One of the best things about arts festivals, be they local or international, is the opportunity such events provide for taking the collective cultural pulse of a city, a community or an artform.
Summer is peak festival season for many Australian states, beginning with Sydney Festival and rolling on into Fringe World, Midsumma, Adelaide’s beloved ‘Mad March’ and so much more. And while March may not technically be considered summer, given the quirky Australian habit of marking the start of each season by the calendar rather than by the arrival of each successive equinox and solstice, it too is a hectic and exhilarating time, culturally speaking – with the nights still hot enough to enjoy a post-show debrief outdoors after catching a performance at the Garden of Unearthly Delights or the Hobart Festival of Comedy.
Rather than an exhaustive list of every summer arts festival on between now and late March (look out for our detailed, month by month listing of every Australian arts festival on ArtsHub soon) think of this three part series of summer festival highlights as a curated sampler to whet your appetite – a cultural charcuterie board, if you will.
In part one, covering the last few weeks of January, we’ve suggested some of the most intriguing events, performances and productions to have caught our eye. Look out for part two, covering some of February’s many interesting options, and part three, an overview of March, in the coming weeks. Now, read on!
Jump to:
Sydney Festival
On now until 26 January, Festival Director Olivia Ansell’s fourth and final Sydney Festival once again encourages audiences to discover “authentically Australian stories, Sydney stories, Gadigal stories in unusual locations[and] in different ways”, as she told us back in October. ArtsHub’s Gina Fairley has already been wowed by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright’s one-off Sydney Festival performance, praising his “genuine connection” with the audience in her five-star review, while Peter Hackney similarly awarded five stars to the “very special” Tina – A Tropical Love Story, but there are many more delights still to come.
Productions to have caught our eye include the world premiere season of The Chronicles (16-19 January), a major new work from the electrifying Stephanie Lake Company (Colossus, Manifesto); the immersive true crime story A Model Murder (now playing until 25 January), which recreates a scandalous 1954 court case in forensic and fascinating detail; the 35th anniversary recreation of Not Drowning, Waving’s stirring and exquisite 1990 album Tabaran (24 January), featuring the album’s original Papua New Guinean musicians George Telek, Pius Wasi, Emmanuel Hakalitz and Ben Hakalitz; and two unmissable First Nations works at Belvoir: the Sydney premiere of Arrernte playwright Declan Furber Gillick’s Jacky (16 January – 2 February), “a play that should be seen by everyone in Australia,” according to Kate Mulqueen’s five-star review of the original MTC season by, and Redfern Renaissance (17-25 January), a series of workshops, discussion panels and performances celebrating the groundbreaking history of National Black Theatre, which operated from 1972 to 1977 but has had – and continues to have – a significant legacy.
Fringe World
Running from 17 January to 16 February, Perth’s annual Fringe World – first held in 2011 as a pilot program to test the model and returning the following year as a fully formed festival, which quickly grew to become one of the largest Fringes in the world – is a wide-ranging celebration of everything from the spicy to the broadly palatable.
Our recommendations for Fringe World 2025 range from This’ll Be Good (22-26 January), a new show from convicted drug dealer turned comedian Andrew Hamilton, who told ArtsHub last year that “laughter can be so transportive” it made him temporarily “forget that I’m locked up in a maximum security prison”; Our Stories, Our Motherland (16-17 January), a celebration of African women’s stories, their ancestors and their heritage told though journalling, poetry, songs and spoken word; the premiere season of Izzy Stonehouse’s Braindead (4-8 February), a biting new theatre production in which recovering zombie Harriet – in remission for eight months – sits down with for an awkward Christmas dinner with the family who previously kept her chained up in the basement; and the world premiere of The Raft (31 January and 1-2 February), a showcase of the skills of CircusWA’s youth academy that’s perhaps best described as Fyre Festival meets Hitchcock’s Lifeboat – or the circus version of Triangle of Sadness.
Midsumma Festival
As with other queer cultural festivals, Melbourne’s Midsumma (19 January to 9 February) incorporates everything from St Kilda’s annual Pride March (2 February) and the festival’s closing street party Victoria’s Pride (9 February, first held in 2022 to acknowledge the 40th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Victoria and now an annual event which has expanded across the state), to sporting events, history walks and more.
Events to have caught our eye in the 2025 Midsumma Festival program include Thirty-six (21 January – 2 February), an international collaboration between two transgender writer/performers, the UK’s Jo Clifford (The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven) and local intimacy coordinator and emerging artist Bayley Turner; queer circus cabaret production Tender (29 January – 8 February), praised by our Sydney reviewer G Middleton as “a celebration [of tenderness] that spans intimacy, domination and sexuality,” in their 4½ star review; and Harry Ball: More Than a Game (27 January – 2 February), in which cabaret performer Jackson Vaughan performs as a gay footy player on the night before he’s going to be outed by a tabloid newspaper’s tell-all article.
We’re also intrigued by Sarah Carroll’s in-development showing of Fekei (8 February), a new play exploring the overlap of lesbian romance and Pasifika identity; Homophonic! (7-8 February), the annual celebration of contemporary queer classical music, which this year crosses the river to play at Theatre Works, since La Mama, where the concert is usually performed, has paused its programming; and If These Wigs Could Talk (4-9 February) by ‘The Queen of Ireland’ Panti Bliss, a subversive drag queen thrust into the role of accidental activist as a result of Ireland’s hard-won 2015 public referendum to legalise same-sex marriage. Tune in to 3RRR’s flagship arts program SmartArts on Thursday 23 January to hear Richard Watts interview Rory O’Neill, Panti Bliss’ alter-ego, about his drag queer and activism.
Look out for part two in this series on ArtsHub next week.
