There was a Dickensian sense of living in the best and worst of times in Adelaide last weekend. As Russia's war in the Ukraine intensified and artists and arts organisations down the east coast were hit by floods, Australia's festival capital was sunny for the opening of Adelaide Festival, which defied two years of COVID-related obstacles to open — and broke the 'international arts' drought, with major productions from Africa and Europe.
Ahead of opening weekend, the festival had almost sold-out (albeit at 75 per cent capacity) its international headliners — Barrie Kosky's production of The Golden Cockerel and Sadler's Wells' production of Pina Bausch's iconic 1975 work The Rite of Spring — and added a performance to its world premiere season of Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan, an oratorio by Australian composer Joseph Twist directed by Adelaide Festival co-artistic director Neil Armfield.
The Festival was not entirely unscathed: ahead of opening night, there were calls to cancel The Golden Cockerel, a production of a Russian opera featuring Russian artists; and co-artistic director Rachel Healy was sidelined for seven days of home isolation, after her son tested positive for COVID.
Neither the pandemic nor the war were ever far from thoughts over the weekend — whether you were immersed in Donmar Warehouse's audio-led adaptation of José Saramago's pandemic allegory Blindness, or an opera about a paranoid, war-mad Tsar who pre-emptively attacks a neighbouring country.
Speaking to ABC Adelaide about the decision to go ahead with The Golden Cockerel, Healy said: "[This production] has been created by a company of artists from eight different nations, including Ukraine and Russia. And they are all horrified at how art is mirroring life outside the doors of the theatre. But they believe, as we do, that art does put a mirror up to society. … The work is an allegory about the foolishness of leaders who believe that military antagonism is the only way forward."
At the opening night's curtain call, one of the performers was draped in Ukraine's national colours.
Pandemic programming
Adelaide Festival has a reputation for delivering international arts, and Healy says even under COVID restrictions, going 'all-Australian' — as other state festivals have — was not an option.
"We were created [in 1960] in the mould of Edinburgh International Festival, which was itself created as a response to the Second World War [with] internationalism in its DNA."
"[Also] you've got to remember that Adelaide is not like Sydney or Melbourne, that has a parade of international artists coming through, for example, Sydney Opera House."
In 2021, Adelaide Festival brought international arts to its audience by live-streaming works from Moscow and New York, among other places.
In 2022, the chance to bring artists to Australia was back on the table but the border reopening on February 21 was too late to secure many of the acts they wanted — given that the program had to be locked off by September 2021 at the latest.
Even in August, with the festival opening five months away, "SA Health were only prepared to commit to the kind of health settings as if the festival was happening the next week," Healy says.
"[So] we were compelled to ask all of the international companies that were invited, if they would be prepared — in a worst case scenario — to do the 14-day quarantine in Australian medi-hotels."
Around three-quarters of those invited declined.
What this year's international programming lacked in size, however, it made up for in complexity.
The Rite of Spring alone saw 51 performers and creatives fly in from 14 African countries.
Hurdles included the extensive visa documentation requirements, fiddly flight connections that were foxed by last-minute cancellations, and coordinating each country's vaccine protocols and certification with Australian requirements (Senegal, for instance, offers two vaccines by the same company, only one of which is accepted by Australian authorities — but the the country's vaccine certificates don't distinguish between the two varieties).
And then there was the soil that the dancers performed on, which had to pass Australia's biosecurity protocols.
"But the work is extraordinary. And to have work like that and artists like that here in Adelaide right now feels incredibly important — alongside the magnificent work that's been created by our local companies and by companies around Australia."
Australian artists on an international stage
Adelaide Festival has a history of 'matchmaking' between international artists and local companies — most famously, bringing out theatre legend Peter Brook in the 80s to create The Mahabharata and The Conference of Birds with local artists; or more recently, connecting Dublin's Draíocht Arts Centre with the State Theatre Company of South Australia and small-to-medium Adelaide company Slingsby to create the 2021 show The Boy Who Talked To Dogs.
