It's around 4.30am in a tiny blue-lit 70s hotel room in a mushroom-shaped concrete bunker above Sydney's CBD, and I'm struggling to sleep. Or is it that I'm struggling to wake up? I've submitted myself to an overnight sonic experience (experiment?) called The Lucid, by American artist Kelsey Lu: I will be bathed in sound for eight hours, with the prospect of having "lucid dreams".
It's one of Sydney Festival's major works.
And so it is that I wake in the small hours, convinced that I've just had a dream within a dream — both of them intense. Evidently my nervous system is having none of it: My heart rate is elevated, my skin is hot, I'm sweating. I search for an 'off' button on the yellow-tasselled speaker near the end of the bed — at this point emitting chirpy worms of sound over an ominous, deep (interminable!) electronic pulse — before deciding that this would be unsportsmanlike.
I retreat to the bathroom (bless the thick, sound-diminishing, solid-wood door — possibly a 70s original) for a moment of deep breathing. For the next two hours, I hover in a liminal space between sleep and dream.
I have no regrets: The experience was more positive than not — and it was both unique and fascinating. Certainly memorable.
The Lucid: A Dream Portal to Awakening is one of several works in Sydney Festival that offer punters unusual access to architectural icons (in this case, the Harry Seidler-designed tower at 25 Martin Place), and one of many works touted by its programming team as "immersive" experiences.
It's partly a canny gambit: In a post-COVID arts economy where audiences are lagging, offering distinctive, enticing programming — "money can't buy" experiences, as Sydney Festival director Olivia Ansell puts it — is an existential necessity.
Across the festival's opening week, I danced at midnight in the ballroom of Sydney Masonic Centre; and greeted the dawn on the grassy, harbourside lawns of Vaucluse's Strickland Estate, to the strains of ambient electronica.
I listened to an apocalyptic opera at a beach inside Sydney Town Hall — and later that night, to a polar storm, while seated inside an inflatable igloo within a concrete bay at Carriageworks.
I sat with 500-plus people in a darkened theatre at 11am on a Sunday watching Drag Race Down Under's Kween Kong do the splits. I also sat in an underground vault, in the dark, on my own, and listened to an audio work threaded with saxophone and positive affirmations.
(Apparently three separate audience members reported seeing a similar-looking ghost in the vault during this week's performances of In Chamber, by UK artist Alabaster dePlume — a true 'money-can't-buy' experience).
Ansell frames this year's Festival — her second, after a baptism of fire in 2022, plagued by COVID, weather, and a boycott — as one of joy.
"We've had some challenging years, a lot of challenging things going on," she reflects.
"And it's nice sometimes to not just have the hard conversations and the important conversations — [though] we really have to do that through the art — but also sometimes it's wonderful just to feel a sense of transportation and joy from coming to the festival; to walk away feeling like your shoulders are a little bit lighter, from having had that sort of 'exhale moment'."
She and her programming team have put together a line-up dominated by work that is gentle, playful, fun — and peppered with unusual venues and experiences that are frequently described as "immersive" and "intimate".
In place of the Festival Garden (formerly in Hyde Park) of previous years, Ansell describes "micro precincts" across the city, including free music and food trucks at the Seymour Centre and an inflatable water garden at Darling Harbour's Tumbalong Park.
Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf 1 has been temporarily transformed into a cabaret venue, and there's a nightly magic show in a pop-up sake bar in Darling Harbour. There are retro aerobics classes at Ashfield pool, and theatre in a Parramatta bowling alley.
Instead of big indoor concerts or a large outdoor venue, this year's music hub is a 200-capacity retro lounge beneath the Seidler building, re-christened The Weary Traveller — where audiences can see cult favourites and lesser known Australian and international acts.
Melbourne duo HTRK, accustomed to far larger venues, is playing two nights.
Music programmer Chris Twite says: "When we reached out to HTRK and said 'This is the space, this is what we're doing', they were very much like, 'We want to be part of this, because we see how exciting it's going to be and how memorable it'll be for us and our fans.'"
Frida Kahlo at Barangaroo
Perhaps the apex of Sydney Festival's experience mania is Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon, an interactive exhibition at The Cutaway at Barangaroo, created by Barcelona studio Layers of Reality.
In the same ilk as popular multisensory exhibitions Van Gogh Alive and Monet and Friends, Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon offers up a series of rooms in which digital art is projected at a large scale — except in this case, it's not Frida Kahlo's art: none of her works appear in this exhibition, which is billed as an "immersive biography".
Across 11 spaces, viewers are offered the usual written biography (most of it via a succession of wall placards in the opening stretch) and black-and-white photos of the artist, alongside digital works that interpret her life's key moments, her art's key symbols, and her personal iconography.
There's a VR experience with a surrealist sensibility; an animated "dream visualisation" generated by algorithm, that riffs on Kahlo's 1932 painting Henry Ford Hospital; and a 'hologram' that purports to represent "the instant" that changed her life (the bus accident in 1924 that left her with chronic pain and physical disabilities).
