Your mission: rekindle the adventure

By Bryce Hallett and Lenny Ann Low
January 31, 2005 - 12:21AM

A new era is set to dawn at the Sydney Festival but how different and risky can the annual event afford to become? Will it remain eclectic and lean or will it become less geographically scattered and more focused in its ambitions?

One thing is certain, the festival needs more buzz, and less about pleasing all of the people some of the time if it's to bolster its reputation and sharpen its edge.

Irishman Fergus Linehan, who directs the next three festivals, is expected to bring greater focus and a concentration of events into the city as well as generate a spirit of adventure that some audiences have found lacking in the past couple of years.

Linehan, 35, is the youngest director to assume the festival reins and the first foreigner in the post. He comes with strong connections, a similar passion to his successor, Brett Sheehy, for original, gutsy, inspiring theatre and the resoluteness to effect change.

Sheehy was farewelled at a party at Circular Quay last night by supporters, producers, directors, artists and musicians and singers, including Nick Cave, Beth Orton and Rufus Wainwright, who attended after their Opera House performance in the festival hit Came So Far for Beauty.

The sell-out shows have given Sheehy an appropriately hip and celebratory climax to his four Sydney Festivals and an ideal vehicle to introduce Linehan, the former director of the Dublin Festival. For the past few weeks he's been keeping a low profile to enjoy the many exhibitions and shows, and no doubt pondering the event's make-up and future.

There are many wonderful things about the Sydney Festival, including its free outdoor events, the big creative names Sheehy has attracted and the quality and scope of the new Australian works coming to the fore. But there's always room for improvement to make it more vibrant and exciting.

The State Government's $2 million annual funding is hardly enough to produce a truly rich, spectacular festival. If additional funds don't flow, the festival board should look at producing a more streamlined, specialist platform and keeping it centralised. The money simply isn't there to serve all the competing interests. It's amazing to think what Sheehy achieved given the hurdles and political pressures.

The Sydney Theatre Company's general manager, Rob Brookman, insists the best festivals aim for maximum focus in the smallest geographical location. "It's hard to feel festive hopping on a train to Homebush to see a work [Transe Express's The Lazy Kings] that was meant for the streets and lanes where people actually live," he said. "I can understand the alliance with Olympic Park but it's a real dilemma ... There's a political push to take work to the west but it doesn't serve the true sense of a festival. It's well accepted that the best festivals have events concentrated in a compact area."

To recapture the buzz, Linehan should return the festival to the centre of the city, perhaps make a stronger feature of the Domain - not just the symphony and jazz - and create an imaginative festival club/village near the Opera House, in the sprawling grounds of Government House or even Sydney Square next to Sydney Town Hall. It's been said the Opera House forecourt presents security issues, yet this is never mentioned when television's mighty Australian Idol takes hold of the site for its jam-packed, frenetic showdown.

There also needs to be a greater sense of adventure, not only combining distinct art forms but seeking out unfamiliar and makeshift venues. Who can forget Cloudstreet at the wharves, or the Flood Drummers in the Hall of Industry at Fox Studios? And it's time to face the fact that the interests of sponsors don't always match the interests or demands of the public.

The festival board might like to think about cutting some apron strings to the money-spinners and popular staples that could surely stand alone. The St George OpenAir Cinema, the Bacardi Latino Festival at Darling Harbour and the Domain Series concerts are fun but, let's face it, they're more about pleasing crowds than taking a punt on the novel.

A festival should invade its environment and alter it physically and emotionally for a certain period. At least once a year, the arts should take over the daily patterns of Sydney, and its inhabitants, by infiltrating and affecting non-arts public areas, buildings and structures. Being accosted by performances of outdoor theatre on the way to work rather than by packs of salespeople dressed as mobile phones is the right kind of street theatre. And bring back the displays of visual art by young and emerging Sydney artists in bus shelters and street furniture, as seen in last year's festival - another example of a festival, however subtly, changing and enlivening its city.

Over to you, Fergus. Just remember: don't overdo the darkly comic Irish plays - we've seen lots of that already.