Banksy art exhibition heads to Adelaide’s Myer Centre
UK street artist Banksy’s work is known for popping up in unusual places – now it’s headed to the Myer Centre in Adelaide.
Arts
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Touring exhibition The Art of Banksy: Without Limits will open at Adelaide’s Myer Centre in August, featuring more than 150 of the mysterious British street artist’s works.
The exhibition is currently in Brisbane, where it has already attracted more than 90,000 visitors, after being seen by 1.2 million people across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the US.
Presented by discovery platform Fever, exhibition production company Muse, and live entertainment group Events, the exhibition will be custom built to fit the Myer Centre space. It will present a mix of original Banksy works, prints, photos, lithographs, sculptures, murals and video mapping installations created for the tour.
Highlights include Dismaland installations from Banksy’s 2015 pop-up Bemusement Park, prints of stencil works Flower Thrower and Kissing Coppers, and the sculpture Phone Booth.
Muse managing director Kemal Gurkaynak said Without Limits was “a museum quality experience with a philosophy”
“Banksy loves to provoke, shock and even disturb society, which he does with humour and poetry,” he said.
“Our mission is to present the truth about Banksy’s art and to carry his powerful message into the world.”
The Art of Banksy: Without Limits opens at the Myer Centre in Adelaide on August 24.
Tickets go on sale July 12, priced from $39 for adults and $27 for children. Waitlist at feverup.com
Mary Poppins musical finally lands in Adelaide
Mary Poppins and her flying umbrella have finally touched down on the Adelaide stage ahead of Wednesday’s long-awaited opening performance.
“It’s definitely a dream come-true, it’s such an iconic role and such an iconic show,” said star Stefanie Jones, who plays Poppins.
“It’s equal parts spectacle and heart … it’s about fixing a family and their journey, and that’s something I think we can all relate to.”
The musical’s resident director Liam McIlwain was part of the original Australian production of Mary Poppins in 2010.
“We had one regret, which was that we never made it to Adelaide with that production, because of a lack of theatre availability and touring schedules,” he said.
Adelaide audiences are making up for lost time with the season extended twice due to demand for tickets, and now set to run at the Festival Theatre until August 27.
“We’ve already had a couple of preview performances and the audience reactions have been absolutely extraordinary,” Mr McIlwain said.
The stage musical combines classic songs from the 1964 Disney film version with new numbers commissioned by producer Cameron Mackintosh and storylines adapted from Australian author P.L. Travers’ original books.
Actor Jack Chambers, who plays the chimney sweep Bert, said nostalgia played a big part in Poppins’ success, and that was being passed on from one generation to the next.
“What I’m really impressed and surprised by is the amount of little kids that are singing along to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” he said.
Bookings at marypoppinsmusical.com.au
Glenelg turns up the heat for winter
Fire twirlers, red-hot cabaret acts and circus infernos are just a few of the ways to warm up this school holidays at the new Glenelg Winter Arts Festival that kicks off this week.
The creative team behind Gluttony has created a program of more than 30 shows, events and workshops to be held at Colley Reserve from Friday, July 6 to July 23.
Program director Elena Kirschbaum said the new event would have a more intimate set-up.
“We want to have a cosy feel … it’s a bit more like a village green,” she said.
“We’ve got spaces that are sheltered all the way along, and one of our big tents that we’ve dedicated to being an enclosed space – there’s big heaters inside, there are throw rugs and bars with warm drinks.”
The program features a mix of returning hit acts and new shows from past Gluttony artists.
“We’ve got a really big workshop program, which is not something we normally do at Fringe.”
Events range from big-name comedians Wil Anderson, Peter Helliar, Nazeem Hussain, Rove McManus and Mel Buttle, through the fiery Inferno variety show and its family-friendly Kid-Ferno counterpart, to market stalls and live music on weekends.
“There’s a succession of tents in a row, so you can make your way between different undercover spaces,” Ms Kirschbaum said.
Full program and tickets at gluttony.net.au
Adelaide’s Botanic Garden of illuminated de-lights
As its name suggests, the creators of Resonate want to strike an emotional and very personal chord with audiences at this year’s Illuminate Adelaide festival.
After the success of its Light Cycles display in 2021-22, Canadian multimedia studio Moment Factory has devised six new, immersive light and sound installations for Resonate, which runs at the Botanic Garden until July 30.
Moment Factory creative director Gabriel Pontbriand said it was proud to return for a third Illuminate, this time as artists-in-residence.
“We received such a warm welcome with Light Cycles,” he said of the event, which sold out in 2021 and drew 123,000 visitors last year.
“We are looking forward to sharing Resonate, inspired by our human capacity for emotional and physical resonance with the environment.’’
