The 12 Best Things to See at the Sydney Festival 2013

The signature event of our city in summer, the Sydney Festival, kicks off 2013 with the Dirty Projectors, Vivienne Westwood, a series of blind dates, and a giant rubber duckie. They feature among the first line-up curated by new festival director Lieven Bertels, in which more than 750 artists from almost 20 countries will present nearly 100 works of music, performance, and visual arts from January 5-27.

Unexpected gems will no doubt be uncovered throughout the festival, but from this early vantage point, these are the 12 events that stand out and have us clamouring for tickets.

1. Semele Walk

Fashion show opera is the performing arts medium we didn't even know we wanted. Now we can't wait for Semele Walk to get here so we can gather around the runway for Handel's tragic Semele as told through the deconstructed opulence of Vivienne Westwood's costumes. Expect a sequinned kilt, diamond-studded socks, plenty of crinolines, and kabuki make-up. Westwood's punk roots aren't completely gone from the playlist, either, with Berlin ensemble Kaleidoskop mixing some sly pop music departures into their arrangement. Sydney's known to favour Semele's mythological son, Bacchus, god of wine, and this should be just the occasion to meet the family.

January 11-15; Sydney Town Hall.

2. David Byrne & St. Vincent

An odd couple to some, a truly remarkable couple to others. Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and multi-instrumentalist St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) will be unleashing their brass-heavy collaborations at one of the classiest joints around town — the State Theatre. The New York-based duo will be accompanied by a brass band on the evening to ensure every quirky interjection from their debut release, Love This Giant, is executed live. The two artists are like kindred spirits, seamlessly creating a record that stays true to each artist's musical identity yet morphs into an entirely new musical beast of its own. When brought to life, this giant will no doubt take on greater sonic measures for an enthralling live experience.

January 17 and 18; State Theatre.

3. The Quiet Volume

It's always the quiet ones. Members of the Concrete Playground team saw this unassuming audio-theatre piece by UK artists Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells in Utrecht and reported it to be phenomenal. The Quiet Volume has you sit side by side with a partner in the Mitchell Library, each of you with headphones on and a stack of books at your elbow. The words on the page, the voice in your ear, and occasionally the companion at your table guide you through a journey that shakes up your understanding of the act of reading. The whispered, interactive work also makes for a great excuse to visit the library, an institution so many of us still have a great love for although rarely visit.

January 7-25; Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

4. 2001: A Space Odyssey

No Stanley Kubrick film is more lauded for its dramatic marriage of sight and sound than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ligeti’s spectral Requiem plays to a mysterious black monolith and Strauss's 1986 'Also Sprach Zarathusa' strains to the fabrication of a hominid’s first weapon, all while making the soundless moments paint the chilling void of the infinite beyond clearer than any music could. At this year's Sydney Festival the soundtrack of Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece will be played live by the Sydney Symphony and Sydney Philharmonic Choirs as the film itself is blown up onto an equally dramatic big screen.

January 24 and 25; Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House.

5. The Moment I Saw You I Knew I Could Love You

This performance includes a local octogenarian couple still adorably in love, jelly-like lilo seating, and a trip into the belly of a whale. You're totally sold on it already, right? Fortunately, The Moment I Saw You I Knew I Could Love You seems to live up to its promise, with Lyn Gardner of the Guardian giving the show four stars, saying, "There is something immensely wistful about a piece that demonstrates that we are merely chemical compounds, and yet also shows us how to discover equilibrium." Creators Leslie Hill and Helen Paris from UK company Curious have worked with filmmaker Andrew Kotting, composer Graeme Miller, and chanteuse Claudia Barton to combine film, live performance, soundscape, and installation in unexpected ways, coming up with something truly special. It's part of the About an Hour series of performances, each $35.

January 11-13; Carriageworks.

6. Dirty Projectors

When you’ve built your reputation on being rather odd, it’s a risk to make an album heavy on catchy hooks and cohesive lyrics. It’s one that pays off on Swing Lo Magellan, the latest from American rock outfit Dirty Projectors. The album is still an intricate layer cake of highly charged hooks, tender melodies and the orchestral vocals of singer Amber Coffman. And if we're running with a cake theme, you could even call it the musical Heston Blumenthal Exploding Chocolate Gateau — it's rich and probably required expensive power tools to assemble, yet still retains a surprising amount of pop and is damn easy to devour. Last time Dirty Projectors were here they played the Metro Theatre, but the Sydney Opera House's Concert Hall is far more befitting of their exquisite orchestration.

January 21; Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House.

