Summer in Sydney would be nothing but sunshine and visits to the beach without its growing outdoor festival season. If you want to sit in the park with your picnic and be entertained for free then the Sydney Festival has a lot to offer you.

Attracting an audience of more than a million people each year to its varied arts events, the Sydney Festival is Australia’s best attended cultural festival. Events range from free, outdoor scale spectaculars to intimate showings of new works by Australia’s premier stage talent. If you like film, dance, theatre, forums, visual arts, performance art or music you’re bound to find something worth attending in the 80+ events and three weeks of the festival, and if you’re not that keen there’s shows happening on the streets and in the city’s shopping malls and public spaces so you won’t be able to avoid seeing something.

In recent years the festival budget has allowed organisers to attract some large scale international productions and artists such as Theatre du Soleil, Philip Glass, Ian McKellen and the Netherlands Dance Theatre.

The festival usually includes a season of a large-scale performance art production set on the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House. This event is free (so you need to get there early to reserve your spot on the Opera House steps.) and one of the most popular of the festival. In recent years it has included fireworks, trapeze artists suspended from cranes, vast trampolines, huge mechanical creatures and always a huge sound and lights show. Coming away from this spectacular often the audience will have found the narrative unclear but the experience will have been one of their most memorable (and mind blowing) theatrical experiences.

Official Sydney Festival Website.

Written by  Kat Mackintosh.

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Festival Highlights

I would agree that the big spectaculars set on the harbour are the highlights of the festival. A couple of years ago the show featured an immense mechanical elephant and the year before that there was an Egyptian themed opera complete with a three dimensional pyramid set. The other festival highlight has to be the season of jazz they usually hold on the opera house concourse. You can sit in the festival bar on the harbour, sip your drink and listen to some jazz…

 

Review posted 13th June 2007 by Dan Mason.

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