2022 Adelaide Festival Program

The 37th Adelaide Festival program will run over 17 days from Friday 4 to Sunday 20 March, 2022. The program offers a total of 71 events in theatre, music, opera, dance, media and visual arts, including uniquely local programs Adelaide Writers’ Week, UKARIA Chamber Landscapes and WOMADelaide.

The Festival will feature 9 World premieres, 6 Australian premieres and 17 shows playing exclusively in Adelaide.

Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield say: 

“We welcome audiences to a festival that refuses to curl and shrink, to aim low and take it easy. A feisty and defiant festival that begins with a phalanx of young bodies colliding and hurling each other through space, and ends with a hundred and fifty breathing humans pleading for the pain in our lives to fly away. We invite audiences to experience the release of primal dance, of exhilarating performance and how the spark of collegiate music making can jump centuries. It’s all there again for the taking: a celebration of body and soul and how great it is to keep them together”.

Steven Marshall, Premier of South Australia, says:

“I congratulate our Festival Directors, organisers and volunteers on a magnificent program – we are truly spoilt for choice. Whatever you are doing in March, make sure you take the opportunity to soak up some of this remarkable Festival.”

Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on Milestones and accessibility of their sixth Adelaide Festival:

Image: Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield. Photographer: Tony Lewis.

“We are celebrating the 30th anniversary of that brave, first WOMADelaide, which began as part of the 1992 Adelaide Festival program; the 40th anniversary of seminal Aussie band ICEHOUSE’s anthemic Great Southern Land; and a darker milestone: the 50th anniversary of the 1972 death of Dr George Ian Duncan, one of those sliding-door moments of enduring importance to this city.”

“We welcome back former Festival Directors Barrie Kosky and Paul Grabowsky. Barrie at the helm of our flagship opera, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel; and Grabowsky once again headlining our eclectic Summerhouse menu of contemporary musicians, this time together with PNG-born chanteuse Ngaiire.

“And we acknowledge the remarkable achievements of Adelaide Writers’ Week Director Jo Dyer, whose brilliant 2022 program wraps up her 3-year stewardship of this great free literary event, beloved by writers and readers alike. 

“As always, the 2022 Adelaide Festival program includes more free events: a gift to the people of our city, state and our visitors. This year, these include the unforgettable opening event Macro; the soaring Skywhales installation; the ‘conversation-we-have-to-have’, Climate Crisis and the Arts forum; the cheeky Cupid’s Koi Garden in Mount Barker and Groundswell, a fascinating interactive soundscape in Rundle Mall. Adults, kids, locals and visitors are invited to discover them all and find wonder, escape, reflection and joy.

“Meanwhile, our popular discounting programs (Tix For Next To Nix, Pay What You Can, Youth & Education) are returning to ensure that price is no barrier to attending.” 

Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on The Major Events:

“Having nurtured the development of our homegrown contemporary circus powerhouse Gravity & Other Myths through several Festivals, it feels right to present them as our free Adelaide Festival opening extravaganza on our first Saturday night – and it’s exciting to know that the same show will travel the seas next August to close the 2022 Edinburgh International Festival.

“It’s equally fitting that our own Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Elder Conservatorium Chorale and Graduate Singers will farewell this 2022 Festival with Prayer for the Living, an uplifting Sunday-twilight choral finale that reaffirms meaning and hope in this era of uncertainty and change.”

Image: Macro

Local contemporary circus company Gravity and Other Myths teams up with dance sensations Djuki Mala from North East Arnhem Land to present Macro, featuring a 30-strong acrobatic troupe, a mass choir, ancient Celtic rhythms, fireworks and giant projection scrims in a free family event that will kick off the 2022 Festival.

Another major event, on Sunday evening of the opening weekend, will be ICEHOUSE: Great Southern Land 2022, a concert celebrating the 40th anniversary of the band's legendary anthem. Also on the bill will be yidaki master William Barton and Groote Eylandt’s ARIA-nominated blues and roots artist, Emily Wurramara.

Both Macro and ICEHOUSE will play at Adelaide Oval’s Village Green.

Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on the Opera program:

“As Australia’s most celebrated international opera director, Barrie Kosky is adored for the startling vision he brings to familiar classics, so we were delighted to invite him back with a work never before seen in Australia, The Golden Cockerel, featuring the voices of operatic superstars Pavlo Hunka, Venera Gimadieva and Andrei Popov, plus our magnificent Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.”

“Far removed from Rimsky-Korsakov’s extraordinary dreamscape, Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan, is an essential chapter from our state’s history. In an almost documentary-style oratorio, this powerful new work demonstrates opera’s capacity to express emotional and imaginative truths, otherwise obscured by the infamy of Duncan’s death”. 

Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan marks 50 years since the infamous drowning of Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan, which triggered an alleged police cover-up, a city-wide scandal, national outrage, a Scotland Yard investigation, pioneering gay law reform but no convictions. The new oratorio is the product of Australian creative talents: librettists Alana Valentine and Christos Tsiolkas; composer Joe Twist; director Neil Armfield and choreographer Lewis Major.

Based on 30 years of research by local historian Tim Reeves, this artistic response to a landmark tragedy is a joint commission between Adelaide Festival, Feast Festival and State Opera South Australia.

Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on the Theatre program:

“Theatre-makers have used the travails of the last two years to fully realise the opportunities that new technologies offer audiences. The 2022 theatre program captures a trend toward one-on-one interactive experiences, audio theatre events using cutting edge binaural technology and soundscapes, audacious use of live and pre-recorded video, cross-artform experimentation and – as ever - extraordinary scriptwriting delivered by brilliant performers.” 

Image: Eryn Jean Norvill in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Photographer: Daniel Boud

Sydney Theatre Company’s remarkable stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’ The Picture of Dorian Gray for is directed by Kip Williams, with the use of live and pre-recorded video allowing Eryn Jean Norvill to play all 26 characters simultaneously.

The Queen’s Theatre is the venue for Blindness, Donmar Warehouse’s adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago’s novel. Adapted by Simon Stevens, its depiction of the aftermath of a global pandemic makes for riveting, adrenalin-fuelled theatre, told entirely through sound and the voice of Juliet Stevenson.

The Nightline by theatre/sound-artist duo Roslyn Oades and Bob Scott; The Photo Box by Adelaide’s Vitalstatistix and Brink Productions and starring Emma Beech; and Sex and Death_and the Internet from Melbourne artist Samara Hersch, all revolve around communication – over the years, between generations and via differing modes – and immerse the spectator in their telling: whether in a room full of 70s rotary-dial phones; pouring over old photos in a regional South Australian town; talking intimately to a stranger across the age divide.

The solo role in Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys, with its gearshift between Fleabag-style hilarity and searing horror, gives Justine Clarke an opportunity to reveal the full range of her talents, in a State Theatre Company production directed by Mitchell Butel.

The Festival’s hub and Festival Club returns at The Summerhouse

With a line-up of events drawing crowds to the riverbank precinct in the Adelaide autumn, punters can enjoy Australian performers Kate Ceberano, and The Whitlams, plus Billy Davis & The Good Lords, Genesis Owusu, Josh Cohen, Connan Mockasin, Montaigne, Ladyhawke, Babe Rainbow, Client Liaison, Isaiah Firebrace and plenty more in an enticing and eclectic mix of popular genres.

WOMADelaide returns to Botanic Park for its 30^th birthday to showcase the very best traditional and contemporary music, arts and dance: 100 performances across seven stages. The first line-up announcement will be made in November. 

Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on The Dance and Dance Theatre programs:

“The 2022 dance program showcases great dance-makers pushing into new directions and reinventing their individual choreographic language. Pina Bausch’s seminal Rite of Spring is recreated by 38 African dancers while Bangarra Dance Theatre and the UK’s Lost Dog merge theatre and dance to tell old stories coming face to face with a new world. And in a highly-anticipated world premiere, Australia’s most dazzling choreographic talent Stephanie Lake matches 9 dancers with 9 drummers in a night of explosive energy and sound.”

The recently renovated Her Majesty’s Theatre is the venue for a Festival-exclusive major dance work. The Rite of Spring / common ground[s] emanates from Germany, Senegal and the UK; produced by the Pina Bausch Foundation, École des Sables and Sadler's Wells; choreography by the late Pina Bausch, her contemporary Germaine Acogny and Bausch colleague Malou Airaudo. 38 dancers from 14 nations across the African continent, Rite of Spring is Bausch’s response to Stravinsky’s music, recreated in its entirety.

Stephanie Lake brings her eponymous company to the Dunstan Playhouse to present the world premiere of Manifesto, with the elemental human rituals of dancing and drumming, to a score by composer Robin Fox. 

Image: Juliet & Romeo. Photographer: Jane Hobson.

Another Australian premiere, exclusive to Adelaide, Juliet & Romeo is more dance-theatre than pure dance, and more a sequel rather than a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s iconic love story: the star-crossed lovers are now 40-ish, approaching a mid-life crisis and in the midst of couples counseling - produced by the UK’s dance/theatre/comedy/circus company Lost Dog.

www.adelaidefestival.com.au

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Due to the uncertainties of COVID-19, Adelaide Festival will continue to provide a flexible ticketing policy giving patrons more flexibility in the case of illness or border closure. Visit adelaidefestival.com.au/info/booking-tickets/ for more information.