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| Our favourite shows from this year's Sydney Festival often examined the lives of women and queer people, including disco musical Converted! (pictured). (Supplied: ATYP / Daniel Boud) |
By Ce Benedict
Sydney Festival finished up over the weekend, capping 23 days of music, performance and a little bit of magic.
It was the final festival of outgoing director Olivia Ansell, who leaves to helm Luminato Festival in Toronto. And it was mostly successful. It brought women, queer and culturally diverse talent to the forefront, and art into underused spaces in Sydney, like the Darlinghurst Courthouse for A Model for Murder.
In the first week especially, it offered political statements: Antigone in the Amazon grappled with the deforestation of the Amazon through Greek myth; in Dark Noon, South African artists re-imagined the history of the United States as a western.
This festival, the politics of art yet again spilled out into a real-world debate.
Air Time, a circus show for families by Sydney physical theatre company Branch Nebula, opened with a Palestinian performer offering a statement of solidarity with the people of Gaza. After an audience complaint, the festival issued a content warning for the show, leading to accusations of censorship from artists in the festival.
These events follow a boycott of the 2022 festival — Ansell's first — by more than 30 acts or events, after it accepted $20,000 in sponsorship from the Israeli embassy in Canberra.
While there's no denying the uneasy relationship between art and politics, there was much to celebrate about this year's festival and we caught as much as we humanly could. Here are seven of our favourite shows.
Read on here.
First published ABC News, January 29, 2025
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