Sydney Festival’s in a minor key

Without an opening-night party or a principal partner, Sydney Festival lacks a cumulative wow factor.

Sydney Festival director Wesley Enoch at the launch of Lunar Velocipede on Wednesday. Picture: Hollie Adams

Festivals come in all shapes and sizes. They can be boutique celebrations of niche artistic interests. They can be brash and hedonistic, making a big beautiful noise over multiple stages. They also can be carefully curated showcases of the arts across all forms, bringing together international stars and boldly original new works by Australian talent.

Every major Australian city has at least one such festival providing a high-quality, multi-arts experience. Perth was the first, its festival starting in 1953. Sydney’s was originally the Waratah Festival; by the early 1990s it had become a culturally significant program with a strong offering of international artists.

Why does the Sydney Festival seem to have slipped several rungs in prominence and excitement? It used to open with a bang — until the state government pulled the plug on the Festival First Night party; now it’s a midweek soft launch. The brochure doesn’t even advertise the start date on its cover.

In terms of visibility and pulling power, the festival’s thunder has been stolen by Vivid Sydney, an event that clocks more than 2.3 million visitors. And the festival is still without a principal partner after The Star casino withdrew in 2017. The revenue shortfall contributed to a $1.2 million deficit last year.

Added to these challenging circumstances is an underpowered program that lacks a cumulative wow factor — the sense of a festival bigger than the sum of its parts. There’s a shortage of big names and major international companies. And while exclusives aren’t everything, many of the local productions on offer already have been seen elsewhere.

It’s the third festival from director Wesley Enoch and marks the halfway point in a term that will take him through to 2021. As other directors have done before him, Enoch has brought his interests and expertise to bear on the program. An indigenous theatre director, he has given a platform to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. On the night before Australia Day, which usually falls during the festival, he has instituted a vigil to commemorate Australia’s colonisation.

Another theme of his program is the idea of sanctuary: the haven that gives people confidence to be and express themselves. It’s evident, he says, in the festival premieres of Counting and Cracking — a play about the Sri Lanka diaspora, staged in Sydney Town Hall — and in Moira Finucane’s acrobatic cabaret Shanghai Mimi, inspired by the heady nightclubs of 1930s Shanghai.

In terms of major international attractions, rather a lot rests on a single theatre production — a highly anticipated collaboration between Schaubuhne Berlin and Britain’s Complicite theatre on Beware of Pity, based on Stefan Zweig’s novel. It’s exclusive to Sydney.

For aficionados of classical music, there’s the Australian premiere of La Passion de Simone, an oratorio by the great Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, to be staged by the enterprising Sydney Chamber Opera.

Enoch claims 18 world prem­ieres in his program, but other shows look like re-runs from other recent festivals. Geoff Sobelle’s Home — in which music, movement and stagecraft produce a meditation on the places we live in — was presented at last year’s Brisbane Festival and left The Australian’s critic Martin Buza­cott underwhelmed. Other productions by local companies — Barking Gecko’s A Ghost in My Suitcase, Dancenorth’s Dust, Legs on the Wall’s Man with the Iron Neck and the indigenous music celebration Spinifex Gum — also have had previous seasons.

If Sydney has designs on a festival able to hold its own among the world’s great arts events, it is falling sadly behind. Or perhaps that’s not the kind of festival the city wants, or needs. Enoch has been to several of those glamorous events, including the Aix-en-Provence Festival in southern France and the Edinburgh International Festival — where one of his predecessors, Fergus Linehan, is in charge — and decided that Sydney’s is a very different event. Aix is where you can see “extraordinarily beautiful high art”, he says, but “it’s just not my thing”.

The Australian festival with truly classy programming, worthy of an international designation, is Adelaide’s. Under the leadership of Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy since 2017, it has asserted its pre-eminence and attracts a substantial inbound audi­ence. But, in Enoch’s view, what works in Adelaide isn’t necessarily right for Sydney. A better comparison, he says, may be with the Perth Festival, which caters for largely a local audience too.

“In the past few years each of the festivals has become more distinctive, more clear about the role they play,” he says. “When the bulk of the audience comes from Sydney, let’s talk about this city and what the important issues are. When audiences are from interstate, there’s a different kind of programming need.”

Enoch is not alone in giving room in his festival program to his particular interests and preoccupations. His immediate predecessor, Lieven Bertels, who studied composition, put a focus on music and arty sound installations. Such an approach can produce an idiosyncratic program but in the hands of a visionary ­director also can be uniquely ­inspiring.

Enoch concedes that the conversations he wants to generate around his program — such as the meaning of Australia Day for indigenous Australians — may not appeal to every festival-goer. But neither does he regard the festival as merely a reflection of his personal likes. A festival has to offer a variety of attractions that will appeal to different audiences, and he takes his cues from artists and the work they are producing.

“I think the job is more of a listening job: what artists are interested in, how do they want to say it,” he says. “That is, for me, very much about the country that we’re living in. And international (artists) also contribute to the national conversation in that way.”

Festival 2019 is described in-house as a mid-size program, with no long-running show in a big theatre, such as 2017’s musical Ladies in Black (which Enoch commissioned as artistic director of Queensland Theatre Company).

Word is that ticket sales are on track and that the festival will return to surplus this year. But to regain its spark, the Sydney Festival needs an injection of funds and a stomach for ambitious ideas.