Adelaide Festival 2022 program released - here’s every show
From world-famous plays, new interpretations of iconic works, and an incredible free opening event, see the full line up for the 2022 Adelaide Festival.
Adelaide Festival
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A new interpretation of late German choreographer Pina Bausch’s iconic work The Rite of Spring, performed by African dancers from 14 countries, is among highlights of the 2022 Adelaide Festival program.
Adelaide acrobatic company Gravity & Other Myths will perform the free opening event Macro, a collaboration with the Edinburgh International Festival, featuring a live Celtic music soundtrack at Adelaide Oval’s Village Green on March 5.
Other newly announced program highlights include Sydney Theatre Company’s acclaimed production of The Portrait of Dorian Gray, the UK’s Chineke! Chamber Ensemble, and Wudjang: Not the Past by Bangarra Dance Theatre.
Artistic directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy said their “feisty and defiant” fifth Festival program contained 71 events, with nine world premieres, six Australian premieres and 17 exclusive shows.
“We welcome audiences to a festival that refuses to curl and shrink, to aim low and take it easy,” they said in a statement released at the program launch in Bonython Hall on Tuesday.
“That begins with a phalanx of young bodies colliding and hurling each other through space, and ends with a 150 breathing humans pleading for the pain in our lives to fly away.
“It’s all there again for the taking: a celebration of body and soul and how great it is to keep them together”.
The family-friendly Macro performance will also feature Djuki Mala (previously known as the Chooky Dancers) from northeast Arnhem Land, a massed choir, projections and fireworks.
Gravity & Other Myths, which created this year’s Festival sellout The Pulse, also won three prizes at the first International Circus Awards in New York earlier this month.
The full 2022 program and tickets are available at adelaidefestival.com.au
OPENING EVENT
Macro
Village Green, Adelaide Oval, March 5
Adelaide contemporary circus company Gravity & Other Myths joins Celtic musicians in this acrobatic and musical collaboration with the Edinburgh International Festival.
DANCE
The Rite of Spring / common ground[s]
Her Majesty’s Theatre, March 4-6
Germany’s Pina Bausch Foundation, Senegal’s Ecole des Sables and Sadler’s Wells in the UK reinterpret this acclaimed work featuring dancers from 14 African countries.
Juliet & Romeo
Scott Theatre, March 5-12
UK dance theatre company Lost Dog looks at what would have happened to Shakespeare’s most famous couple if they had lived to be middle-aged.
Wudjang: Not the Past
Festival Theatre, March 15-18
Bangarra Dance Theatre artistic director Stephen Page tells the story of an ancestor whose remains are unearthed during construction work in a piece combining theatre, poetry, music and song.
Manifesto
Dunstan Playhouse, March 17-20
This world premiere by Melbourne’s Stephanie Lake Company looks at the symbiosis between dancing and drumming with nine dancers and nine drum kits.
OPERA
The Golden Cockerel
Festival Theatre, March 4-9
Acclaimed director Barrie Kosky returns with his international co-production of Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s classic fusion of fairy tale and political satire.
Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan
Dunstan Playhouse, March 2-8
Festival artistic director Neil Armfield commemorates the 50th anniversary of the drowning murder of gay Adelaide academic Dr George Duncan in this newly commissioned oratorio.
THEATRE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Her Majesty’s Theatre, March 13-19
Sydney Theatre Company’s Kip Williams adapts and directs the Oscar Wilde classic in this acclaimed production which features a virtuosic performance by Eryn Jean Norvill.
The Nightline
Young St/Waymouth St, March 4-20
Theatre-maker Roslyn Oades and sound artist Bob Scott have assembled a collection of real-life stories, rants, confessions, pranks and private thoughts left by more than 600 anonymous callers between the hours of midnight and 6am.
The Photo Box
Space Theatre, March 3-7
Emma Beech’s new work is about a town in regional South Australia where everyone knows you, and a girl left to make her own mistakes and grow herself up.
Sex and Death (and the Internet)
Mystery CBD location, March 9-20
Part date, part game, part public artwork, this intimate, intergenerational conversation piece provides an opportunity to big questions of someone a little older and wiser.
Blindness
Queen’s Theatre, February 23 to March 20
Based on Nobel prize-winner José Saramago’s dystopian novel and narrated by Juliet Stevenson (The Doctor) this is an immersive binaural sound and lighting experience created by UK company Donmar Warehouse.
Girls & Boys
Odeon Theatre Norwood, February 25 to March 12
UK playwright Dennis Kelly follows a love affair as the power dynamic between its characters shifts in this State Theatre Company production starring Justine Clarke.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Chineke! Chamber Ensemble
Adelaide Town Hall, March 16-17
UK double bass virtuoso Chi-chi Nwanoku brings the core of her black and ethnically diverse orchestra to perform two programs, with new works by Aboriginal composers William Barton and Deborah Cheetham.
Haydn’s Solar Poetics: Morning, Noon & Night
Adelaide Town Hall, March 5
The Australian Haydn Ensemble performs three programs in one day: A delicious brunch, lunch and dinner degustation of solar system inspired chamber music.
Resonance: Chamber Landscapes
UKARIA, March 11-14
Pinchgut Opera artistic director and organist Erin Helyard programs this 2022 classical concert series to examine “the delicate influences that echo between musicians, amongst cultures, and across generations”.
Prayer for the Living
Festival Theatre, March 20
The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Elder Conservatorium Chorale and Graduate Singers join forces to close the Festival with some of the most inspiring – and rarely heard – choral music of the past century.
Karin Schaupp & Flinders Quartet
Adelaide Town Hall, March 8
Classical guitarist Schaupp reunites with Melbourne’s Flinders Quartet for the first performances of a new guitar quintet by Carl Vine, commissioned in memory of an audience member’s daughter.
After Kreutzer
Ayers House, March 8-11
Author and musician Anna Goldsworthy combines Beethoven’s 1803 Kreutzer Sonata for piano and violin with words inspired by Tolstoy’s controversial novella and his wife Sophia’s recently uncovered response.
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Various venues
As well as the opening week concert by Icehouse at the Village Green and the return of Womadelaide to Botanic Park, the Summerhouse venue will feature a stellar line-up. Artists scheduled to perform include Billy Davis & The Good Lords, Genesis Owusu, Amyl and The Sniffers, Paul Grabowsky & Ngaiire, Josh Cohen, Montaigne, Ladyhawke, Client Liaison, Kate Ceberano and The Whitlams, to name but a few.
VISUAL ARTS
Various venues
Patricia Piccinini’s floating Skywhales will return – including new balloon mate Skywhalepapa – along with the Art Gallery’s Adelaide Biennial exhibition Free/State, inflatable installation Cupid’s Kopi Garden at Mount Barker and a tilting six-metre platform called Groundswell in Rundle Mall. Works by Isaac Julien, Helen Fuller and Daniel Jaber will also feature in solo exhibitions at the Samstag Museum.
WRITERS’ WEEK
Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, March 5-10
Authors including Amia Srinivasan, Liane Moriarty, Colm Tóibín, Anuk Arudpragasam and Hannah Kent are among the guest speakers, with the full line-up to be released in January.
Bars, stars and festival guitars
Wanderers frontman Dusty Lee Stephensen will premiere his upcoming solo material as part of Adelaide Guitar Festival.
Festivals in the firing line amid looming city rate rise
A raft of much-loved city festivals, activations and business programs may face devastating or program-ending funding cuts as Adelaide City Council looks to lower its rates.