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| Robert Le Page directs Igor Stravinsky's The Nightingale and Other Fables Adelaide Festival 24. Photo by Michael Cooper |
Adelaide Festival 2024.
Artistic
Director. Ruth Mackeenzie CBE. General Manager Kath M Mainland CBE. Associate Director Wouter Van Ransbeek. March 1-17 2024. Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au, Adelaide Festival 1300393404. Ticketek
131246.
Previewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Artistic Director Ruth Mackenzie Photo by Claudio Raschella |
Adelaide’s prestigious flagship
festival has a new captain at the helm. Ruth Mackenzie CBE comes to Australia’s
premier arts festival with a most impressive record as the artistic director of
world leading arts festivals in Manchester, London ,Nottingham, Chichester,
Amsterdam, Paris and Vienna. Last year she arrived to navigate the 2023
festival that included a program initiated by Neil Armfield and Rachel Healey
before their highly successful term came to an end. This year Mackenzie will be
steering her visionary program and making her indelible stamp on the 2024
Adelaide Festival. In recognition of the past and with an eye to the future, Mackenzie
quotes in her introduction to the Festival brochure “We are inspired by the
history of our festival and ask everyone to help reinvent the Festival for the
21st. Century.” I ask her how she proposes to do this.
“A major role of any festival is to
inspire”, Mackenzie tells me. As well as welcoming back to Adelaide world class
artists like Robert Le Page, Stephen Page and Barrie Kosky to name just three
legends of previous festivals, Mackenzie is thrilled to announce the return of
Laurie Anderson with I’ll Be Your Mirror,
which incorporates AI in an exhibition of the work of Anderson and her late husband
Lou Reed. Using ground-breaking technology this promises a glimpse towards a new
horizon of artistic creativity.
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| Stephen Page's Baleen Moondjan Photo Daniel Boud |
In her quest to introduce new artists to the Adelaide Festival, Mackenzie cites Albanian theatre maker Mario Banushi’s Goodbye Lidita a wordless work about a family through death and new birth. This production from Athens has been hailed as a work of astonishing visual and symbolic power. “There are a lot of brilliant names that are equally new and that is really important”, Mackenzie says “because the festival is finding hits of tomorrow and not just hits of today. I am prepared to bet that Mario (Banushi) is going to be a hit of today and a hit of tomorrow.” “It is important to show new names. I hope that everybody trusts us to try some of those new names”
Mackenzie’s festival is not just
a showcase of familiar and new world class artists from Australia and
internationally with new works that open our hearts and minds to the human
condition now and into the future. Mackenzie comes to the Adelaide Festival
with a passionate commitment to community engagement. To this extent she has
introduced two initiatives that mark a new phase in festival programming. Create4Adelaide is a concept borrowed
from Glasgow’s COP 26 where power lies entirely with young people who decide
what the theme for the year should be. The Festival with cultural partners who
have an investment in youth arts approached schools to participate in the
project and submit works of art on the theme of climate change. Workshops were
held in the schools throughout the state
and over a thousand works of art were submitted in three categories: extinction
of animals and plants, extreme weather events and pollution of our waterways.
The young people will then vote on which works of art will represent them in
the Adelaide Festival and these will be exhibited in the Bicentennial
Observatory of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. Mackenzie plans for this to become
an annual event in the Festival calendar and audiences will be asked to vote on
a topic for the following year.
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| Create4Adelaide with Grade 4 students |
The other free community centred event and Mackenzie’s unique contribution to a fresh approach to programming is Floods of Fire. This is a two day festival within the Festival that confronts the challenge of climate change. The event has been conceived and directed by artistic director Airan Berg from Linz in Austria and led by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Presented in the University of Adelaide Floods of Fire will celebrate the university’s 150th anniversary with over 100 South Australian partner organizations. The first part, Our Voices, Our Dreams will invite communities, cultural leaders, artists, scientists, researchers, activists and artivists to present short artistic interventions responding to the theme of Floods of Fire. Part 2 will feature Our Citizen’s Orchestra, which proved a huge success at the opening of the 2023 Adelaide Festival. The intercultural and intergenerational orchestra and chorus will work with musical director Tim Steiner from the UK and Ricardo Baptista from Portugal to reflect South Australian experiences and the climate reality we all face. Akram Khan returns to Adelaide with a remade interpretation of Kipling’s The Jungle Book set in suburbia. It reflects his continuing concern with climate change. It is set in the future where wild animals have taken over our cities and where Mowgli is stranded not in the jungle but in the city as a climate refugee. It’s something that comes from his passion first!”
