Sydney Festival 2013 is Revealed

The signature event of our city in summer, the Sydney Festival, has today announced its 2013 program, and the Dirty Projectors, Vivienne Westwood, a series of blind dates, and a giant rubber ducky are all in the mix. The first line-up curated by new festival director Lieven Bertels brings to our shores more than 750 artists from almost 20 countries to present nearly 100 works of music, performance, and visual arts from January 5-27.

The Music

To make room for the musical carnival winding its way into town Sydney will re-erect many of last year’s much-loved pop-up music hubs. The Festival Bar is moving to Sydney Town Hall to play host to downtempo electronic producer Nicholas Jaar, sepulchral Mercury Prize nominee Richard Hawley, our own Dappled Cities and nu-disco pioneer Lindstrøm with the Future Classic DJs in tow. Over in Hyde Park, the Festival Garden will be the setting for an eclectic array of indoor and alfresco performances including one by tuneful darling of the interwebs Perfume Genius. If it’s the tail end of the week you can kick on at Late in the Garden, which you should definitely do on the 17th when Hunx and His Punx take it over with their unique brand of Californian bubblegum queercore.

And that’s just the ephemerals; Sydney's more established venues will be graced with the sights and sounds of art-pop rockers Dirty Projectors, Indonesian grunge band Navicular and the collaborative musical beast of David Byrne and St Vincent, the last of which we already fanned out over a few weeks ago. And don’t miss the screening of Stanley Kubrick’s recently restored 2001: A Space Odyssey, which eschews narrative in favour of a powerful classical score performed by Sydney Symphony and Sydney Philharmonic Choir.

The Performing Arts

Particularly strong on program 2013 are cutting-edge performances that play at the boundaries of music, theatre, and other worlds. In addition to the jaw-dropping Vivienne Westwood fashion show/Handel oratorio mash-up Semele Walk already announced, large-scale Catalan innovators La Fura dels Baus bring us the world premiere of opera A Masked Ball, which you can count on to be as visually adventurous as aurally so. Eraritjaritjaka, the pioneering 2004 mixed-media work with the Aboriginal title from German Heiner Gobbels gets its first and only Australian staging, and the arts of our often overlooked Asian neighbours are showcased with The Peony Pavilion and The Jade Hairpin, courtesy of Beijing's Northern Kunqu Opera Theatre. These are the tickets for the height of drama.

Non-musical highlights in the theatre include The Blind Date Project, in which a different performer each night will romance actor Bojana Novakovic as she sits alone in a karaoke bar, and Murder from Australians Erth, which brings the dark characters imagined in Nick Cave's Murder Ballads to life. In the affordable ($35) About An Hour stream, there's some real gold, including Berlin's answer to Flight of the Conchords, Die Roten Punkte in Kunst Rock; the pop culture romp As the Flames Rose We Danced to the Sirens, the Sirens by Spanish experimentalists the Sleepwalk Collective; and Curious's immersive installation The Moment I Saw You I Knew I Could Love You, where you'll reflect on biology and biography from inside the belly of a whale.

In the tradition of sell-out hits La Clique, Smoke and Mirrors, and last year's Little Match Girl, two house shows will fill the Famous Spiegeltent: dirty-sexy circus cabaret Cantina from Strut & Fret, and Frank Woodley and Simon Yates’ physical theatre and silent comedy INSIDE.

The Visual Arts

The Festival’s 2013 art output has a heavy water bias this year. Darling Harbour will spend two weeks being occupied by Florentijn Hofman’s oversize Rubber Duck, while Middle Head takes on boarders from audio-sampled Chronometer and the locally grown Notes for Walking. Away from the water, the State Library hosts silent autoteatric scavenger hunt The Quiet Volume, Song Dong's Waste Not comes to the Carriageworks' foyer and a blockbuster art meets the art gallery in the form of Francis Bacon.

And more

We don't quite understand why you'd would mess with the accessible street festival formula of past years' Festival First Nights, but we'll be happy to be proved wrong when the free Day One: An Opening in Three Acts signals the start of the festival on Saturday, January 5. The Three Acts are Fun Run (registration is not open; there is only one runner doing it in the name of art in Hyde Park), The Arrival (the rubber ducky! This can only go well), and The Daptone Super Soul Revue (the outdoor dance party everyone will be in The Domain for).

Thankfully, the Tix for Next to Nix booth will be back in Martin Place, selling $25 tickets to all shows. With this mighty program looming and La Nina gone, we're quite prepared to line up.

Check out the full program at the Sydney Festival website.

By Rima Sabina Aouf, Hannah Ongley, and Zacha Rosen. Image by Jamie Williams.