Sydney to host Leonard Cohen festival
A one-day festival of theatre, talks and music will celebrate the poet and songwriter, and the Jewish roots that shaped his work.
Leonard Cohen’s songs have soundtracked weddings, funerals and plenty of quiet nights in. A decade after his death, Sydney is getting a festival dedicated to the man behind them.
The Leonard Cohen Festival will take over Bondi Pavilion, featuring writers, playwrights, performers and musicians for an afternoon and evening of theatre, conversation and music inspired by the Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist, who died in 2016.
Born in Montreal in 1934, Cohen grew up in a prominent Jewish family and was proud of his descent from the Kohanim, the priestly line. He was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1996, yet continued to identify as Jewish. In 1973, he performed for Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War.
His appreciation for his Jewish heritage runs through his writing. Hallelujah draws on the biblical stories of David and Samson, and his final album, You Want It Darker, released weeks before his death, opens with a title track featuring the choir of Montreal’s Congregation Shaar Hashomayim and the Hebrew word Hineni, meaning “here I am”.
Canadian author Michael Posner, whose three-volume oral biography, Leonard Cohen: Untold Stories, draws on interviews with more than 550 people who knew the singer, will be the keynote speaker.
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