For 2022, the festival brokered a match between a collective of Australian artists — including Adelaide circus ensemble Gravity and Other Myths, Indigenous Australian dance group Djuki Mala and Kaurna company Yellaka — with Scottish artists, to create the opening night event MACRO.
The show was co-commissioned by Edinburgh International Festival, where it will be the opening event in August.
MACRO feels in many ways like the inevitable result of Gravity and Other Myths' evolving relationship with Adelaide Festival, which began around 2016 when Rachel Healy, newly appointed to the festival, arrived in town and caught a performance of their show A Simple Space at the Fringe.
She promptly commissioned a work for Adelaide Festival — and with the extra funding and creative infrastructure, GOM created Backbone (2017), which went on to be a huge international hit. This was followed in 2019 by Out of Chaos, and in 2021 by The Pulse — both also commissioned by Adelaide Festival.
MACRO takes its spine (and a number of sequences) from The Pulse, which combined the acrobatics that have made GOM famous with South Australia's Aurora choir, and music by Turkish-born Sydney-based composer Ekrem Phoenix.
Darcy Grant, creative lead for GOM — and director of the company's last three shows — says when Adelaide Festival approached him with the idea of adapting The Pulse, with an international component and a short timeline, he knew it had to involve "Scottish tradition and First Nations Australia".
He reached out to an old circus colleague, Josh Bond — artistic director of Djuki Mala; and original member Wakara Gondarra.
Edinburgh Festival's artistic director, Fergus Linehan, connected him with Gaelic music specialist Aidan O'Rourke.
The final result represents GOM's most ambitious project to date, bringing together more than 60 acrobats, dancers, singers and musicians on stage.
In coming together, they've created something unexpected; less of a celebratory spectacle and more reflective — even melancholic, at times.
MACRO opens not with a Welcome to Country, but a "Spirit of Place" ceremony led by Karl Winda Telfer, Burka (senior cultural custodian of ceremony) of the Mullawirra meyunna (Dry Forest people, Southern Country), and his daughters.
He said the ceremony was also inspired by the work of his mother: "She spoke that spirit of place, and she worked all her life to try to connect the wider community to [that], so that they can understand what it means for us."
Telfer told the opening night audience that they were on tarnda womma ("kangaroo plains"), now called Adelaide Oval.
"This place here is where the skin of our red kangaroo was replaced with the skin of the sheep. And when that happened, we lost our spirit of place, our country. [It's] squares now; squares put over our circles … Truth telling is what we need. So we can move forward."
His daughter also spoke as part of the ceremony — and Telfer later told me this was essential: "The women's voices need to be not just heard, but listened to once again … In our old world, the women's voices were very, very important."
A central section of MACRO, named Lamento after Monteverdi's madrigal Lamento Della Ninfa, sprang out of the ensemble's shared sense of loss.
Grant says: "When you're talking about First Nations Australia, or the Scottish, [with] the English clearing out the highlands to make way for sheep farms, there's this real connection to the things that get lost along the way — at a colonial level, at a cultural level."
He says the ensemble members were also reflecting on two years of living through the pandemic.
"It was like, 'We can be hopeful, but let's be hopeful and together and also acknowledge our loss.'"
He says Telfer and Bond were crucial in leading the development of MACRO, but also a broader conversation that will shape the company going forward.
"It's a lot further from what I thought working on an opening piece would be, in some ways," Grant admits. "I sort of thought it would be a bit more like a gig.
"[It's become] a kind of way of evolving GOM, towards a really awesome, critical discussion about place and people, and also growing our community by performing with local people."
Messy stories on the main stage
Gravity and Other Myths is a prime example of how an artist or company's development can be turbo-charged by the bigger platform, infrastructure and budget that a festival can deliver.
Adelaide performer Emma Beech, who premiered her new show The Photo Box at Adelaide Festival this year, is another.
Healy saw her perform soon after she arrived in Adelaide in 2016.
"I fell in love with her as a performer. She works from her own life, and she's extremely charismatic, very funny, very dry. She's got such an interesting, disarming perspective on the world," Healy says.
