Covid forces Adelaide Festival director into isolation hours before program starts

Covid has forced one of the Adelaide Festival’s artistic directors into isolation hours before the opening, as Ukrainian and Russian performers unite for the premiere.

One of the Adelaide Festival’s artistic directors, Rachel Healy, will be forced to miss the first week of its events after one of her children tested positive for Covid.

The Festival officially starts on Friday with performances of international opera The Golden Cockerel, dancers from 14 African countries in The Rite of Spring, and Australian theatre shows The Nightline and The Photo Box.

The opera’s associate director, Denni Sayers, revealed the reason for Ms Healy’s absence before a dress rehearsal of the production.

Ms Healy is in isolation for seven days, until March 9, after her son Frank tested positive to Covid on his 16th birthday.

Adelaide Festival artistic co-director Rachel Healy. Supplied by Adelaide Festival.

Cast members from The Golden Cockerel have also forged a unique solidarity after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Bass-baritone Pavlo Hunka – who plays a fictional Tsar – was born in the UK but his father is Ukrainian while soprano Venera Gimadieva, who plays his queen, and many of the other soloists are Russian.

“Unfortunately, I’ve been directly affected because 27 of my cousins … are about to be called up to the army, never ever having held a pistol in their lives,” Mr Hunka said.

“Now they have got to fight for their very existence.

“But the atmosphere here is that people have been highly professional, highly respectful.

“Everybody has been so very uplifting and empathetic – to the extent that one of the Russian colleagues, who has been living in Germany for 27 years, offered me an apartment for my family, if and when they escape from Ukraine.”

Adelaide Festival 2022. The Golden Cockerel opera singers Venera Gimadieva (Russian soprano) and Pavlo Hunka (British-Ukrainian bass-baritone), with Australian actor Matt Whittet in the background as the cockerel. Picture: Andrew Beveridge

Ms Healy and fellow artistic director Neil Armfield’s Festival program features more than 70 shows and events, including Writers’ Week, and runs alongside the Fringe until March 20.

Mr Hunka said that The Golden Cockerel explored similar themes to the current crisis in Ukraine, “but in a fairytale way”.

“The Tsar is an incompetent individual, he’s a child, he’s never grown up, he makes tantrums and he gets away with it.

“That’s exactly what’s been going on. You could easily treat it as an allegory.

“But it’s also about love, innocence and naivety. It’s a beautiful story.”

Hunka, who originally worked as a lawyer, has also spent the past 33 years preserving his culture through the Ukrainian Art Song Project, which has created a library of 1200 previously suppressed compositions and already recorded 486 of them.

“The likes of Putin will not be able to destroy them again,” he said.