Wesley Enoch locks down on the local angle for Sydney Festival

The acclaimed director looks back as his final Sydney Festival opens

Wesley Enoch says the 2021 Sydney Festival is the ‘clearest sense of my values of the five festivals’. Picture Ryan Osland

So much for best-laid plans. Wesley Enoch closed his 2020 Sydney Festival in January last year just as the coronavirus was starting to wreak havoc across the globe. When the lockdowns took effect in Australia in March, he quickly decided to adopt a new strategy and to plan the 2021 festival — his fifth and final festival as director — around Australian artists.

No matter if international borders remained closed and guests from overseas were not able to participate. Enoch has a strong ethos of developing Australian artists, including Indigenous artists, and his final festival would celebrate the best of home-grown talent. He called it his “Made in Australia” festival.

But coronavirus makes no allowance for even the most prudent planning. The recent outbreak in Sydney that prompted tighter restrictions on public gatherings and once again closed state borders has wiped out Enoch’s opening-night attraction, an acrobatic spectacular called The Pulse, staged at an outdoor arena at the Barangaroo Headland that can accommodate up to 1500 people. The Pulse is from a group called Gravity and Other Myths that is based in Adelaide. As the festival announced in an email that arrived like a wet blanket on New Year’s Eve, the closed NSW-South Australia border means the acrobats no longer are able to travel to Sydney.

Enoch admits to disappointment that his festival opener cannot go ahead. “We’ve been training for this all year and we’ve got multiple scenarios,” he says of the late changes. “In many ways, the scenario that we’re enacting now is one that we had planned three months ago. There are disappointments and there are joys — you just have to put things into perspective.”

Two other performances have been withdrawn from the festival because of border closures: Hide the Dog, involving artists from New Zealand, and the Brisbane-based Orava Quartet.

Fortunately, the rest of Enoch’s program remains intact. Sunshine Super Girl, a theatricalised life of Evonne Goolagong by Andrea James and featuring Tuuli Narkle — the show coincides with the 50th anniversary of Goolagong’s first win at Wimbledon — is fully subscribed at Sydney Town Hall. Exciting cabaret artists Paul Capsis and iOTA will appear on the outdoor Headland stage in Rapture, described as a song cycle of desire, ecstasy, murder and mayhem. In the Carriageworks season are new productions by renowned local companies Force Majeure and Sydney Chamber Opera. And author Douglas Stuart, whose debut novel Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize last year, will appear in conversation in an exclusive live-stream presented with Sydney Writers Festival.

Enoch, 51, has worked his entire career in the arts, as a playwright, director, producer and artistic director; immediately before the Sydney Festival, he was artistic director of Queensland Theatre Company. He has encountered the double-bind that affects all festival directors. Festivals thrive on novelty — of program ideas and of a charismatic leader who can sell them to the public — and festival boards favour a regular rotation of directors. At five years, Enoch’s term at the Sydney Festival is longer than that of his predecessors in the role. At the same time, festival directors may commission new shows that can be years in the making; and dates with in-demand touring artists can be years in advance. It means that directors often don’t hit the sweet spot in their program until midway through their term or later.

“A festival director doesn’t stay around forever because you don’t want the same vision; you want to be pushing the edges,” Enoch says, adding that if he has a regret, it’s that he didn’t push harder, earlier, to bring his ideas to fruition.

“What was good about programming 2021 is that COVID pushed me a little further too. And 2021 is the clearest sense of my values of the five festivals, the clearest sense of what my service to the community can really be. I can see why people want to stay in festivals longer because your artistic vision — and the mechanics of how you operate, and understanding how it works — keeps maturing.”

International highlights of Enoch’s past festivals include a theatre adaptation based on Joan Didion’s observations of Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 70s, The White Album; Barber Shop Chronicles from Britain’s National Theatre, featuring a brilliant cast of African actors; and Tree of Codes, contemporary dance from choreographer Wayne McGregor in collaboration with artist Olafur Eliasson, who did the stage designs, sound artist Jamie xx, and dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet.