7. Eraritjaritjaka

Heiner Goebbels is the celebrity of the 2013 Sydney Festival, as far as the experimental performance nerds are concerned. But the director and composer's esoteric-sounding works can be relied on to hit a nerve no matter whether you've done the background reading. Eraritjaritjaka, which means 'regret for lost things' in the Indigenous Australian Arunta language, features the unflinching texts of Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti, live music by Amsterdam's Mondriaan String Quartet, an actor who takes the whole audience with him when he leaves the stage, and a lesson on how to chop an onion in perfect time with the music of Ravel. The expansive multimedia performance has toured the world since 2004 and now makes its exclusive Australian appearance at the Theatre Royal.

January 9-13; Theatre Royal.

8. Nicolas Jaar

Read three articles about Nicolas Jaar’s debut album Space Is Only Noise and you can probably expect two of them to make some mention to the Guardian dubbing him “The renaissance man of electronic music.” It’s a tag that isn’t at all unjustified. Jaar’s music is not only quick-witted (in the sense that it’s both highly intelligent and sprinkled with humour) but spearheading (though not on its own) what could be called an electronic revolution. If you follow dance music closely, you could get high off the way it morphs deep house and techno into something soulful and ambient, and if you don’t, its beautiful melancholy is no less addictive. Another great thing about Jaar is his ability to command a room with the barely audible in the same way others command a room with thumping bass. FBi are bringing him over for the Sydney Festival this January, so be at the Town Hall on the 23rd for proof.

January 23; Sydney Town Hall.

9. Day One

Rubber duckie you're the one; you make staring out over Darling Harbour so much fun. Childhood nostalgics will be beside themselves at the visiting art installation Rubber Duck by Florentijn Hofman, which is five storeys high. We loved it when it popped up in France's Loire River earlier this year, and we'll love it closer up when it bobs into Cockle Bay to mark the opening of the Sydney Festival in the two-hour spectacle billed The Arrival, complete with acrobats, 3000 littler ducks, and the opening of the Pyrmont Bridge. Also happening on Day One is Fun Run, a theatricalised marathon focusing on one guy on a treadmill in Hyde Park (you can even be a part of it — no running required), and the Daptone Super Soul Revue, a huge outdoor dance party in the Domain that thrills every year. It's disappointing that state funding for the ever-expanding street party Festival First Night was slashed in 2012, but Sydney Festival organisers are clearly showing off their powers of making-do with the fun, free, concentrated three acts of Day One that go from 9.30am until late into the night.

January 5; Hyde Park, Darling Harbour, and the Domain.

10. Perfume Genius

The discrepancy between Perfume Genius's Twitter feed and his music is incredible. As Mike Hadreas he channels his often unnerving honesty into a series of vulgar 140-character trivialities about everything from fondling the f*** out of zits to applying cheapo L'Oreal BB cream. As Perfume Genius he channels it into beautifully harrowing lamentations on serious personal traumas ranging from prostitution to drug addiction. At his live show you get a sense of both sides of Hadreas, making it an even more genuine look into the singular musician’s mind.

January 26 and 27; the Famous Spiegeltent.

11. It's Dark Outside

The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer won over Sydney Festival audiences in 2011 with its charming, low-fi futuristic world wrought through live action, animation, puppetry, and song. Now that production's creators return with It's Dark Outside, which uses similar ingredients to tell the tale of an old man suffering from dementia. His Sundown Syndrome, which makes him wander off as evening approaches, here becomes a poetic Wild West landscape where puffs of cloud escape from him and a butterfly-net-wielding tracker is hot on his heels. For anyone who's watched a loved one succumb to Alzheimer's or fretted over the inadequacy of their own memory, it's sure to be a moving 60 minutes. It's Dark Outside is another highlight of the About an Hour line-up.

January 11-17; Carriageworks.

12. Micro Parks

If you've walked the back streets of Newtown and Erskineville, you've probably stumbled upon one of several random little parks that are in blocks between houses and sweet but decidedly empty. Performance Space has a solution to that: put An Art in it. With Micro Parks, they've commissioned four new installations and performances to fill the scattered spaces, which you can seek out by aid of a map acquired from the Carriageworks base. There's dance by Martin del Amo and Julie-Anne Long, tea ceremonies by Sarah Goffman, social sculpture by Kate Mitchell, and performance by Jess Olivieri and the Parachutes for Ladies. Leslie Knope would surely approve.

(Carriageworks is full of great stuff during Sydney Festival; check out the epic Waste Not installation by Song Dong in the foyer while you're there.)

January 11-13; Carriageworks.

Check out the full 2013 program at the Sydney Festival website.

By Rima Sabina Aouf and Hannah Ongley.