As Adelaide’s long, dry summer comes to a close in February and the warm days and blue skies of March signal the arrival of autumn, the city opens its doors to a host of festivals. A celebration of music, books, theatre, comedy and everything in between, Adelaide’s all-embracing festival season is best defined by its love of the outdoors.
This is the time of year when cafes spill over on to streets and beer gardens come alive with chatter. With beaches as little as 20 minutes away, and wine regions just an hour away, the days here are defined by long afternoons, while on the warm summer evenings Adelaide gives itself over to art.
The Adelaide Fringe is the second largest arts festival in the world after Edinburgh, and it simply takes over the city.
Alleyways, old office buildings, and empty basements are converted into new venues every year. But it’s in Adelaide’s parks that the Fringe really shines, effectively turning the whole city into a venue. The Garden of Unearthly Delights, a fixture of Rundle Park since 2000, has in turn inspired a host of venues, and now tents, bars, and attractions pop up all over the city, from Gluttony in Rymill Park to the Royal Croquet Club in Adelaide’s central Victoria Square.
This is an open-access, uncurated festival, so the best way for visitors to approach it is simply to pick up the programme and dive right in. The full line-up isn’t released until December 2015, but a handful of details have already emerged.
The 2015 highlight, Briefs, return with their jaw-dropping brand of circus, after dazzling at London’s Southbank Centre, while the women of Hot Brown Honey return with their political cabaret. New York performance artist Penny Arcade makes a long awaited return to Australia with Longing Lasts Longer. The largest section of the programme is always comedy, with comedians testing out their work before hitting the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and beyond, and in 2016 such staples as Judith Lucy, Wil Anderson and Dave Hughes headline.
The Adelaide Festival of the Arts is one of the oldest arts festivals in Australia. This prestigious event has been importing the best of international art to Adelaide since 1960.
The 2016 festival will open by taking over the skies. The new Adelaide Oval, perhaps most famous to international visitors as the home of cricket in South Australia, will be invaded by French artists Groupe F, who combine performance with spectacular video and fireworks. It’s guaranteed to be one of the biggest displays Adelaide has ever seen.
Across the Torrens river from the Oval, the Festival fills the Adelaide Festival Centre with work from around the world. One of the world’s leading contemporary dance companies, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, returns to Australia for the first time in 16 years, with a premiere of one of the dance world’s most iconic works Nelken, which will fill the Festival Theatre alongside one of Australia’s most exciting young choreographers, Atlanta Eke, with her Body of Work in The Space.
In the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, thousands of readers gather on the green grass to listen to leading writers from around the world during Adelaide Writers’ Week. The 11-hour epic The James Plays Trilogy headlines the theatre programme, together with 1927’s Golem, Castellucci’s extraordinary Go Down Moses and Australian offerings including Deluge and Erth’s Dinosaur Zoo.
Artistic Director David Sefton has always placed an emphasis on the most exciting contemporary music, making Adelaide the Australian home of Unsound. This year, he pulls out all the stops, with the return of Unsound, and stand-alone highlights including Sunn O)))) and Magma, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Sufjan Stevens.
But WOMADelaide is where the real musical heart of Adelaide’s festival season lies. The only Australian version of WOMAD, WOMADelaide can seem like a world unto itself in Botanic Park, where, on over seven stages, musicians from around the world converge, along with the best of local food, crafts, visual arts and roving performers.
Bands with as many as 20 members get thousands of people dancing under the sun and into the evening on two main stages, while the Morton Bay Fig stage hosts music of a quieter ilk, the audience lounging in the shade of the eponymous fig trees. The festival is a true family affair, though dedicated music lovers can party deep into the night with one of the many visiting DJs.
Music is at the centre of the bill, but WOMADelaide attracts all manner of artists and disciplines including an extensive series of environmental discussions in The Planet Talks held in Speakers’ Corner which will begin with the keynote address from David Suzuki. In 2016, everyone from Australian Dance Theatre to cartoonist First Dog on the Moon will take part, and likely highlights announced so far include 47SOUL, The Cat Empire, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Mahsa & Marjan Vahdat and the Violent Femmes.
All of these global stars will surely shine in Adelaide in 2016, but the real star of this diverse festival season is the city itself. With entertainment on literally every street corner, wonderful local food and drink, plus the balmy evenings and friendly locals, there’s no better time to visit one of the warmest, most livable cities on the planet.
Adelaide’s festival season runs through February and March. For more information visit the combined festivals’ website