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| Our Citizen's Orchestra in Floods of Fire. Photo Andrew Beveridge |
Adelaide’s North Terrace will be
the magnet for free events including Create4Adelaide,
Floods of Fire, Jose Da Silva’s Inner Sanctum at the 2024 Adelaide
Bicentennial of Art at the Art Gallery and Festival
Community where artists and audiences can mingle and meet. At the State
Library of South Australia audiences will be able to see Laurie Anderson’s I’ll Be Your Mirror. The various sites
along Adelaide’s elegant and stylish North Terrace emanate an energy and
invention that sets Mackenzie’s festival apart from many of its predecessors
and gives audiences license to participate freely. We are trying to introduce a kind of new
element of enabling anyone in the community” Mackenzie says. “You start from
what community members want to say about their lives and their futures and the
burning issues that they notice about them. Politics is integral to the way you
live your life. ”
In the wake of the result of the
referendum of a voice to parliament enshrined in the constitution nowhere is
politics more relevant than in the commissioned and programmed works of the
indigenous community of artists. “The major role of a festival is to give voice
to artists. Mackenzie says. “If ever there were a section of the arts community
whose voice needs to be heard in the current circumstances it is the First
Nations artists. It is extremely timely that we are able to give a platform to
Stephen Page’s Baleen Moondjan, the
opening event on Glenelg Beach, to Jacob Boehme’s Guuranda, and Daniel Riley’s Marrow. They are all making new works that
are being workshopped now. That is
incredibly important. There has never been a more urgent time to be insuring
that they have a voice Ngapa William Cooper which was a highlight of the ’23 festival
returns with Dr. Lou Emmett, Lior and Nigel Westlake. It will be performed with
Lior and Westlake’s first song cycle, Compassion.
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| Barrie Kosky's production of The Threepenny Opera |
In a programme as rich and
diverse as the 2024 Adelaide Festival, I ask the impossible question. If
audiences were coming from intestate and could only afford to choose a
selection of events, what would Mackenzie recommend? “You are so mean to ask
that” Mackenzie retorts. The starting point might be the festival programme on
the Adelaide Festival website www.adelaidefestival.com.au
which also includes Writer’s Week and WOMADelaide. There is a pause before
Mackenzie offers some insight into the unmissable. “You won’t get another
chance to see Igor Stravinsky’s first opera The
Nightingale and Other Fables directed by Robert Le Page with such
theatrical magic. It is such an outstanding opera, rarely done and you’ll never
see it done in Australia and I doubt that it will ever be done again in our
lifetime. I would also say that in that first weekend Jacob Boehme’s Guuranda is going to go down in festival
history as is Stephen Page’s Baleen
Moondjan. Another unmissable production in that first week is Barrie
Kosky’s astounding production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Victorian
satire The Threepenny Opera, direct
from the legendary Berliner Ensemble. Also the third world premier event that
weekend is Restless Theatre’s Private
View, giving voice to people with disabilities who do not always get the
chance to talk about love and romance and sex. They are approaching this with their
impeccable standard. I love Restless ‘s work”
Lovers of performance art will be
intrigued by Takeover, a global
participatory project from the Marina Abramovic Institute. Aficionados of world
music will be enthralled by the performances at WOMADelaide and literature
lovers and those with a passion for ideas will again flock to Writers’ Week.
Mackenzie has created a festival for everyone . She pauses to reflect on her
program for the 2024 Adelaide Festival. “I’m living my dream” It is a dream
that she is excited to share with artists and audiences when the festival opens
with Stephen Page’s Baleen Moondjan
on the beach at the seaside suburb of Glenelg on March 1st.
Adelaide Festival
March 1-17 2024
Bookings and Festival Program on www.adelaidefestival.com.au
Phone: Adelaide Festival 1300 393
404024
Ticketek 131 246