The largest space is dedicated to an audio-visual "biography" projected onto all four walls and the floor; the second-largest is named La Rosita (after the bar that Frida and her students decorated in 1943) and scattered with small tables where visitors can colour in pictures of the artist — and then project these onto the walls. At the exhibition exit is a workshop space with buckets of synthetic flowers, where you can make a flower crown (for $35).
"One of the key themes amongst audiences, coming out of the pandemic, is people want experiences that they can be part of — almost 'money can't buy' experiences," says Ansell.
The decision to not include Kahlo's art is explained by Layers of Reality creative producer Rosa Monge as a result of copyright (and associated costs), logistics and narrative.
Importantly, the studio wanted to distinguish itself from various other immersive and museum exhibitions focusing on Kahlo's art.
"It's a decision that was made at the very beginning. We wanted to explore why she's the icon she's become today — how strong of a woman she is. And we believed that the best way to know her was to explain her life," says Monge.
Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon premiered in Barcelona in December 2021, which is where Ansell saw it.
"I looked at the hologram technique and other installations, and I suggested that maybe we take the scale up and increase the ratio, because I could really see it working down at The Cutaway," the festival director says.
The exhibition has toured Europe and America, but the Australian iteration, exclusive to Sydney Festival, is the largest yet — and in fact the largest event the festival has built in its 46-year history.
Tickets for the opening week had sold out before it opened on January 4, and it has been extended until March.
Sun & Sea
Immersive or not, festival shows are exciting in their own way: It's an opportunity for artists to try new work, take risks, and invite the audience to push their own boundaries — somewhat at a remove from commercial pressures.
This year's festival sees the return of international headliners: from France, physical theatre maestro James Thierrée presenting his ode to lockdown insanity, Room; from Spain, flamenco queen Sara Baras, presenting her showcase Alma.
The opening weekend centrepiece was Sun & Sea: an opera by Lithuanian artists Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, which took place on a beach inside Sydney Town Hall, made from 26 tonnes of sand.
Over the course of four back-to-back hour-long 'loops' each day, a mix of 70 international and local singers and performers (and one dog) re-enacted beach life in its joy and also its banality (reading, exercise, board games, shuttlecock) while singing about topics as mundane as sunscreen and as existential as coral bleaching, while the audience perambulated the mezzanine balconies of the Centennial Hall (audiences were ushered in and out at the hour mark).
Anxiety and melancholia thrum below the surface of the work, erupting in minor chords, dissonance, and absurdist lyrics. As librettist Vaiva Grainytė writes in her program note:
"The sunny beach and cheerful holiday situation is just a surface with which to wrap the disaster rather than exposing it literally. Humour and irony allow the audience to enter the melancholy through a backstage door."
Sun & Sea was a hit at the 2019 Venice Biennale — where it also won the Golden Lion — and has since toured the world (Ansell saw it at Reykjavik Art Museum). It's slightly different in each iteration.
Director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė explains: "Here, the beach-goers [performers] are bringing their own habits to the beach: different games, different activities, different dynamics. So everywhere [we perform] the beach is more or less similar in some aspects, but in others very different."
She and composer Lina Lapelytė say when they travel with the show they try to experience the local beach culture, and to understand the history of that particular place.
"Everywhere we go, there are difficult narratives in that country. So we also try to be aware of those things and try to be open with inviting institutions so that they can do social integration, to make it more site specific," says Barzdžiukaitė.
The Sydney Festival iteration incorporated performers from Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, Western Sydney's River City Voices, and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Choir.
Antarctica: A meditation on oblivion
Across town, another female-led opera with climate change on its mind opened at Carriageworks as part of Sydney Festival: Antarctica, by Australian composer Mary Finsterer, making its Australian premiere following a world premiere at Holland Festival in 2022.
Antarctica is an ambitious work in every sense, born out of a symposium of scientists that Finsterer instigated at the University of Tasmania, where she is a creative fellow.
She and librettist Tom Wright spun those discussions into an opera, commissioned by Dutch chamber orchestra Asko|Schönberg (which had an existing association with Finsterer's music), and brought to the stage by Sydney Chamber Opera.
Sydney Chamber Opera are an exciting, relatively young company (founded in 2011) with a passion for new Australian work — and a strong relationship with Sydney Festival, dating back to 2014 and spanning six works.
"It's been a wonderful way for us to find new audiences," says SCO artistic director Jack Symonds.
"We find that people are much more willing to take a punt on us, if they haven't heard of us, if it's in a festival context."
Sydney Festival has also been a platform for the company to create some of its most ambitious work.
The company produced Finsterer's first opera, Biographica, in 2017, and Symonds says Antarctica "aims a lot higher in terms of what it asks musically and narratively".
Finsterer's haunting, dreamy score marries acoustic and electronic sound (a field recording of a multibeam sonar is manipulated and threaded into the mix, for example), and is infused with modernist, Baroque and Renaissance influences.
