Adelaide Festival 2019. March 1- 17.
Artistic Direction Neil Armfield and Rachel Healey. Adelaide Festival
Centre and various venues. Bookings; adelaidefestival.com.au; BASS 131246
Previewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Co-Artistic Directors Rachel Healey and Neil Armfield |
“Every international festival is
special in its own way,” co-Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival, Rachel
Healey tells me, ”but our ambition from the outset has been to reassert
Adelaide’s role as the national festival if you like. Everyone who wants to see
and hear the work of the most energetic, imaginative artists working today can
come to see it all in one place in one seventeen day period.”
According to Healey, it is a
legacy that she and co-Artistic Director, Neil Armfield, inherited when they
were approached to direct their first Adelaide festival in 2016. Both Healey and I remember that legacy as
young people growing up in Adelaide. I remember with fondness performing in Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde at the second Adelaide Festival in 1962, and then
again in Edward Bond’s Saved in 1970.
Naturally, Healey and I share a special love for Australia’s longest running
international arts festival, the brainchild of the late Professor John Bishop.
The Adelaide Festival has grown into the largest festival of its kind in
Australia. No longer biannual, it offers audiences the very best the world has
to offer every year. It now incorporates the free Writers Week, and the
immensely successful world music festival WOMAD. Running alongside the Adelaide
Festival is the explosive Adelaide
Fringe, founded by the late Frank Ford in 1975. Together, Festival and Fringe
make Adelaide the place for all arts lovers to be in March.
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| Womad at the Adelaide Festival |
Since it became an annual event
from 2006, past directors have been
hitting the ground running each year to secure the very best international arts
performances and events for the years ahead. It is a daunting, challenging and
immensely exciting task, and it is obvious in Healey’s voice that she an
Armfield are driven by an overriding passion for the arts and a desire to offer
Adelaide the very best of the world’s talent. This is Healey and Armfield’s
third festival and I ask how it is different from previous festivals. Healey is
quick to point out that his year’s festival will present an unprecedented twenty-three
works by first rate artists that will be entirely exclusive to Adelaide. The
second major difference will be the connections and links that concern artists.
Healey and Armfield don’t programme to any specific theme, but it is obvious
this year that artists are very concerned with the issue of forced migration.
“It’s thrilling,” Healey says, “to see how artists consistently bring new
perspectives and ways of understanding to current affairs.” I ask Healey to
outline some of these.
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| Another LIfe |
From Greece comes Another Life: Human Flows/Unknown Oddyseys, a
collection of twenty six photographs from The Museum of Photography in Thessaloniki.
Healey describes the exhibition as a 360 degree overview of the Greek
experience of refugees who have come into Lesbos and more widely into the Greek
mainland. The exhibition covers everything from burley Greek fishermen helping
those who have arrived in leaky, fragile boats to images of refugees beaten up
by Greek skinheads. In a private section one can experience the real horror of
bodies being washed up after drowning at sea. It’s a vastly moving exhibition
that absolutely grapples with the issues facing Europe while putting
Australia’s refugee policy into sharp relief. Other works, such as A Man of Good Hope, a collaboration
between the Young Vic and the Isango Ensemble of South Aftrica, expresses a
similar theme but is very differenrt. The performance chronicles the journeys
of an eight year old Muslim boy, Asad as he criss-crosses six African countries
after the murder of his mother during the civil war in Mogadishu. Played by
three actors at various ages in Asad’s journey, this part musical, part opera
explores contemporary issues such as human trafficking, migration, poverty and
xenophobia. Leavened with humour and magnificent song, the production offers
fresh insight in resilience and survival.
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| A Man of Good Hope |
In a similar vein, and yet very
pertinent to the Australian circumstance is Manus
by Verbatim Theatre Group from Iran.
This rough agit-prop theatre promises to jolt you like a high voltage
shock. The main character is based on
Kurdish journalist, Behrouz Boochani, now entering his sixth year in detention.
The play is performed by an all Iranian company, performing in Persian, and,
although not easy to watch, is must see theatre
From Australia comes Two Jews Walk into a Theatre, directed
by celebrated choreographer, Lucy
Guerin and featuring Brian Lipson and Gideon Obarzanek, playing their fathers
who have come to see a play created by their two sons. Both fathers’ lives have
been influenced by the horror of war and oppression, and this affectionate
tribute demonstrates how the social and political winds that buffet our
families affect us all.
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| Two Jews Walk into a Theatre |
Teatro Nacional D. Maria ll
brings By Heart to the Adelaide
Festival from Portugal. “This is a really special work.” Healey says. Inspired
by the George Steiner quote, “Once ten people know a poem by heart there’s
nothing the KGB or the Gestapo can do about it. It will survive” Tiago
Rodriguez’s grandmother is going blind. She asks her grandson to help her
memorize an entire novel, so that she will have something to read in her mind
when she is blind. By Heart is a
wonderful personal story about the importance of handing things down. Ten
volunteers are chosen from the audience to learn a poet by heart by the end of
the performance.
It would be a gross misconception
to believe that the festival is laden with works relentlessly exposing serious
social issues and global conflicts. It is the role of theatre to hold the
mirror up to nature and Healey is adamant that the role of the festival should
be” to present seventeen days of not only entertainment but ideas. A theatre or
performance environment is a space in which you’re not plugged in online, or
hopefully not spending ninety minutes with your head down looking at your
screen. You’re engaged with everyone else in that audience in the one place at
the one time with the performers to be entertained absolutely but to reflect on
and have new perspectives on whatever the current or universal issue on the stage
is be it Uncle Vanya from La Mama UlsterAmerican from Scotland.” Or
perhaps Carmen from Germany, Two Feet from Meryl Tankard, Robyn
Archer, Tim Minchin or Ben Quilty. And don’t forget Barry Kosky’s production of
The Magic Flute from the Komische
Oper in Berlin.
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| The Magic Flute |
A look at the programme presents
a staggering diversity of artforms and artists from countries around the world.
Many will be in Adelaide only, which offers a rare opportunity to see the best
the world has to offer at the leading arts festival in the Southern Hemisphere.
Finally, I ask Healey which
weekend she would recommend for those coming from afar. “The opening weekend is
an absolute knockout” she replies . “The middle weekend with Carmen and WOMAD
is unbeatable and then there’s Camille doing Nick Cave and late night in the
Cathedral in the final weekend. “ It’s really impossible” she says bursting
into laughter.
Go online, check out the
programme and work out the best experience for you. You won’t be disappointed.