David Sefton: What sets the Adelaide Festival apart from elsewhere in Australia
ON the Australian landscape, the Adelaide Festival is still viewed as the most important cultural event of its kind.
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ON the Australian landscape, the Adelaide Festival is still viewed as the most important cultural event of its kind.
Even if it’s fallen off the numberplates, we are the Festival State.
That needs to be constantly emphasised, as does its importance as the core of all this other activity — that it’s at the heart of the Fringe and Womad and everything else that goes on around it.
We have a certain advantage by bringing all these things that you can only see in Adelaide. People will get on a plane for Pina Bausch or The James Plays.
That happened with Roman Tragedies as well. I know a lot of younger people travel in for Unsound … because they come and tell me.
I don’t see the other interstate festivals as any kind of a threat: They are in competition for attention but that’s more about media than audiences.
That’s why the international work is much more important, to retain the exclusivity — otherwise your festivals all look the same.
On one level, I wanted to be very sure that reputation for really ambitious international performance work was maintained with things like Roman Tragedies, The James Plays and Pina Bausch; doing this absolute A-list, ambitious, in some cases epic work.
In the past four festivals there was New York avant-garde composer and musician John Zorn and there was US video artist Bill Viola; there was comedy theatre in One Man Two Guvnors; there were four Unsounds and two Tectonics.
I came in saying I would completely change the music program. In the past, Festivals have used their club as a way of getting younger people in to drink, but what I wanted to do was change the audience profile with the music content.
The Unsound experimental and underground club music program has been a huge success across the board, while Tectonics working with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra has changed what the orchestra does in the Festival.
One of the things I’m very keen on is that a Festival does things that don’t happen the rest of the year.
I don’t feel that standard opera lovers are under-served in the rest of the year in Adelaide, neither are classical music fans.
We’ve done large commitments to people like Gavin Bryars, a contemporary classical composer. We’ve also used the orchestra in things like the Danny Elfman event, which was film music.
However, moving forward, if we are going to continue to draw comparisons to the Edinburgh Festival, we have to look at the number of concert halls and theatres it has in the central city.
I am very happy to say I have found sufficient reasons to keep me and my family here.
David sefton was artistic director of the Adelaide Festival 2013–16
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