Murray Bramwell
From the moment of its program launch in the Cunard ambience of the brand new international terminal at Adelaide airport, the 2006 Adelaide Bank Festival has been looking to the skies. Director Brett Sheehy says he dislikes heavily themed festivals, but from the ornately decorated gas balloons of the opening event, Il Cielo Che Danza, to the centerpiece opera, Flight, the impression has been of things taking off.
And that included the ticket sales, which topped fifteen thousand in the first month, a forty year record. The Festival has been in need of such vital signs lately because it has had something of a bumpy ride so far this century. What with the disputed financial returns from Robyn Archer’s excellent 2000 event, followed by the Peter Sellars Experiment in 2002, the festival under Stephen Page in 2004 was very much a recovery exercise. Fortunately, it worked well, enjoyed goodwill from audiences and established some steadying structure with the appointments of Simon Bogle as General Manager and Kate Gould in programming.
2006 has been a more ambitious event. From the time of his appointment, Brett Sheehy, a veteran of the Sydney Festival, made it clear that he knew what was required of him in Adelaide. Here was a festival that had, what marketers call, a brand to protect. Adelaide claims a reputation second only to Edinburgh and Avignon, and Sheehy had visited the Festival often enough over twenty years to know that wasn’t just a parochial boast.
What is more, this year’s Festival closed the same weekend that the Rann Government went triumphantly to the polls with what might be called a no-bread-plenty-of-circuses campaign which included the Festival, Fringe, Womadelaide, a new Autumn Adelaide Cup, and – just around the hairpin bend – the Clipsal 500. Mike Rann knows, as one who once served the Dunstan Renaissance, that South Australia has big tickets on itself culturally. It is Rann who underwrote the decision for Womad to play annually, a few weeks ago it was announced that the Fringe would also. The Festival will remain biennial, a good strategy, but government has tossed a generous amount of extra coin into its hat as well.
All of this political patronage has made the Festival a closely watched affair and Sheehy has performed well on the high wire. Whatever bugs might have turned up in the organisation have been genially and efficiently dealt with – in stark contrast to the spats, beat-ups and bunker mentality that have marked one or two festivals in recent memory. Like the silvery events brochure with its “Your Festival” geometric graphics, the Festival has been sharp and shiny – well-run, on task, fiscally responsible and announcing today box office returns of $3.9 million and attendances (including Womad) exceeding 625,000.
It is fine and dandy that targets have been met, and many behind the scenes will be mightily relieved – and justly pleased. But there is quite another kind of acquittal that a festival must make – and that is to answer the question “what has it given us ?” What has it been like to be in Adelaide in March ? Has 2006 been an ethereal excitement, or in its mix of crowd pleasers and current styles, a lightweight ?
The answer is that it has, at times, been both.
Not all of Brett Sheehy’s high profile events have won over audiences. The Glyndebourne opera, Jonathan Dove’s Flight, a recent work about a group grounded overnight in a passenger terminal, despite notable performances and a lusciously lit and impressive set, disappointed those expecting a contemporary work of the stature of, say, Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. Instead they got something closer to whimsical operetta.
Another major item, David Byrne’s Here Lies Love, a song cycle based on the life of Imelda Marcos, despite the former Talking Head’s affable presence, revealed itself as underdone and inconclusive. Such are the fortunes of a festival at times. Brett Sheehy’s fostering of Byrne’s project could well have triumphed – and may yet in its next incarnation in Robyn Archer’s Liverpool Festival.
Other new works have excited audiences, however, and more than vindicated inclusion – Honk if You Are Jesus, Peter Goldsworthy’s stage adaptation (with Martin Laud Gray) of his satiric novel about IVF and the cloning of a New Age, was a sell-out success for the State Theatre Company while Garry Stewart’s latest for ADT, Devolution, has already been picked up for further festivals in the US and Europe.
The music program has been appealing and broad, spanning jazz and electronica from Pat Metheny and Talvin Singh to a vibrant rendition by the Australian Youth Orchestra of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. The performances from the Amsterdam Sinfonietta and the Rascher Saxophone Quartet, along with the Adelaide Symphony’s final night Leningrad Symphony have considerably bolstered the music stocks in the festival. Elsewhere Womadelaide continues as a major event in its own right, bringing depth and diversity to the second weekend. The after hours club – the Persian Garden, also the location for the As Night Softly Falls program, has proven to be just the place to gently rock the Casbah, the large palms and wandering camels, adding an exotic touch to the mostly balmy nights.
Festivals are often remembered for their signal moments – those epiphanies that remind us of how imaginative and affecting performed art can be. In the past, in Adelaide, it has been the work of Robert Lepage, the Rustaveli Company, Frankfurt Ballett and David Gulpilil. In 2006, Nora, Thomas Ostermeier’s adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was splendid, less for its altered ending and strobe and punk tactics, but for the intelligence and wit of its reading of a play still challenging us from 1879. The other highlight has been The Forsythe Company’s Three Atmospheric Studies, a work of startling originality which uses movement and text, processed sound and silence, to make us feel the value and meaning of the life – and death – of a mother’s child.
These two events alone have a gravity and seriousness that adds substance and range to Sheehy’s program. Ultimately, it has been an airy imagining, but not a festival lite. That much has seemed effortless in presentation but, also, on reflection, rewarding and provocative, is indication that, even in cynical times, Brett Sheehy has put wings under this Adelaide Festival. We look forward to where it will glide in 2008.
“Festive City in Full Flight” The Australian, March 20, 2006, p.19.