Adelaide Festival 2017: Final acts announced
THE final acts for next year’s Adelaide Festival have been announced — and there’s something for everyone, with 31 events including three world and 16 Australian premieres. Check out the highlights here.
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GRITTY Shakespeare, early music and community dance are among the final acts announced by the Adelaide Festival’s new joint directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy.
The line-up of 31 theatre, music, opera, dance, film and visual arts events includes three world and 16 Australian premieres, with many attractions exclusive to Adelaide.
Berlin’s Schaubuhne Theatre returns to the festival for the third time with Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Music includes Italy’s Concerto Italiano, praised worldwide for its thrilling early music performances, playing Monteverdi’s 1607 operatic masterpiece, L’Orfeo.
Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright will bring a symphonic version of his first opera, Prima Donna, and highlights from his recreation of Judy Garland’s 1961 Carnegie Hall concert.
Dance includes Canada’s Electric Company Theatre and Kidd Pivot with Betroffenheit, a work about trauma, two works from Israeli dance company L-E-V, which formed out of the famous Batsheva Dance Company, and Adelaide locals dancing in Gala from France.
Art Gallery of SA will screen RED, del kathryn barton’s film about female power featuring Cate Blanchett, while the SA Museum will stage an exhibition exploring the history of the didjeridu.
The audience will wear headphones in British theatre company Complicite’s journey into the Amazon, The Encounter, and lie down at the Queen’s Theatre to experience an installation about the Syrian crisis, Gardens Speak.
SA companies Restless Dance Theatre, and Gravity and Other Myths, will make their Festival debuts, and there will be chamber music at Mt Barker’s UKARIA cultural centre.
Youth programs include Miriam Margolyes in Peter and the Wolf with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and Every Brilliant Thing, an uplifting show about depression aimed at teenagers.
The Festival has already announced three major productions — Barrie Kosky’s Saul, Armfield’s production of The Secret River at Anstey Hill quarry, and The Riverbank Palais, announced in The Advertiser today.
Kosky’s celebrated production of Handel’s Saul is almost sold out.
The Festival will run for 17 days from March 3 to 19.
Part homage to Jim Sharman’s landmark 1982 Festival, part leap into the future, Armfield said he and Healy wanted their program to bring audiences and artists together in “new and unique contexts”.
The floating Riverbank Palais, which will moor near the Elder Park Rotunda, was an example of this.
“It will be a way of drawing the audience together with the artists, at the exhilarated or exhausted end of the day, to share in a communal conversation,” said Armfield.
“A festival is an extraordinary time when you stop and gorge on great art and events and ideas.
“There will be Writers’ Week just across the road, Womadelaide, and the Fringe happening all around.”
Armfield first worked on an Adelaide Festival during Sharman’s ’82 event.
The Palais, The Secret River, and a new project by photographer William Yang and media identity Annette Shun Wah, announced today, all have links to ’82.
“We couldn’t have avoided the sense of influence and great respect for the ’82 Festival,” said Armfield.
“It was wonderful.”
Festival tickets are available through the Festival’s website and Bass.
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