PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and a strong Indigenous program have been announced in the program for Sydney festival 2017, the first of three under the curation of Wesley Enoch, the festival’s first Indigenous artistic director.
The festival, which takes place in January, will also include the first major exhibition of work by the Australian artist Myuran Sukumaran of the Bali Nine, who was executed last year by Indonesia for heroin smuggling; and a major program of world-class circus and physical theatre, Circus City, which will take over western Sydney venues over the next three years.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds will be bringing Cave’s first live shows since the release of Skeleton Tree, and the shock death of his son, to Australia, with two sets at Sydney festival supported by the Necks; and Harvey will be returning with a 10-piece band and songs from her latest album, The Hope Six Demolition Project.
Among the festival’s best photo opportunities, 1.1m plastic balls will be making “an ocean without sharks” at the Cutaway in Barangaroo reserve – an enormous adult ball pit put together by the US company Snarkitecture; and six performers from the Sydney Dance Company will be moving nude through the Art Gallery of New South Wales, co-presented with AGNSW’s summer exhibition Nude: Art from the Tate collection.
There will also be work from leading international companies including the UK physical theatre troupe Gecko, who are bringing the Australian exclusive performance of Institute; Cheek By Jowl and Pushkin Theatre’s award-winning exploration of Russian politics (and Shakespeare), Measure for Measure; Cirque Eloize’s enormous, high-energy blend of circus and urban dance, iD; and Complicite (UK), who are bringing The Encounter, which uses groundbreaking sound design and high-tech equipment to plunge the audience into the Amazon.
Enoch described The Encounter as the easiest programming decision he had made. “The aural stimulation provokes a physiological response, so at one point [when I saw it in Manchester], they were talking about tracking through the jungle and how hot it was, and I literally broke out in a sweat.”
The Encounter comprises part of a program focus on the senses, which will also include Imagined Touch, an immersive performance by deafblind artists Heather Lawson and Michelle Stevens; and Scent of Sydney by “olfactive artist” Cat Jones, who will be hosting talks about smells and inviting the public to contribute to an “olfactory portrait of our city” that will eventually be turned into a scent.
“There’s a whole big international trend around ideas of sensory stimulation or sensory deprivation, and I’m reading that as an artistic response to the digital and virtual world that we’re living in,” Enoch said. “Our kind of lifestyles are leading us away from the corporeal – and artists are doing different things to invite us back into our bodies.”
Speaking to Guardian Australia before the program announcement, Enoch said he had been around the world six times since being appointed to take the reins from the festival’s outgoing artistic director, Lieven Bertels. For his first program, he said, his personal politics were very much in play: “Of course I’m going to do an Indigenous program, that’s par for the course for me.”
Bayala: Let’s Speak Sydney Language is a multifaceted project sharing and celebrating the Indigenous heritage and languages of Sydney. Eora and Darug community leaders will be leading classes, talks and an installation, with a mass choral performance of a new song in local language, commissioned to be performed on 26 January.
“My job is not to simplify what is a very complex issue,” Enoch said. “In some respects, what I want to do over the next three years is just keep building this up.”
Enoch, who is a member of the NSW Australia Day committee, said he had mixed feelings about the celebration of the date, which marks the arrival of the first fleet of British ships at Port Jackson, NSW, in 1788. “I’m deeply concerned by a whole range of things on that day … [but] if you change the day from 26th of January to something else, can we continue to talk about what it means?” he said. “I don’t want to lose that conversation about Aboriginal Australia.”
The Indigenous program also includes the world premiere of The Seasons, a new play written by the Indigenous playwright Nathan Maynard and performed by an all-Indigenous cast including Trevor Jamieson (Cleverman, The Secret River); and 1967: Music in the Key of Yes, which will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum through song, performed by Dan Sultan, Leah Flanagan, Yirrmal, Adalita, Thelma Plum and others.
In Blood on the Dance Floor, the choreographer and writer Jacob Boehme will be negotiating his Indigenous heritage and his HIV-positive status through movement and a monologue about the stories blood can carry; and there will be a road trip comedy from Ilbijerri Theatre Company, co-presented with Belvoir, alongside a major Vernon Ah Kee exhibition, and Yellamundie: the National First Peoples Playwrighting festival.
The 2017 program is bursting with Australian work, with world premieres including Urban Theatre Projects’ Home Country; National Theatre of Parramatta’s Hakawati; Sydney Chamber Opera’s Biographica; and new work by the internationally acclaimed Australian circus troupe Circa, Humans.
There will also be a celebration of the work of Patricia Cornelius, whom Enoch describes as “one of the most awarded playwrights in Australia, and one of the least-performed”; a second Sydney run of the Helpmann award-winning Ladies in Black; and The Second Coming, a production by the Australian cabaret/burlesque troupe Briefs who are returning from sell-out seasons in Berlin and London.
Enoch, who was formerly artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company and has directed six productions for past Sydney festivals, including The Sapphires, said the focus on Australian work was key.
“Because the recent funding cuts from the small to medium sector, I thought, OK, what role can this festival play and how can we look at supporting the small to medium sector? Or how do we engage in the politics of what our local arts are about?”
• Sydney festival 2017 runs from 7 to 29 January
