The 2024 Adelaide Festival will feature returning favourites such as Barrie Kosky, Laurie Anderson, Angélique Kidjo, Stephen Page and Akram Khan, as well as introducing a new generation of rising stars from Australia and around the world.
Adelaide Festival
An extra $2.3 million will be allocated to the arts and culture festival after it contributed $57.6 million to the state economy this year.
Adelaide Festival
An orchestra pit transformed into a lake and puppeteers who double as acrobats are among the inventive elements of Canadian director Robert Lepage’s The Nightingale and Other Fables – announced today as the centrepiece of the 2024 Adelaide Festival.
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.
Art, nature and history converge in South Australian artist Catherine Truman’s fascinating exhibition of discovery and encounter at Carrick Hill.
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.
Kiwi pop star Lorde made a long-awaited return to Adelaide, performing to a vocal audience including many fans who seemed to have grown up with her.
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 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.
News
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.
Adelaide Festival
Alex Frayne and Paul Grabowsky present an innovative approach to art exhibition through the meeting of improvisational music and visual art.
Adelaide Festival
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.
Two South Australian acts, Alexander Flood and Sons Of Zöku, stood right alongside the top international artists at this year’s WOMADelaide with their own unique and genre-challenging fusion of ethnic influences.
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.
Adelaide Festival
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.
Nearing the end of his life, DH Lawrence poured a vision of radical tenderness into Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the ‘scandalous’ novel which UK writer Alison MacLeod says essentially led to a woman’s sexuality being put on trial.
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.
Adelaide Festival
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.
A Palestinian poet whose inclusion in Adelaide Writers’ Week helped spark a heated free-speech debate said he had first tried to gain international sympathy for Palestinian dispossession: now he is angry.
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.
Adelaide Festival
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.
In an immersive and inventive performance, Slingsby’s Flying Squad brings a tropical cyclone to the stage, skilfully melding the personal with the political in this astonishing story of survival.
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.
This festival season, InReview is the home of professional arts reviewing in South Australia. Here’s how you can support our not-for-profit work.
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.
Adelaide Festival
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
Netherlands-based arts leader and creative producer Wouter Van Ransbeek – former co-artistic director of the highly regarded Internationaal Theater Amsterdam – has been appointed associate director for the 2024-26 Adelaide Festivals.
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.
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.
New Zealand singer Lorde will perform at Adelaide Oval as part of next year’s Adelaide Festival, with the songwriter set to make her first trip to South Australia since 2014.
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.
Adelaide Festival
The 2022 Adelaide Festival attracted 11,782 visitors from interstate and generated an increased estimated gross expenditure of $51.8 million for South Australia, according to an economic impact report released today.
Adelaide Festival
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.
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.
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.
An ear-splitting explosion. A shuddering light. A plunge into darkness. From the outset, Wudjang: Not the Past grabs us by our neatly-pressed collars and hurls us into the dark chasm of Australia’s colonial legacy.
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.
Festivals
PHOTO GALLERY: Music lovers were out in force – and dancing with zeal – as WOMADelaide celebrated its 30th anniversary across the long weekend with a stellar line-up of artists that showcased the depth and breadth of Australia’s music talent.
Adelaide Festival
With dazzling stagecraft and an extraordinary solo performance by Eryn Jean Norvill, this screenshot of Dorian is a Wilde ride.