Luke and Charlotte Davey attended a preview of Resonate, spread along a 1.7km walking trail, and said it was “truly magical”. “It was such a treat to step into this incredible world, the gardens are totally transformed,” Ms Davey said.
Resonance has sessions every 15 minutes from 6pm Tuesday-Thursday and 5.30pm Friday-Sunday. Moment Factory is also presenting its interactive work Mirror Mirror at the Illuminate Pavilion in Victoria Square.
ASO Indigenous collaboration fans flames of Creation
Ancient, classical and modern instruments will be united around a virtual campfire to give a contemporary musical edge to Creation, a new work performed by First Nations artists with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
Sung and narrated in the Yugambeh language by its own creator Grayson Rotumah, the work reflects Bundjalung history and culture through the reimagining of creation stories with spiritual, mission and massacre songs.
“The symbolism of fire resonates through all communities and cultures, and can draw connections to survival,” Rotumah said. “This collaboration between two very different musical traditions can lead to a … unique sound that celebrates both cultures.”
Indigenous musicians will be seated around a virtual campfire in the Grainger Studio on Friday, July 14, with the ASO playing behind.
Performers will include hip-hop artist Rulla Mansell, Kaurna yidaki player Robert Taylor, and Dylan Crismani on the electric crystal, which has tuned steel rods.
“The steel rods are bowed using wet glass cylinders to produce ambient, haunting and ethereal textures that will complement the spoken word, rapping, singing and yidaki … to create a spiritually haunting, beautiful but eerie vibe,” Rotumah said.
The concert follows NAIDOC Week, which runs until next Sunday, and is part of the ASO’s community project Floods of Fire.
Book at aso.com.au
Figaro wants a wife in bold new opera
Long before Married At First Sight and Bridgerton hit TV screens, Mozart gave audiences The Marriage of Figaro – his musical version of a slapstick romantic comedy.
Now Mozart’s classic is being given a modern makeover thanks to Adelaide director Nicholas Cannon, who will present his boldly reimagined version for State Opera at Her Majesty’s Theatre in November.
“We’re catapulting the narrative into modern day with renowned operatic classics and a vibrant, fizzing score, complemented by striking sets and lighting,” Cannon said.
“Enthralled audiences will be on the edge of their seats as Figaro and his betrothed fight the odds on their way to the altar.”
Jeremy Kleeman and Jessica Dean, last seen together in HMS Pinafore as part of State Opera’s Gilbert & Sullivan festival in May, will play the underdog groom Figaro and his beloved bride Susanna.
“Figaro is the ultimate rom-com, full of truth and incredible beauty … it really has a bit of everything,” Dean said.
Everything includes forbidden crushes, revenge plots, secret long-lost sons, a cheating scandal, drunken gardeners, solicitous lawyers, scorned wives and some cheeky bridesmaids … all of which threaten to ruin the couple’s happy day.
The Marriage of Figaro is at Her Majesty’s Theatre from November 16 to 25. Book at stateopera.com.au
Bubbles bring pop art to City Lights display – full map
Bubbles bring out the child in almost everyone – and the CBD will be bubbling with more than 40 amazing public City Lights installations as part of this month’s Illuminate Adelaide festival.
Four-year-old Ivy White and her father AJ had a sneak preview of Ephemeral Droplets, a series of shimmering giant bubbles that will be installed along North Terrace as part of the event which runs from next Friday, July 7, until July 23.
“It was such a thrill to see Ivy’s face light as the droplets came into view,” her dad said.
The full City Lights program and map is included in a special four-page liftout inside The Advertiser today, detailing installations in the city’s north, east and west precincts.
Ephemeral Droplets was created by Sydney studio Atelier Sisu, a collaboration between artists Renzo B. Larriviere and Zara Pasfield, as a mix of art and architecture which they say “examines the impermanent, fleeting nature of our world”.
“Our aim is not simply to create something beautiful or a temporary sculpture but to reinterpret our public spaces through architectural choices.”
Other displays will range from The Eyes, a massive head made of inflatable eyeballs at Lot Fourteen, to projections of celebrity chef Poh Ling Yeow’s artistic alter-ego The Girl throughout Rundle Street and the East End.
Full program and City Lights map also at illuminateadelaide.com
Theatre company on the Brink of leadership change
Internationally acclaimed Adelaide theatre company Brink Productions will begin the search for its first new artistic director in almost 20 years after Chris Drummond’s decision to step down from the role.
Mr Drummond, who has led the company since 2004, will finish in the job on August 25 to pursue new, undisclosed creative opportunities.
“I’ve been extremely fortunate to be the custodian of a tenacious and ambitious theatre company committed to telling new stories in new ways,” Mr Drummond said.
“However, I’m also incredibly excited to be heading into this new phase of my own career, with all the amazing opportunities that are now opening up.”
