Isabelle Adjani, Joan Didion’s White Album, and Aboriginal theatre at Sydney Festival

Sydney Festival director Wesley Enoch. Picture: Sam Mooy

As Wesley Enoch prepares to present his first major work for the stage since his acclaimed 2014 play Black Diggers, he can see a day in the not-too-distant future when he is no longer working as an artist in the conventional arena of theatres and festivals.

Enoch is directing Black Cockatoo, a play about Johnny Mullagh and the 1868 Aboriginal cricket tour of England, as part of the Sydney Festival that gets under way this week. It’s one of many performances, exhibitions and other events to feature indigenous artists and perspectives, in a festival that also includes international theatre, dance, music and visual arts. Indeed, Enoch has done more than any other festival ­director to raise the prominence of indigenous artists within a mainstream festival.

But Enoch, a former artistic ­director of Queensland Theatre Company, says he is starting to think of new opportunities for his organising skills and creativity after he brings the curtain down on his final Sydney Festival program next year. One option is that he may step back from having such a high-profile arts career.

“Talk to me in six months and I’ll have a clearer idea,” he says over a herbal tea at a cafe near his home in Sydney. “I’m an artist, and I like the idea of having an ­artistic voice — although as a maker, I think my career may be coming to an end. It’s not unusual: people transition regularly out of being artists, and into some other contribution in the world.”

Several ideas are driving Enoch’s thinking. Turning 50, he says, has caused him to reflect on how he may productively spend the next decade. Also, his partner, David McAllister, is stepping down as artistic director of the Australian Ballet, the company he has led since 2001.

But Enoch also considers the responsibilities of running a large-scale theatre company or multi-arts festival: what can be accomplished with such a cultural apparatus, and the limitations.

“One of the reasons I stepped back from (freelance) directing and went into companies was the idea of building infrastructure, building opportunities,” he says. “The number of commissions this festival has” — the Sydney Festival is presenting 46 commissions this year, often in partnership with other festivals or presenters — “is incredibly challenging at times … I imagine that festivals aren’t my future in many ways. The story of festivals, and the storytelling that I want to do, aren’t always in sync.

“I’m more interested in a cultural conversation than I am in a cultural-tourism conversation or an economic conversation. I’m ­really committed to the idea that, through the arts, we have a cultural voice and I want to build that up … There is increasing pressure, more and more, that festivals ­become an amalgam of economic impacts and cultural tourism.”

The Sydney Festival has changed substantially in recent years as it responds to available ­resources and external pressures. The festival is still without a major sponsor after arrangements ended with The Star casino in 2017, contributing to a deficit of $1.2m in 2018. (The 2019 festival, Enoch says, returned to surplus.)

The festival no longer presents free concerts in Sydney’s Domain that were once such a feature of summer in the city. Indeed, the festival has sold the outdoor stage canopy to Enoch’s predecessor as artistic director, Lieven Bertels, who is now director of the ­Momentary, a new arts space in Bentonville, Arkansas, that is due to open next month. Other operators are responsible for the canopy that is now erected at the Domain, where Opera in the Domain later this month will be presented as an umbrella event within the Sydney Festival.

Other changes also will affect the festival. After this year, the festival must vacate Hyde Park where it hosts a Festival Garden of spiegeltent shows, food and drink outlets and other attractions. The City of Sydney has determined that long-term structures in the park, including the festival and the Night Noodle Market, prevent grass growth and limit the wider public’s enjoyment of the area. Enoch says the festival will look at alternative sites but is not convinced that a festival garden will be a feature of future programs.

This month’s festival will be the first in which visitors have use of the new light rail through the city — “at least we’re not a construction site,” Enoch says — and will also be the first in more than five years to enjoy late-night entertainment not restricted by the state’s lock-out laws.

“People going out to a festival show, and going to a bar as part of the experience — that has diminished over the past five years,” Enoch says. “Now that the light rail is running and the lock-out laws are being lifted … that will ­affect the festival in a good way, it will change the way the city operates.”

Among the international ­attractions this year are The White Album, a theatrical reimagining of Joan Didion’s 1979 collection of essays about the counterculture of the late 1960s, when young people thought they could change the world. It was first produced last year by Los Angeles multidisciplinary artist Lars Jan and his company Early Morning Opera. His partner, actress Mia Barron, narrates Didion’s text.

Enoch says he was attracted to the piece, in part, because it ­involves the audience in the performance. “I’m interested in how, 50 years on, mass movements and mass protests are now about things like the environment,” he says. “We see young people taking to the streets, and politicians saying, ‘No you can’t’.”

Another festival highlight also involves the reimagining of a cultural artefact from the 1970s, John Cassavetes’s film Opening Night in which his wife Gena Rowlands plays an ageing actress whose life is a mess. In the theatrical adaptation by Cyril Teste, Isabelle Adjani plays Myrtle Gordon with a spontaneity and vulnerability that Enoch finds compelling.

But Enoch is especially proud that one of his festival’s major co-commissions, Black Ties — a ­romantic comedy about the marriage of an Aboriginal groom and a Maori bride — is almost sold out. He speaks of it as this year’s Counting and Cracking, the multiple award-winning Sydney Festival premiere last year that was staged at Sydney Town Hall, as Black Ties will be.

The cast of Black Ties. Picture: Garth Oriander

“At the heart of it is an insight into cultural differences between these two First Nations cultures, and how racism works inside those communities as well,” Enoch says. “We often have these opinions of each other, at a distance. There’s nothing like a wedding to bring them together and sort them out.”

Other highlights include a recreation of Reg Livermore’s Betty Blokk-Buster by Josh Quong Tart, Britain’s Tenebrae vocal ensemble, the revival of stage musical Bran Nue Dae, a concert tribute to Gurrumul Yunupingu called Bungul, and dancer-singer Francois Chaignaud, with his interpretation of Spanish romance.

Enoch, whose own festival ­offering Black Cockatoo is playing at the Ensemble Theatre, already is thinking of his final festival program next year and to a possible alternative future.

One idea is to turn his energy for community-building to Queensland’s Stradbroke Island, the ancestral home of the Aboriginal side of his family. He wants to help the community there become self-sufficient by developing a micro-grid for electricity.

“The major things that we are facing in the future have to be ­delivered through collective ­action and community-based ­decision-making,” he says, mentioning things such as local food production and the rural fire services whose heroic volunteers are battling fierce bushfires around the country.

“They are cultural conversations, but they are not manifesting in the ways we’ve seen in the past.”