Wright's libretto starts with the discovery of the body of a young girl in the ice, as she narrates her own excavation; it then cycles back in time to the Age of Enlightenment, to follow a journey to the then-unknown polar continent by a theologian, a natural philosopher and a cartographer.
The final ingredient is the staging. Sydney Chamber Opera is known for high-end, conceptually clever productions, engaging some of the country's best (often younger) directors. For Antarctica, they returned to a favourite: Imara Savage, a former resident at Sydney Theatre Company, whose relationship with SCO stretches back a decade.
"[Some] directors would just illustrate each scene, but Imara's approach is to find the metaphorical and imagistic language that creates a wonderful counterpoint to the workings of the piece musically," says Symonds.
It was Savage and her creative team who — in the wake of the NSW floods of 2022 — chose to tease out the connection between Antarctica and Australia in terms of climate change.
"I was so interested that the weather events in this [distant] place have a direct effect on what is happening to us," she says.
Her production frames Finsterer and Wright's work within a contemporary sensibility; the performers appear in boxes within a large digital screen that feeds us algorithmically-arranged text, ranging from the names of locations and animals to excerpts from eyewitness accounts of the floods.
The creative team also teased out the idea of the buried girl: In this production, she is represented on stage by a child who watches the action silently; the narrator is conceived as a contemporary woman suffering climate anxiety — with the screen functioning, intermittently, as a portal to her mind (and the minds of the other characters, too).
"We talked about Mary's music being a journey of the soul in a metaphysical and spiritual sense," says Savage.
"Or as someone more succinctly put it, 'a meditation on oblivion'."
Blak Out
Many of Sydney Festival's big conversations happen within the Blak Out program, the curation of which is led by Sydney Festival's inaugural creative artist in residence, Jacob Nash, a Daly River man who has been living and working in Gadigal country for almost two decades, and who is also head of design at Bangarra.
This year's line-up features three world premieres: Australian Dance Theatre's Tracker, directed and choreographed by new artistic director Daniel Riley, a Wiradjuri man; Blue, a monologue written and performed by Thomas Weatherall (Heartbreak High); and the family show Hide the Dog, co-written by palawa playwright Nathan Maynard (trawlwoolway pakana) and Māori writer Jamie McCaskill (Ngāti Tamaterā, Te Ati Haunui a Pāpārangi, Ngā Puhi), and directed by Noongar man Isaac Drandic.
There's a strong thread of work by women, too, with shows by Elaine Crombie, Ursula Yovich, Deborah Cheetham and Emma Donovan; and art by Brenda L Croft and Thea Anamara Perkins taking over the walls of Old Government House Parramatta and Carriageworks, respectively.
"I think for First Nation artists, the last three years with COVID really gave people time to sit, to think, and work out what they really wanted to say, and how we want to share our messages as artists — what's important to us; what's important to our family; what's important to our community; what important for country," says Nash.
He says the results are seen in this year's program, and predicts the next two years will see a larger wave of important new work from First Nations artists across the country: "It's super exciting."
Pointing to Tracker, which explores the story of Riley's great-great uncle Alec, Nash says, "That's a big story about a really important man in our history, and his legacy. And then you go to Blue, and it's a really intimate story about family, and a relationship between a mother and son. And they're both so relevant for completely different reasons.
"They've still got this fire burning inside of them that talks about who we are. That's what excites me."
Nash speaks of Sydney Festival as an agenda-setting moment in the calendar: "Being in January, it has the opportunity to really set the tone for what we want to talk about [as First Nation people]; what are the most important stories we have to share this year."
Nowhere is this more apparent than Vigil, an annual event at Barangaroo Reserve on the eve of January 26, inaugurated in 2019 by then-artistic director Wesley Enoch, a Noonuccal Nuugi man from Stradbroke Island.
This year's event, produced by Nash in collaboration with former Bangarra artistic director Stephen Page, looks — figuratively and literally — to Me-Mel (or Goat Island), which the state government has committed to returning to the Indigenous community.
A culturally significant site of gathering that was once home to Indigenous leaders Bennelong and Barangaroo, the island has, since colonisation, been a site for convict quarters, munitions storage, police and fire services.
"It's been so many different things over time that have excluded us as First Nations people. And now, what do we do for that land to care for it?" Nash reflects.
"Whatever its journey into the future is, I think now's the right time to look across to that [island], and cleanse it."
He and Page have worked with the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council to devise a 45-minute ceremony involving smoke cleansing, flares, drones and audio-visual content.
"We've gone big," Nash says.
"You know, we make symbols in this city all the time — whether it's New Year's Eve and fireworks across the Harbour Bridge, or we light up the Opera House.
"I have a strong desire to make First Nations images in the city that remind everyone all the time: Always was, always will be; we're always here."
Sydney Festival runs until January 29. Vigil: Awaken is free and takes place from 8.30pm at Barangaroo Reserve, Hickson Rd.
