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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.
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.
Adelaide Festival
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.
Visual Art
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.
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.
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.
Amazon’s role in exacerbating America’s social divisions was highlighted in a real-life dystopia described by US author Alec MacGillis at Adelaide Writers’ Week, while Irish writer Colm Tóibín gave an insight into the story behind his epic novel The Magician.
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.
Adelaide Festival
Audience members were treated to hit after hit at Icehouse’s Great Southern Land 40th anniversary concert on Adelaide Oval’s Village Green.
Festivals
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.
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’.
Adelaide Festival
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.
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.
Festivals
The world has changed a lot since Courtney Barnett’s last Australian tour, but after two years the singer-songwriter is returning to the stage with new music and a newfound gratitude for live performance.
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.
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.
Adelaide Festival
Led by a ‘gargantuan’ solo performance by Eryn Jean Norvill, director Kip Williams turns Oscar Wilde’s 130-year-old novel into a portrait of 21st-century vanity.
Festivals
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.
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.
The Adelaide Festival has appointed prominent Melbourne arts executive Kath Mainland as its new CEO.
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.
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.
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.
Writers’ Week director Jo Dyer has announced that next year’s event will be her last. She talks to us about why she’s leaving, plans for her final effort in charge, and the harrowing personal challenge that came into focus in the midst of 2021’s event.
Adelaide Festival
As one of 20th-century music’s great anti-war statements, is the message of peace and understanding in Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time as relevant today as it was during World War II?
Adelaide Festival
This nuanced and gentle farewell film from charismatic actor David Gulpilil offers fascinating insights into the way a man as celebrated as he is continues to inhabit his own culture, writes Penelope Debelle.
