The Best Free Things to See and Do at Sydney Festival 2017
Who even needs money?
The Best Free Things to See and Do at Sydney Festival 2017
Who even needs money?
Cheap festival events are great. Free festival events? Even better. Sydney Festival has done a lot in the last couple of years to up the free factor in its programming, which means you can breezily pad out your January with giant ballpit beaches, bold new exhibitions, dancing boxes full of glitter, and other outings fun and fanciful.
By the Concrete Playground team.
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As if anyone hasn’t watched Eric Forman embarrass himself at a roller disco in front of Red and Kitty and didn’t think, “I could totally do that.” Well, the Meriton Festival Village is giving you the chance to prove it with a weekly shred at Hyde Park’s very own Roller Jam. Dust off those skates, unravel the tube socks and press those short shorts, because Saturday nights in January mean DJs, disco, and desperately trying not to fall over. Runs every Saturday night from January 7 to 28.
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When you have hair as thick and lush as I do, you don’t think about hair all that much. But, for those less blessed in the follicles, this show is exactly what you need. Featuring Australia’s Prince of Polyester, Bob Downe, The Big Hair Show and Catalunyan hair wizards Osadia, the festival village plays home to curlers, straighteners, a healthy dose of matte-finish styling clay, and a solid helping of hilarity. A strange, hands on mixture of art, performance and extreme barbery, The Hair Salon will be begging you to not leave your hat on.
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Rounding out the Sydney Festival season at Carriageworks is the Night Market — curated by one of Sydney’s favourite, highly-renowned chefs Kylie Kwong. Kylie is a regular at Carriageworks, she often brings her authentic, home-style Chinese Australian cuisine to the Saturday farmers market.
Taking inspiration from the streets of Harajuku (Tokyo), Hongdae (Seoul) and AnFu Lu (Shanghai), the market will immerse you in the food, pop culture and music of contemporary Asia. As always, Carriageworks’ curated markets showcase Sydney’s best producers and chefs. More than 50 stallholders will be there on the night, presenting the very best Asian food there is to offer.
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From the perfume that reminds you of a particular person to the scent of freshly-baked cookies that brings you back to your childhood kitchen, our noses play a key role in our most treasured (and not so treasured) recollections. In her innovative installation Scent of Sydney, Cat Jones encourages us to use our olfactory system to gain a new understanding of our city. Exploring themes like democracy and resistance, this immersive piece will give you a fresh perspective on the metropolis we call home.
You can see the installation from January 7 to 29, but it’s closed on Mondays. Talks by Cat Jones are on January 10, 11, 17, 18, 24, and 25. It’s all free to attend.
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Rising sea levels, floods, fires, droughts, deforestation, wars, persecution — there are many, many reasons why hundreds of millions of people around the world have been forced to flee their homes during the past 15 years.
And EXIT, a digital installation commissioned by the Foundation Cartier, Paris, now showing at UNSW Galleries as part of Sydney Festival, makes sure you can’t ignore them. For 45 minutes, this immersive work surrounds you with 360 degrees of frankly terrifying statistics, presented as mesmerising images, text and sound. Prepare to leave wondering how on earth the Earth will possibly cope, yet compelled to do something — anything — about it.
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In words attributed to everyone from Mark Twain to Alexisonfire, we should dance like no one is watching, and Sydney artist duo Harriet Gillies and Roslyn Helper (aka zin)’s Glitterbox gives you the chance to do pretty much just that.
Stuck inside a giant colourful cube that’s pulsating with glitter, sitting atop The Star’s Sky Terrace, get your groove on to some killer tunes in an entirely unique situation that’s will make you okay with the fact that glitter doesn’t wash out for weeks.
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Bayala means ‘speak’ in the tongue of Sydney’s first people, and that’s exactly what this series of talks, workshops and performances at Sydney Festival begs of you – to speak the language that lived here, long before we did.
In 1790–91, Patyegarang, a young Aboriginal woman, taught ‘First Fleet’ English astronomer William Dawes the local language during frequent visits to his hut. That site is now known as Dawes’ Point, under the southern pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. This is where you can hear Lille Madden, a young Gadigal woman, reading the wordlists and sentences in language as spoken by Patyegarang.
The installation will be open daily from 6am-11pm throughout the festival. Become immersed as Gadigal representatives read from notebooks written in 1790, or take classes with Darug and Gadigal teachers. Check out the rare collection of artefacts that preserve the language, or take your place in the massive performance of traditional songs about country, ancestors and healing. Head to the State Library to take the plunge to learn just a little more about the history that we all share.
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When Vernon Ah-Kee was born in 1967 in Far North Queensland, he wasn’t counted as a citizen. It wasn’t until later that year that, following a referendum, the Australian Government came to officially recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Today, Ah-Kee is an internationally celebrated artist with work in collections all over the world — from Canada’s National Gallery to Hannover’s Sprengel Museum. And, as part of Sydney Festival 2017, he’s bringing us a powerful exhibition that confronts issues of race, ideology and politics.
Titled Not an animal or a plant, the show marks both Ah-Kee’s 50th birthday and the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum. Its combination of oversized drawings, paintings, text-based installations and 3D works investigates colonisation and racism, historically and contemporarily.
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After an incredibly amazing day of chilling at the beach, there’s nothing worse than being trolled by millions of grains of treacherous sand all throughout your car, your clothes – everything. Thanks to this event, sand dramas are a thing of the past.
There’s no better place to host an artificial beach than the imposing, architectural blank space at Barangaroo’s The Cutaway. Dreamed up by the off-beat team at Snarkitecture, from January 7-29 (excluding Mondays) the concrete void of the Cutaway will be transformed a beach of 1.1 million balls with no sunburn, no sharks and no worries. Dive in.
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Potentially one of the more important events at this year’s Sydney Festival is this posthumous exhibition from Australian Myuran Sukumaran. Now a household name in this country, these works were all created during Sukumaran’s incarceration in Bali’s Kerobokan Prison.
Curated by 2011 Archibald winner Ben Quilty and Campbelltown Arts Centre director Michael Dagostino, Another Day in Paradise displays not only Sukumaran’s work, but works by other artists specially commissioned in response to the death penalty. This exhibition brings to the fore the discussion surrounding capital punishment around the world, and opens up a dialogue regarding art, redemption and rehabilitation.
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