WOMADelaide kicks city into gear as freedom comes to streets and sidewalks

The party for WOMADelaide’s 30th anniversary last weekend didn’t disappoint.

Baker Boy had the WOMADelaide crowd dancing and signing on Saturday. Picture: Brenton Edwards

Any notion that Adelaide, during its Covid-bound isolation, had lost its reputation as the edgy cultural capital of Australia was laid to rest last Friday by an energised evangelist in Rundle Street mall.

Gesticulating wildly, the man waved in one hand a flyer advertising a burlesque show and in the other a band poster, and bellowed: “Repent, brothers and sisters, you have entered the city of sin.”

While the party-pooping proselytiser may have held a narrow view of moral transgressions, he also may have been half right. For what hair the city had not torn out during the past two years of quarantine and border closures was well and truly let down at the weekend as South Australia’s Marshall government lifted its long-held restrictions on indoor gatherings and decriminalised those most egregious pandemic-era felonies: singing and dancing.

Adelaide may have been celebrating its new-found freedoms, but the city was in a buoyant mood for another reason. WOMADelaide, the world music festival founded in 1992, was marking its 30th birthday at Botanic Park, and the party did not disappoint.

The festival opened on Friday afternoon with a reflective welcome to country by Kaurna Narungga man Jamie Goldsmith and dance group Taikurtinna before audiences settled in to the classical strains of Egyptian-born Australian oud virtuoso Joseph Tawadros with his percussionist brother James and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

On an adjacent stage – one of eight at the four-day event – supergroup Springtime made its presence known. Featuring three of the country’s finest musicians in Gareth Liddiard (the Drones, Tropical F..K Storm), Jim White (Dirty Three) and Chris Abrahams (the Necks), the band unleashed its singular experimental “noisecore” stylings – a giant, distorted wall of improvised sound – on a mesmerised crowd.

Guatemalan blues, rock, jazz singer and guitarist Gaby Moreno took a different route to the hearts of her audience on the other side of the precinct by dialling up the tempo and bringing people to their feet. As the 40-year-old approached the end of her set, she took a deep breath and addressed the assembled mass before her. “It’s been years since we’ve been on tour. This means so much. Thank you. We love it here,” she said before launching into her single This is Where I Belong. It was clear Moreno meant every word.

On Saturday morning, as the sun rose on Adelaide, so too did Skywhale and Skypapa, Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini’s 25m-tall hot air balloon works. The inflatable airborne mammals, owned by the National Gallery of Australia, hovered peacefully over the Torrens River in Elder Park, as good a portent as any that in Adelaide during the so-called Mad March long weekend one should expect the unexpected.

The surprises at WOMADelaide started on Saturday afternoon. When A.B. Original – the rap duo Briggs and Trials – hit the stage they were joined, unannounced, by acclaimed indie singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett and Indigenous singer Thelma Plum, the last of whom was not on the WOMAD bill.

The crowd swelled for the set by Indigenous artist and rapper Baker Boy, resplendent in dreadlocks and a green tracksuit, as he launched into his rapid-fire articulations – much of it in language – about his country and family. “I’m a proud black Yolngu boy with the killer flow,” he spat at the crowd. “Listen to the yidaki, listen to it blow.” Baker Boy would perform two stellar sets over the weekend, confirming the 25-year-old’s status as a frontman par excellence.

As the sun went down, the main stage audience was transformed into a heaving throng of families as Melbourne Ska Orchestra turned up the dial. Charismatic band leader and singer Nicky Bomba played maestro to both the crowd and the 25-strong ensemble as the ARIA-winning orchestra rattled off its horn-heavy back catalogue.

On the second stage, Adelaide DJ Motez couldn’t quite believe his eyes. The producer – real name Moutaiz Al-Obaidi, an Iraq-born refugee who moved to Adelaide in 2006 – looked out to the crowd from his elevated deck, haloed in white light, and allowed himself a reflective moment. “This was the first festival I ever came to,” he said. “I thought then … imagine doing a show here. What would it look like? Well here we are.” And there he was. Just a boy standing in front of a crowd, asking it to dance.

He wasn’t the only artist who had audiences moving. Colombia’s El Gran Mono whipped the great unshod into a barefoot frenzy with Latin-Jamaican beats, a bush doof in all but name, down at the precinct’s outer reaches.

Back on the main stage, the final Saturday set had been reserved for Barnett. The acclaimed Melbourne singer-songwriter drew a huge crowd. Wailing on her southpaw sunburst guitar, she and her band variously rocked and serenaded the masses who had gathered to see her perform her first Australian show in more than three years. Surely there is no voice more resonant with her generation than Barnett’s. The crowd swayed reflectively as it absorbed her elegy to home ownership in Australia: “If you’ve got a spare half a million you can knock it down and start rebuildin’.”