"She traverses a kind of intimacy with the audience and a theatricality that is really, uniquely her own."
Healy says she wanted to commission something straight away — but Beech was busy wrangling toddler triplets among other things, and so it was a slightly longer path to The Photo Box.
The work, which is co-produced by Port Adelaide arts company Vitalstatistix (a long-time champion of Beech's work), arose after Beech — the last of nine children — was given a box of photographs by her parents.
The result is her most personal show to date, and a departure from a practice that has largely revolved around her interest in talking to strangers.
Trying to unpack the stories with her family proved more uncomfortable than she'd anticipated, and after a particularly difficult conversation with her dad early on in the process, she decided to refocus the work on her own story.
"This is my perspective. It's my journey. I'm not going to make everybody start thinking about things that if they'd wanted to think about them, they would have," she explains.
In The Photo Box, she talks to the audience about growing up in Barmera, a town in the Riverland region of South Australia, the youngest by seven years in a large family.
"It's actually quite a dark place and you really have a lot of access to a lot of darkness and a lot of drugs and a lot of goodness and a lot of beauty — and it's all right there," Beech tells me later that weekend.
Over the course of the show she takes the audience through her life — traversing school plays, overseas trips, failed relationships, experimentation with hard drugs, a developing art practice, and a stint in natal intensive care with her triplets.
She also reflects on the show itself — and the art, psychology and ethics of telling family stories.
The Photo Box is ultimately a messy, odd story — in the way that life is messy and odd — and strange in the telling: part TED Talk, part performance art, including an interlude where Beech flaps around on the floor like the proverbial fish out of water.
She says doing this at Adelaide Festival was a dream.
"How exciting to have an unusual kind of person telling an unusual kind of story in an unusual kind of way. Being able to be here doing this right now, with so much support — I am definitely aware of that and how lucky I am."
Down the road, dancer and choreographer Daniel Jaber was also getting messy on opening weekend — with his seven-hour endurance performance Rite, programmed as part of Samstag Museum of Art's Adelaide Festival program (alongside works by acclaimed UK video artist Isaac Julien and Adelaide ceramicist Helen Fuller).
Jaber, an alumnus of Garry Stewart's Australian Dance Theatre, grew up gay in the town of Nairne, in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, with Lebanese and Maori cultural heritage, during the AIDS epidemic.
The piece sits at a nexus between his emerging interest in improvisation and his processing of past trauma.
"It speaks to this traumatised inner child … [and] certain challenging circumstances, which led to this sort of carrying of guilt and shame," he explains.
Taking up temporary residence on an outdoor balcony, which was scaffolded into a small black-box 'stage', Jaber undertook a seven-stage journey: stripping his dance training "baggage" away in a process of improvisation, before a series of sequences involving bondage and self-inflicted pain — and finally an "ascension", where he is suspended by leather cuffs from a scaffold, while standing on a bed of nails.
"Rite is a ritual in dealing with that shame. And really, the work is about how to find comfort in the discomfort of how you feel about yourself," he told me ahead of his performance.
"It's about becoming the messy version of yourself — this process of transitioning from feeling all of this weight and guilt and suppression, to kind of going, 'This is who I am', and owning more of yourself."
Audience members were invited to view the performance through one of two 'peepholes' in a gallery window, for five minutes at a time. From 10am to 5pm, through the duration of the show, there was always a queue of people waiting — and the attendants told me that a number of people were re-joining the queue after their five minutes were up.
The experience is emblematic of one of the unique joys of festivals: that they throw audiences in the path of work they might not usually see.
"If this [Rite] happened at a different time of year in this space, you could almost predict the audience that would come," Jaber reflects.
Late night adventures
The Nightline, showing nightly as part of Adelaide Festival (except for Mondays), is another work that taps into the festival's unique potential for chance encounters and unexpected adventures.
Taking place between the hours of 8pm and 2am in a darkened warehouse-style space in a CBD laneway, this audio-led theatre experience connects audience members with anonymous night-owls.