A co-production with Sydney’s Belvoir theatre, Counting and Cracking, playwright S. Shakthidharan’s saga of a Sri Lankan-Australian family, was a true festival occasion and went on to win multiple awards. The Seidler Salon Series, in which classical and other small ensembles perform in Harry Seidler-designed properties around Sydney, were perfect experiences for music lovers.

Enoch who has Noonuccal Nuugi heritage, from Stradbroke Island, has made Indigenous artists central to his programs, from featuring Jimi Bani in My Name is Jimi, to physical theatre company Legs on the Wall with Man With the Iron Neck. A series of education programs to teach people Indigenous languages has morphed into this year’s Burrawa Bridgeclimb, in which guides lead visitors on the Sydney Harbour Bridgeclimb adventure while telling stories about the city’s Indigenous past. Enoch also instigated the annual Vigil, a January 25 celebration of Indigenous culture and heritage on the eve of Australia Day.

“When I started, there were conversations about does First Nations work sell, is it too risky?” he says.

“And in 2021, the Indigenous works are the highest selling works in the festival. There is an appetite and audi­ences have turned up in big numbers.”

Enoch says he has enjoyed working closely with the artists he commissions. Last year, he included himself in the program, directing a play by Geoffrey Atherden, Black Cockatoo, about the Aboriginal cricket team that toured England in 1868. It cleverly balanced the experiences of the touring cricketers with contemporary concerns about Indigenous heritage and identity.

The temptation, says Enoch, is to be involved in the rehearsal room and working directly with artists, when the festival structure is not always made for such a hands-on approach.

“That’s why I’ve perhaps done more commissions than the festival would normally do, because I wanted to get closer to the artistic process,” he says. “And that’s not always the best thing for a festival to be doing unless it’s built for it. I think there’s been tensions and some back and forth.”

There remain shows that Enoch has been unable to present because of time lags in programming and the border closures. One of the highlights of last year’s Perth Festival, Hecate — an adaptation of Macbeth, performed in Perth’s local Noongar language — was to have come to Sydney; it may wait for another year. The Pulse, from Gravity and Other Myths, was to have been a popular outdoor attraction, and not only for the daring acrobatics on display. The show is a product of the pandemic: instead of retiring into lockdown for the duration, as other performing arts companies had done, the GOM team used their JobKeeper wage subsidies to develop and produce a festival-style touring work. It will now have its premiere at the Adelaide Festival in March.

“When we made the decision to go all-Australian, there was a sense of ‘What does that mean?’ Enoch says. “Commissioning has been very important; the Australian voices, the First Nations voices, they are still there. But what’s missing is the international flavour. We’ve had a couple of international collaborations that haven’t been able to mature in my time.”

Enoch says Sydney Festival 2021 will be his final fling as a festival director, and he will return to freelance directing and other projects. In March he’ll direct the Australian premiere of Appropriate, a dark comedy by US playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, for Sydney Theatre Company.

He also wants to continue to work with Indigenous artists, especially with his community at Stradbroke Island. “I’m going to spend about six months a year on Stradbroke: the family’s there, we’re trying to build an arts centre there,” he says. “I’m also interested in the next generation of artists, and how they come through, in what will be a financially and socially conservative time, in this living with COVID world. How do we make sure there are pathways for younger artists to come through?”

His successor at the Sydney Festival is Olivia Ansell, formerly head of contemporary performance at the Sydney Opera House.

Appointed in June last year, mid-lockdown, she is under no illusions about the challenges of pulling together a festival program in uncertain times. “I think it’s about smart programming and making sure that we pick events that are sustainable,” Ansell says. “The 2022 festival will need to be the most clever program for that reason … It’s about leveraging and collaboration.”

Enoch is philosophical about the pandemic throwing a wobbly on his final Sydney fling. He says the opportunity for community connection, in COVID-safe fashion, is more important than whatever the economic costs may be.

“It’s not all about me and what I want, there’s a whole city and people’s health to look after,” he says. “Sydney Festival can also look after people’s health by making sure everything’s COVID-safe, and that we give people an opportunity to be safely in their community, not just locked away.”

The Sydney Festival runs from Wednesday to January 26.