Brink is best known for its 2008 Adelaide Festival production of Andrew Bovell’s play When The Rain Stops Falling, its version of Moliere’s The Hypochondriac – both of which featured the late actor Paul Blackwell – Skip Miller’s Hit Songs and The Aspirations of Daise Morrow, adapted from a Patrick White short story.
Drummond also led Brink’s collaboration with London’s Barbican on its war elegy Memorial, and with English Touring Theatre on Bryony Lavery’s play Thursday, inspired by the story of South Australia’s London bombing survivor Gill Hicks.
Brink will begin its recruitment process for a new artistic director through industry specialist REA Consulting in late July.
Let there be light … Illuminate begins
Lights and smiles will be beaming with equal brilliance at the opening of the third annual Illuminate Adelaide winter festival on Wednesday night.
The event runs until the end of July, with City Lights installations throughout the CBD and two major new displays by Canadian artists-in-residence Moment Factory.
Mirror Mirror, at the Illuminate Pavilion at Victoria Square, is a dazzling playground of interactive technology in which Moment Factory invites viewers to discover their own creativity through reflections and projections.
Illuminate creative directors Lee Cumberlidge and Rachael Azzopardi said Mirror Mirror “guarantees surprise and complete delight”.
Twin sisters Scarlett and Sienna Moon, 7, and their brother Max, 8, got a sneak preview inside the installation.
“My eyes were so excited, the colour and the lights are everywhere, and my favourite part was jumping on the flowers on the river as they floated past.” Sienna said.
After two sellout seasons of its show Light Cycles, Moment Factory is also bringing a its new multi-sensory digital art experience Resonate to the Botanic Garden, with six installations along a 1.7km night-time trail.
Cumberlidge and Azzopardi said their focus was to bring “world first experiences” to Adelaide.
Full program and tickets at illuminateadelaide.com
Gallery builds a Mexican wall … of art
If Frida Kahlo’s works look right at home in the Art Gallery of SA, that’s because the exhibition space was inspired directly by the Mexican artist’s studio and surroundings.
Exhibition curator Magda Carranza de Akle said the design by Adelaide architects Grieve Gillett Andersen was one of the most elaborate ever created for the Gelman Collection of Mexican Modernism, which has toured to 64 cities around the world since 1999.
“I love it – it conveys a lot of what Mexico is about and the colours that we actually use in our houses, and different elements of the architecture,” she said.
The Frida & Diego: Love & Revolution exhibition features 20 Kahlo paintings and drawings, alongside works by her husband Diego Rivera and their contemporaries, from Saturday until September 17.
Ms Carranza de Akle said the collection showed “a gentler side” to Kahlo, who suffered horrific injuries in a bus accident when she was just 18.
“All her paintings that are in the collection are what we would like to think of as ‘happy paintings’ … they do not refer to her very turbulent and tragic life.
“In the end, she laughed a lot – she was an incredibly party-loving, life-loving person – otherwise she couldn’t have made it.”
Although much less famous than her husband during their lifetimes, Kahlo’s work has since seen her become a feminist and queer icon.
“She went to the opening of her exhibition in a stretcher – who does that unless you’re a fighter?” Ms Carranza de Akle said.
“She represents that to the younger generation: Someone who was never a martyr, she was a fighter.”
SA WEEKEND: LOVE, PASSION & POLITICS
Why the Festival Theatre will be flooded with water
The Festival Theatre’s orchestra pit will be flooded to create a lake in which singers will perform with Vietnamese-style water puppets for next year’s Adelaide Festival opera.
The Nightingale and Other Fables, directed by Canadian multidisciplinary artist Robert Lepage, will also feature other forms of Asian puppetry, from Chinese shadow play and Taiwanese hand puppets to a giant skeleton operated by rods.
“It’s very bewitching … there’s all this water shimmering all over the place,” Mr Lepage said from Quebec.
“The singers are closer to you in the orchestra pit, and because they have all this water bouncing their voices, and the orchestra is on stage … so it is a very interesting musical experience.”
The Nightingale runs for about 50 minutes and will be the second half of the opera program, with other related works by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky forming the first half.
“They are all fairy tales or fables. Because of that, there are a lot of animals … so it was a good excuse to use puppetry,” Mr Lepage said.
Based on the story by Hans Christian Andersen, The Nightingale tells how the emperor of China receives a book from the emperor of Japan about the singing bird, which inspired the opera production’s Asian puppetry.
Lepage’s company Ex Machina is noted for its visual spectacles and has a long history with the Adelaide Festival, performing its works The Dragon’s Trilogy here in 1988, The Seven Streams of the River Ota in 1998, Needles and Opium in 2014, and The Far Side of the Moon in 2018.
Festival artistic director Ruth Mackenzie said the production would appeal to young audiences and “first-timers” as well as seasoned opera goers.
