Cirque Éloize’s iD; image supplied.
Programming a festival is always a risk – a work that has resonated in one city may fall flat in another. Cities have their own personalities and need their own cultural visions.
But there’s a certain sameness which sometimes creeps into festival programs as directors compete for yet more cutting edge exotica. It’s a situation which Wesley Enoch, Director of Sydney Festival, is keen to avoid.
‘I joke that often, festival directors make programs with their primary audience being other festival directors, this notion of saying “What will impress them?”’ Enoch laughed.
For his debut festival in January 2017, Enoch has taken a very different route, ensuring that his program not only reflects Sydney’s unique population and geography, but that it also supports Australia’s extraordinarily diverse artists and companies.
‘The biggest worry is that our festivals become formulaic. “You need this, you need this, you need this, and you need this to be a festival.” No, what you need is to reflect the place that you come from and the people who live there,’ he said.
With that proposition as a starting point, Enoch has moved away from the idea of exclusive drawcards as his program’s foundation, towards a festival which offers a smorgasbord of some of the best work seen around Australia in recent months, as well as cutting edge work from overseas.
He believes rather than drawing people with an exclusive touring act, it’s better to build a program which has the magnetism of the city. ‘The whole “exclusive” thing was about saying “people will travel.” And yes maybe 100 people will travel interstate to see one show, or 200 people to see one show, but if you put a package together that’s unique in your city, people will come to experience your festival and experience your city through the festival – and that’s a different kind of lure for people.’
Learn more about the 2017 Sydney Festival program
Works which Enoch has selected for the 2017 Sydney festival include remounted productions of La Boite Theatre Company’s Prize Fighter, the smash hit of the 2015 Brisbane Festival; Blood on the Dance Floor, a deeply personal exploration of community and identity by Aboriginal dancer and choreographer, Jacob Boehme, originally presented by Arts House; SHIT, an unflinching look at the impact of class and misogyny by lauded Melbourne playwright Patricia Cornelius; and Spectra, a dance dialogue between artists from Tokyo and Townsville, and which premiered at this year’s OzAsia Festival.
‘I think that the more people see a work the better; the more an artist gets to express themselves and hone their work, the better,’ Enoch said of programming works which have already had seasons outside Sydney. ‘Let’s get over exclusivity and start to build a very collegial environment in which great work happens.’
Complicite’s The Encounter; photo by Gianmarco Bresadola.
Naturally, there is also an electrifying variety of recent international works on offer, including the hallucinatory Greek production Still Life; the must-see (and must-hear) British production The Encounter; and a performance by genre-defying French composer Yann Tiersen; as well as a range of new works resulting from collaborations with a cross-section of the Australian arts ecosystem.
These include the dance-meets-football production Champions, created by Form Dance Projects in consultation with coaches and athletes from the Western Sydney Wanderers’ W-League; the decade-spanning conversation Ich Nibber Dibber by post, co-presented with Campbelltown Arts Centre; ILBIJERRI Theatre Company’s road trip take on father-daughter relationships, Which Way Home at Belvoir – one of many Indigenous works in the program; and Tim Finn’s acclaimed Australian musical, Ladies in Black, from Queensland Theatre.
Circus City
A key component of Enoch’s Sydney Festival program for 2017 is the Parramatta-based project, Circus City, a program which is designed to reflect the character of the Western Suburbs. While his predecessors have experimented with a range of approaches to programming works in Western Sydney, Enoch has his own ideas about how to work with the region.
Explore the Circus City program
‘Over the decades we’ve done lots of different models: taking things that have performed in Sydney out to Parramatta or beyond; thinking of Parramatta as an offshoot of the festival that’s happening out there somewhere,’ he said.
‘What I’m trying to do is say actually, here’s an offering that is unique to Parramatta; something that you can’t see anywhere else in the festival … We’re inviting audiences to have a sense of civic pride about hosting international circus companies, national circus companies, and nationally important discussions around circus in their home town.’
Across venues including Riverside Theatres and a big top in Prince Alfred Square, Enoch has programmed circus companies and artists from as far away as Montréal and as close as Brisbane, bringing the best of circus to Parramatta.
‘There’s a long history of circus in Australia … and it’s also something that we do really, really well. So I think for lots of different reasons – the artistic reasons, the social reasons, our historical reason – circus is a great thing to put forward for people in a festival,’ said Enoch.
Cirque Éloize’s iD; image supplied.
Alongside startling performances by Canada’s acclaimed Cirque Éloize, the innovative and socially conscious UK company Ockham’s Razor, and two Queensland companies, the playful Company 2 and the remarkable Circa, Circus City is also a rare opportunity to explore the breadth and depth of circus as a contemporary art form.
‘It’s interesting, we don’t think of physical theatre or circus as having an intellectual or a cultural history. We think of it as all now, because it’s mostly young bodies in front of us. So no, deepen your understanding. What was circus like 50 years ago and how far have we come?’
Circus City also looks to the future with a new Sydney Festival initiative to foster Australian circus talent. Cirque Éloize’s performers will host an exclusive series of industry workshops and masterclasses, led by the internationally respected trainer and acrobatic designer Krzysztof Soroczyński and joined by Charlotte Mooney from Ockham’s Razor. Circa’s artists will also run tailored workshops for emerging circus professionals. The general public are also invited to get in on the fun, with trapeze workshops for young and old.
Learn more about the circus industry program
There’s also a curated exhibition of circus posters and costumes; film screenings – including the Australian premiere of documentary The Show of Shows, featuring a soundtrack composed by Sigur Rós members Georg Holm and Orri Páll Dýrason in collaboration with leading Icelandic composer Hilmar Orn Hilmarrson; and panel discussions about circus then and now, exploring everything from access issues to the history of circus in Australia.
‘Because it’s quite exhilarating to watch circus, it’s sometimes difficult to engage with the intellectual pursuits of circus. As an audience member you’re seeing these incredible skills playing out, but we don’t get those opportunities to dig deeper. Circus City is about digging deeper,’ said Enoch.
Sydney Festival 2017
www.sydneyfestival.org.au
7-9 January
