cyclones with a new show by Slingsby’s Flying Squad that carries both a warning and a message of hope.
Award-winning actor Ewen Leslie makes his Adelaide Festival debut as the archetypal mad scientist with a dark secret in a ‘bonkers’ Hitchcockian adaptation from the team behind The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Adelaide Festival will return to full strength as an international arts festival in 2023, with artists and writers from 18 countries converging on the city to take part in 52 events ranging from epic operatic and theatrical works to free outdoor experiences including an opening night concert in Elder Park featuring Spinifex Gum.
Adelaide Festival
The theatre company that brought the epic Shakespearean cycles Roman Tragedies and Kings of War to the Adelaide Festival will return in 2023 with an adaptation of American novelist Hanya Yanagihara’s equally epic modern-day classic A Little Life.
Festivals
WOMADelaide has revealed a further 30 acts bound for Botanic Park in 2023, including Senegalese star Youssou N’Dour, Scottish folk-rockers The Proclaimers, English singer-activist Billy Bragg, and multiple-ARIA-winning artist Sampa the Great.
Andy Warhol’s career-long obsession with photography will be the focus of a 2023 exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia that promises to shed fresh light on the American Pop artist as well as those he captured in his portraits – including his Australian friend Henry Gillespie.
Around 200 performers, including 36 dancers from Switzerland’s largest professional ballet company, will feature in the 2023 Adelaide Festival centrepiece: choreographer Christian Spuck’s epic production of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem.
British arts leader Ruth Mackenzie has been appointed the next artistic director of the Adelaide Festival and will take up her new role in mid-2022 as current ADs Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield prepare to step back earlier than planned.