“A cast of 17 international singers, puppeteers and acrobats … will join SA’s own Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and State Opera,” she said.
The full 2024 Festival program will be released in October.
The Nightingale and Other Fables is at the Festival Theatre from March 1 to 6. Tickets go on sale July 3 for Festival Friends and July 11 for the general public. adelaidefestival.com.au
Evolution at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival
Constantly evolving musical identities are at the centre of two very distinct new shows at this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
Zimbabwe-born singer Thando Sikwila has rebranded herself as THNDO and titled her latest tour The Reintroduction, while Sarah-Louise Young examines the career of an iconic fellow UK performer in An Evening Without Kate Bush.
Melbourne based THNDO will make her fourth Cabaret Festival appearance at the Banquet Room on June 22 but says her music has undergone a stylistic shift from R&B and soul into being “a pop artist”.
“I’ve had a really transformative year,” she said.
“My experience coming off the most recent season of The Voice made me realise the sort of artist that I wanted to be.”
Young is also making her fourth visit to the Adelaide event and said her show, at the Space Theatre from June 15-17, is really a tribute to Kate Bush’s fans who have rarely had the chance to see their idol perform live.
“The show is absolutely about connecting everybody in the room, whether you are a super-fan or not,” Young said.
“Adelaide is this delicious, luxurious, warm hug of a venue. It’s a completely unique festival.” The full program runs until June 24. Book at adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au
New Disney stage musical Winnie the Pooh comes to Adelaide
Disney’s new musical stage adaptation of Winnie the Pooh will come to Adelaide in August as part of a national tour.
After critically acclaimed runs in New York, Broadway and Chicago, Winnie the Pooh will be at the Dunstan Playhouse for seven performances, from August 17 to 20.
The show, created by Australian-US producer Jonathan Rockefeller, was inspired by the classic books by A.A. Milne and Disney animated films. It features large-scale puppets of the characters, including Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger, and songs from the films by the Sherman Brothers. “The music, the spectacular life-size puppets, and the charming performances are the perfect way to introduce – or reintroduce – audiences to live theatre,” Rockefeller said.
Tickets go on sale June 15 from Ticketek. winniethepoohshow.com
Scores of fans for Adelaide Symphony Orchestra movie magic
The Force will be with young concertgoers as they thrill to the music of Star Wars, The Avengers, Superman and more with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
In the family friendly Lights! Camera! Symphony! concerts this coming week, the ASO will introduce children to the musicians and instruments which create the magic, through some of cinema’s most exciting scores.
They’ll experience the soaring trumpets of Star Wars’ main theme and discover which section of the orchestra makes Darth Vader sound evil in the Imperial March, along with such other favourites as the Superman March and the Jurassic Park theme.
“This is such a great way for children to be engaged with a live concert,’’ ASO timpanist Andrew Penrose said.
“It’s such a thrill for kids to hear music from the movies being played right in front of them. We often take film music for granted – but the in-person experience brings the music to life, and stays with them for years.”
Penrose said his daughter Erin, 5, who dressed as Princess Leia for the shoot, is “a bit little to really get it’’.
“But she loves coming in and seeing all the big instruments,’’ he said.
ASO: Lights! Camera! Symphony! is at Grainger Studio at 10am and 11.45am on Saturday, June 17. aso.com.au
Shot gets seal of approval in Australian Geographic Nature Photographer contest
A great image all depends on which way you look at it – and one seal pup has added its own unique perspective to this year’s Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year competition.
The seal bent over backwards to give finalist Andrew Peacock his shot, titled Weaner Portrait, at Gold Harbour on South Georgia Island in Antarctica.
“These young southern elephant seals are newly separated from their mother after being weaned and left to fend for themselves,” said the Queensland based photographer.
“They are very curious, as the contortion this one performs to watch me shows.”
Fellow finalist Ofer Levy captured a confrontation between a mud crab and a blue-spotted mudskipper at Broome in WA for his entry, titled Neighbours’ Dispute.
“It was a brief and slightly aggressive encounter initiated by the mudskipper, but didn’t escalate into a real fight,” NSW based Mr Levy said.
More than 90 finalists – including three shot in SA – were chosen across nine categories from 2182 high-calibre entries by 550 photographers in 10 countries.
Winners will be announced on August 24 by the SA Museum, which runs the competition and will present an exhibition of the top works from August 26 to October 29.
Full shortlist at samuseum.sa.gov.au
Adelaide curator to head Aboriginal art museum in US
An Art Gallery of SA curator will leave to head the only overseas museum specialising in Australian Indigenous art.
Grief for high-profile family as beloved artist dies
The Yirrkala community is in mourning after the artist and didgeridoo expert, and relative of Yothu Yindi’s front man, died last month.