Adelaide Festival takes centre stage
The Adelaide Festival is back for 2022 animating Adelaide with art and culture from around Australia. The AJN explores the program.
The Adelaide Festival is considered an icon in Australian arts festivals and this year, the program certainly delivers.
According to Timeout, many performers consider Adelaide Festival to be Australia’s “big one”, attracting some of the best artists from around the country and the world.
Artistic directors, Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield AO say this year will help bring a feeling of positivity back to the world.
From operas to installations through to YouTube sensations, the 2022 Adelaide Festival promises a melting pot of live entertainment.
The Golden Cockerel – the Australian premiere and an Australian exclusive – is directed by prominent Melbourne director Barrie Kosky.
The opera, based on Pushkin’s 1834 poem The Tale of the Golden Cockerel, was written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and conceived over the terrifying din of the 1905 revolution.
Audiences will fall in love with the half-surreal fairy tale and half-political satire opera that we see today.
Kosky has directed two operatic centrepieces at recent Adelaide Festivals, with Saul in 2017 and The Magic Flute in 2019, both of which were sell-out smash hits.
Samara Hersch will be bringing interactive theatre to the Festival with Sex and Death_ and the Internet, which she describes as “an intimate one-on-one encounter with an older stranger”.
“It’s a unique opportunity to talk about the body and debunk ideas around what it means to age,” she continued.
Participants book individually and then walk through a portal where they are connected to a senior anywhere in the country.
Virtual cards are shuffled with some of the “big questions” covering life’s essential questions around, of course, sex and death.
The beauty of it, according to Hersch, is that the experience can take you wherever you want as together, you walk down memory lane or share a laugh with a stranger.
“There is something truly vital and life-affirming about making work for a live audience,” she said.
In the music space, YouTube sensation Josh Cohen presents his classical and jazz interpretations of Radiohead’s experimental rock classics, which have been approved by the band itself.
One of Australia’s most successful singer-songwriters, Lior will be joining fellow ARIA winner Paul Grabowsky on stage, bringing their talents and voices together to reinvent some of Lior’s most cherished songs. Grabowsky is one of Australia’s most distinguished artists as a composer, pianist, director and conductor.
And finally, coming to WOMAdelaide, once again, is YID!, the popular fusion of traditional Yiddish with elements of electronic dance music, Weimar Republic cabaret, free jazz, indie-pop and big band. Mixing tribal beats with improvised riffs and angelic vocals, YID! brings some funk and fun to the Eastern European folkloric songs.
Of course, there’s so much more to enjoy as the community of performers celebrates 2022 like never before.
Adelaide Festival takes place March 4-20. Tickets: adelaidefestival.com.au
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