Arts Festivals: same same but different

How do you program an international arts festival, and are two festivals ever the same?
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Roysten Abel’s The Kitchen can be seen at the 2015 Sydney Festival

It’s festival season in Australia, with the programs for Adelaide and Sydney just recently announced, Melbourne Festival about to wrap up for another year, and Jonathan Holloway’s fourth and final Perth Festival program waiting in the wings.

Once the various festival brochures have been published, it’s sometimes tempting to sit down and compare which festival has the best program – though such comparisons are often a fairly pointless exercise, according to Sydney Festival Director Lieven Bertels.

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Richard Watts OAM is ArtsHub's National Performing Arts Editor; he also presents the weekly program SmartArts on Three Triple R FM. Richard is a life member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, a Melbourne Fringe Festival Living Legend, and was awarded the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards' Facilitator's Prize in 2020. In 2021 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Green Room Awards Association. Most recently, Richard received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in June 2024. Follow him on Twitter: @richardthewatts