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SALIFE
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.
Visual Art
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.
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.
Local
The Adelaide Festival has appointed prominent Melbourne arts executive Kath Mainland as its new CEO.
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 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.
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?
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.
Adelaide Festival
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This installation, constituting 1000 questions on the topic of race, creates a deeper intellectual and emotional resonance than could ever be achieved by an artwork purporting to have answers.
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.
Adelaide Festival
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?
Adelaide Festival
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.
Pandemic fiction and a rockstar appearance by Julia Gillard marked day one of Writers’ Week.
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.
A new exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia invites viewers to spend a day in the life of Clarice Beckett, a significant Australian painter who disappeared from the art history narrative for 35 years.
Slingsby takes Martin McKenna’s memoir The Boy Who Talked to Dogs back to County Limerick where it began, with a show featuring an Irish pub band, shadow dog puppets and a brilliant performance by Irish actor Bryan Burroughs.
Adelaide Festival
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.
Adelaide Festival
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.
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.
The four artists exhibiting in the 2021 Adelaide//International all present different visions of the future through moving image, performance, sculpture and installation.
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.
Adelaide Festival
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.
Adelaide Festival
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.