WOMADelaide has come a long way since it was founded by then Adelaide Festival director Rob Brookman as a sister event to London’s WOMAD festival, which had been initiated a decade earlier by former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel. The Adelaide iteration in its inaugural year featured Crowded House, Paul Kelly and Archie Roach, and it had been conceived as a one-off event. But it was so successful that it became a biennial, and eventually an annual, event. It is now one of the country’s most popular music festivals.

Organisers at last weekend’s event estimated 16,000 people daily had streamed through the gates, a good result for a festival that – despite a strong international contingent – was far more locally focused than in previous years.

WOMADelaide director Ian Scobie said drawing on the “creative and cultural diversity” within our own borders was no programming coincidence. “Since 1992 WOMADelaide has (celebrated) music, arts and dance from around the world. The Australian artists performing continue that tradition,” he said.

WOMADelaide coincided with the Adelaide Art Biennial at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Festival Fringe, along the city’s east terrace, and Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy’s Adelaide Festival, now into its second week.

The festival, which last week premiered Barrie Kosky’s opera The Golden Cockerel and Armfield’s oratorio Watershed, about a gay hate crime that still haunts the city, continued its strong theatre line-up with Blindness, a remarkable audio experience staged almost exclusively in darkness in a back room of the Queens Theatre. Based on a novel by Jose Saramago, the narrative – spoken by award-winning actor Juliet Stevenson – centres on an epidemic of visual impairment sweeping the globe (the parallels with the Covid-19 pandemic are undeniable and stark). Wearing high-fidelity headphones, the audience becomes part of the work, with the protagonist at various points seeming to whisper in our ears, scream from across the room or shuffle in front of us. The senses are heightened to such an extreme that at one point I thought I could make out Stevenson’s form before me. But there was no one there. It is a remarkable work.

Next door, in another section of the Queens Theatre, was another festival favourite: The Nightline, created by Roslyn Oades and Bob Scott. Audiences are ushered into a darkened room full of rotary-dial telephones, set on round glass tables and illuminated with a lamp. We are invited to place the receiver to our ears and listen to one of hundreds of real people who have recorded voice messages in the wee hours on a special telephone number. There’s the tearful man who can’t get over the loss of his parents; the woman unapologetic about a sexual affair; the retired baker whose body clock refuses to adapt to a 9-5 rhythm; the 94-year-old woman too strong, or perhaps too afraid, to let sleep come.

There was a generational theme, too, at Union House for Sex and Death and the Internet, a one-on-one Zoom call/confessional with a baby boomer where life’s big questions are discussed. Samara Hersch’s work is a truly beautiful and therapeutic, if at times confronting, festival piece.

A stream of visitors flowed through the doors of the Art Gallery of South Australia, playing host to the second week of the Adelaide Biennial. On the day The Australian visited it was the exhibition’s opening work, The Wine Dark Sea – a riff on Homer’s Odyssey in marble – attracting most attention. The artist is Ukrainian Stanislava Pinchuk, whose home city of Kharkiv has been all but destroyed by Russian forces.

Elsewhere, feminist provocateur Julie Rrap’s Write Me, an installation wherein an image of her face can be distorted and manipulated, was well patronised, as was Reko Rennie’s moving-image work Initiation OA_RR, whose Nick Cave soundtrack provided an unofficial musical accompaniment to the exhibition.

The Adelaide Festival’s contemporary music program was firing at the Elder Park Summerhouse, too, with a diverse line-up of performers including Montaigne, and Amyl and the Sniffers. And with the length of Rundle Street closed, its traffic replaced with pop-up bars and impromptu performances all the way to the entrance to the Fringe, the sinners (and the odd saint) had their playground sorted.

But the weekend belonged to WOMADelaide.

Sunday’s program kicked off with the singular sound of the Balkan Ethno Orchestra before 1980s rockers Goanna set the stage alight with a performance that featured didgeridoo virtuoso William Barton. Later, Australian Latin-ska band the Cat Empire and Jayda G, the Grammy-nominated Canadian DJ, kept the party going well into the early hours.

Monday’s line-up may have been, on paper, a more subdued affair, but there was no more perfect way to close the festival than with a musician who has been there since the beginning. Paul Kelly, who headlined in 1992 and who has performed at the event five times, played WOMADelaide off into the night. It was a touching tribute from one the festival’s oldest and dearest friends, a musician who, better than most, knows that from little things big things grow.

Tim Douglas travelled to Adelaide as a guest of WOMADelaide.