You're greeted at the threshold by a stern "concierge" (performer Katia Molino), and ushered into a room with rows of small tables each bearing a lamp, a rotary telephone and an old-fashioned 'line exchange' with eight slots. Each audience member sits at a table, picks up their receiver, and plugs in their cable; the calls begin — or rather, pre-recorded messages left by insomniacs, night workers and other sleepless souls.
There are tales of loneliness, exhaustion, grief; more mundane messages about how a conversation or a day has gone; confessions about secret crushes and transgressions ("When I was 17, I stole a top," one caller admits).
Audience members can stay on the line or manually switch to another via their exchange box — but there's a bit of deus ex machina magic going on too: at certain points across the 40-minute show, the lamps flicker, each line crackles and distorts, and another call cuts in; the audio in your earpiece competes with a swelling soundscape in the room.
In these moments we're all connected, together — in the same story, or dream.
The Nightline is the product of a long-term artistic relationship between theatre-maker Roslyn Oades and sound designer Bob Scott, whose collaborations include the "headphone verbatim" shows I'm Your Man and Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday.
It was devised collaboratively with lighting designer Fausto Brusamolino, site designer Clare Britton and theatre-maker Katia Molino, in a process that Oades and Scott call "recomposing from reality".
The show's first iteration took place in a disused Chinese restaurant in Blacktown in 2018, supported by Urban Theatre Projects; the next version was commissioned for the inaugural Rising Festival in Melbourne, where it premiered for one night in May 2021, before the festival was shut down by a new COVID wave.
An adjusted version showed at the National Art School in January as part of Sydney Festival — but Oades and Scott think the Adelaide version is the strongest yet, as time and experience have allowed them to reflect on and refine the work.
Each venue imbues the work with its own flavour — "We're listening to the voice of the city and that space," Oades tells me — and the creative team were excited by the unusual windows and L-shape of their Adelaide venue (Queen's Theatre) — both of which are amplified by dramatic lighting.
The phone messages in The Nightline were left by people from all over the country, including South Australia; Oades, herself an insomniac, gathered them through a national call-out that involved lots of interviews on late-night talk-back radio, where she could reach directly across the airwaves to invite listeners to call her nightline.
And as audience members leave the warehouse, they're handed a calling card with a mobile number; an invitation to join this temporary community.
"So many calls were left last night," Oades tells me on Saturday morning of opening weekend.
Part of the national conversation
State Theatre Company of South Australia's artistic director Mitchell Butel has also found in Adelaide Festival a unique opportunity to tap into a national conversation — and reach an audience beyond the company's usual base.
As part of Adelaide Festival, he is directing the premiere Australian production of Girls and Boys, by UK playwright Dennis Kelly.
A hit in 2018 at London's Royal Court, where it starred Carey Mulligan, the one-woman play is a bomb with a long fuse, shocking audiences with its investigation of male violence.
In Adelaide, where it is performed by Justine Clarke, Girls and Boys is one of several festival works — including Watershed and The Rite of Spring — that grapple with gendered violence.
The thematic thread ran through Adelaide Festival's Writers Week, too — and STCSA's public programs took advantage of this, inviting Jess Hill (author of domestic abuse exposé See What You Made Me Do), who was part of a Writers Week panel with Grace Tame, to host a Q&A with Clarke and Butel after a matinee performance of Girls and Boys.
By the end of Adelaide Festival's opening weekend, the show's three-week season had sold out.
Butel sees participation in Adelaide Festival as part of a bigger project to connect STCSA with a national audience (most recently, through interstate tours of their co-productions Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Girl From The North Country).
"Being part of Adelaide Festival is great — it's great for South Australian audiences, but it also means there's a lot of national interest in the play, and all the people coming in [to town from interstate]," says Butel.
"But also, the intersection with other ideas that's happening in a festival is a really exciting thing."
Adelaide Festival runs until March 20.
The writer travelled to Adelaide as a guest of the festival.
