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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.
Adelaide Festival
Dancers in insect bondage gear, others with heads joined by elastic-strapped hammocks: Garry Stewart blows our minds once again with an ambitious and innovative exploration of what the future might hold for humanity.
With its final weekend still to come, the 2021 Adelaide Festival has sold almost 61,000 tickets and achieved a box office income of more than $3.7 million, despite reduced venue capacity and other challenges posed by COVID-19.
Adelaide Festival
A double bill of contemporary dance by locally grown, globally minded choreographer Lewis Major invites a meditation on the universal truths of our times through two contrasting, memorable performances.
Adelaide Festival
The fragility of existence is laid bare in Sydney Dance Company’s Impermanence, a masterful display of music and movement held in perfect symbiosis.
PHOTO GALLERY: Almost 19,000 people attended WOMADelaide’s series of four COVID-safe sunset concerts over the long weekend, with highlights including performances by Archie Roach, Midnight Oil, Lior, and Tash Sultana.
Game-changers from opposite ends of the spectrum – the streetwise avant-garde and the dance establishment – lifted the veil on a brave new world in this double bill streamed live from London’s Sadler’s Wells.
Euripides’ Greek tragedy is reimagined with blood, ash and buffering issues by writer/director Simon Stone and Internationaal Theater Amsterdam in one of Adelaide Festival’s experiments in COVID-era adaptation.
What just happened? This was the only question to ask at the close of Adelaide Writers’ Week 2021, where for six days the Canberra scandal kept intruding and COVID kept the big international stars away.
From a childhood spent immersed in Yolngu culture, to celebrity, dining with the Queen and time in prison, David Gulpilil has lived the extremes. In a new documentary, the actor’s extraordinary life is offered as a final gift from this significant national storyteller.
Adelaide Festival
Brace yourself for a series of perilous predicaments as High Performance Packing Tape throws away the safety guidelines and tests the limits of the contents of your local hardware store.
Adelaide Festival
At an early autumn Writers’ Week discussion about the ruin of the Murray-Darling River system it was revealed – depressingly – that South Australia is the source of a new and particularly thirsty problem: almonds.
Adelaide Festival
Day four of Adelaide Writers’ Week saw former politician Christopher Pyne addressing the rape allegations rocking Canberra, while another session tackled the changing nature of political power in the Australian media.
Dance
In Australian Dance Theatre’s Adelaide Festival work Supernature, outgoing artistic director Garry Stewart continues his quest to understand the inextricable place of human society within nature.
The struggles of paramedics and the extraordinary power of belief – be it in Creation, ghosts or UFOs – were explored in two key sessions at Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Taking place in the middle of a 10-pin bowling alley, Restless Dance Theatre’s Guttered is a colourful, engaging performance that encourages audiences to ponder the dignity of risk and the art of failure. So, do you consider yourself a risk taker?
Another former Prime Minister has used the forum of Adelaide Writers’ Week to weigh in on the latest distressing allegations about sexual crimes in federal politics, while the author of one of 2020’s most-loved Australian books talked about finding light in dark times. Here’s our latest despatch from SA’s premier books and ideas event.
Bursting with big vocals and soulful harmonies, Yve Blake’s exuberant debut musical celebrates the culture of fandom and gives audiences a heady taste of teen euphoria.
Adelaide Festival
Pandemic fiction and a rockstar appearance by Julia Gillard marked day one of Writers’ Week.
Adelaide Festival
A Midsummer Night’s Dream sits squarely in the tradition of a comedy of errors. Benjamin Britten’s take on the play, directed by Neil Armfield, is likely to throw fresh challenges to aficionados of opera and Shakespeare alike.
At the throbbing heart of The Pulse is the beauty of endless renewal, depicted as bodies and voices unite, retreat and reconnect in a monumental display of synchronicity and skill.
The Plastic Bag Store, Robin Frohardt’s temporary supermarket with a powerful twist, has popped up in Rundle Place – and it might change your shopping habits forever.
Robyn Nevin gives a mesmerising performance as a woman looking back on an extraordinary life that saw her working in Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda in Nazi Germany.
Ahead of the opening of Writers’ Week, Jo Case recommends five sessions that promise to captivate and spark conversations about everything from pandemic fiction to politics.
Visual Art
The four artists exhibiting in the 2021 Adelaide//International all present different visions of the future through moving image, performance, sculpture and installation.
CityMag
Restless Dance Theatre has spent decades changing attitudes and diversifying Australia’s artistic landscape, but a significant funding cut means support is needed more than ever before.
With the Adelaide summer festival season kicking into gear this week, we asked some of InReview’s contributing arts journalists and reviewers to share the Festival and Fringe shows they are most looking forward to – from visual arts to theatre, music and more.
Writer and composer Yve Blake believes pop idols, and the legions of young fans who love them, have been maligned and belittled for too long. With her musical Fangirls, Blake hopes to leave even the most hardened non-Belieber with no choice but to Stan.
The story of Martin McKenna’s early life in Ireland goes to some dark places but it is the indomitable spirit of the boy who grew up to become known as the “dreadlocked dog man” that captivated Adelaide theatre-maker Andy Packer.
Some of the most audacious and path-changing musical minds in modern times will be in the spotlight at UKARIA Cultural Centre for this year’s Adelaide Festival.
In the toughest of years for the arts, South Australian companies created new ways to find audiences – and some of these innovations are here to stay.
Adelaide Festival
Adelaide Writers’ Week has launched its full program for 2021, with an extra 73 Australian and international guests announced as part of the six-day line-up in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden.
Adelaide Festival
Young American counter-tenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen has kept his fellow hotel guests entertained while quarantining in the city ahead of his performance in the 2021 Adelaide Festival opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Midnight Oil, Archie Roach, Lior and Tash Sultana are among artists announced in the line-up for WOMADelaide’s sunset concert series in the Adelaide Park Lands in March.
Adelaide Festival has overcome challenges posed by the global pandemic to launch a 2021 program featuring 70 events – including a record number of Australian premieres, a free opening night concert, two international installations and a series of performances livestreamed from Europe direct to Her Majesty’s Theatre.
WOMADelaide won’t be held in Botanic Park in 2021, with COVID-19 constraints forcing organisers to “reimagine” the music festival as a series of sunset concerts in a new Adelaide Park Lands venue.
Adelaide Festival will host a new pop-up Festival Club next year, with plans for a 1430-person-capacity open-air venue by the River Torrens that will host live music and other events, as well as serving food and drinks.
Adelaide Festival
Adelaide Festival will present UK composer Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a highlight of its 2021 program, with four performances at the Festival Theatre plus big-screen streamed events in Elder Park and regional areas.
Adelaide Festival
The Adelaide Festival will go ahead in 2021 but it will look very different, co-artistic director Rachel Healy tells InDaily, with changes including a new Festival hub, more South Australian and Australian shows, and increased outdoor experiences.
