The Best Free Things to See and Do at Sydney Festival 2015

Cheap festival events are great. Free festival events? Even better. The 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 party-picnics, miracle swings, park yoga and other outings fun and fanciful.

SEU JORGE: SUMMER SOUNDS IN THE DOMAIN

There's not many a cover artist can teach David Bowie about music. But when the art-glam-rock king heard Seu Jorge perform his hits acoustically, in Portuguese, for The Life Aquatic, he said he heard a whole "new level of beauty". Jorge, who cut his deep yet irresistibly tender voice in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, will make his debut Australian performance at Sydney Festival. He’ll be playing an array of his famous, unique interpretations, as well as a bunch of originals, accompanied by a delicious mix of Latin and Caribbean beats, in both live and electronic form. Catch him for free with thousands of other Sydneysiders at the Domain, where food and drinks will be available from 4pm, or you can always bring a picnic.

Saturday, January 10, 8pm at the Domain.

PARRAMATTA OPENING PARTY

Explore a different side of Sydney at the Paramatta Opening Party. Music highlights here include Australian music legend Paul Kelly in his collaborative project The Merri Soul Sounds (featuring Dan Sultan, Clairy Browne, Kira Puru and Vika & Linda Bull), The Stiff Gins, All Our Exes Live in Texas, Fez Hamadcha and Rattlin’ Bones Blackwood. Stages are scattered around Town Hall and Civic Place, as are eats and arts. The Soul of Sydney crew are throwing their famous block party or the flickering Fire Garden installation behind the library. Think old-school Festival First Night, just a little way out of the city centre.

Friday, January 9, 6–11pm around Parramatta's Centenary Square.

HIGHER GROUND BY MASER

Home to much of the festival's music, two Spiegeltents will be anchoring the expanding Festival Village, one of the real successes of last year and a true hub for hanging out in. Also within it will be a huge-scale art work from Ireland's answer to Banksy, street artist Maser. The maze-like, colour-splashed, two-storey-high installation, called Higher Ground, is said to be "a dream come true for those who always wished they could step inside a painting", and will be the focus of everyone's Instagramming this festival (which for the first time in two years, is Rubber Duck-less). Maser will be the artist-in-residence at the Village, though as he operates in anonymity, we don't expect to see too much of him.

January 8-25 at Hyde Park. Read our interview with Maser here.

WATERFALL SWING

"This interactive waterfall swing won’t make you wish you’re a kid again, it will make you forget you’re an adult,” wrote Techly earlier this year, after Dash 7 Design's Waterfall Swing made waves in Rockefeller Plaza and across the US and Europe. And we wouldn't be Concrete Playground if we didn't get a bit excited by a souped up piece of play equipment in the middle of the city. Waterfall Swing sends you flying towards a curtain of water that, thanks to the work of sensors, parts just before you hit it. Magic.

8-24 January at Cockle Bay, Darling Harbour.

INSIDE THERE FALLS

UK artist Mira Calix teams up with the Sydney Dance Company’s Rafael Bonachela for Inside There Falls, an installation combining sculpture, dance, spoken word and music. Over the past year or two, Calix has been busy in her studio, shaping vast sheets of paper into an ethereal labyrinth, which will be transported to Carriageworks for the Sydney Festival. On entering, visitors will find themselves immersed in a surreal, shimmering world, where they’ll hear snippets of poetic prose spoken by actor Hayley Atwell, strains of classical music and, every now and again, catch sight of a dancer. Even though the dancing has been choreographed, performances won’t be scheduled: it’ll be a matter of taking your chances. Sounds like the perfect, dreamy summer escape.

January 8-17 at Carriageworks.

SYDNEY BUDDHA

Zhang Huan’s Sydney Buddha joins the Sydney Festival at Carriageworks, if only for a limited life. For this highly-anticipated work, two 5 metre-tall Buddha sculptures made of 20 tonnes of incense ash and its aluminium case, will face each other. The incense ash is collected from Chinese temples and set to disintegrate slowly within Carriageworks, acting in the same way a Tibetan Buddhist mandala works and making a stunning, complex, time-consuming artwork to be briefly enjoyed and subsequently destroyed, reminding us of the brevity of life.

January 8 to March 15 at Carriageworks.

YOGA IN HYDE PARK WITH LULULEMON

You know where there's room to salute the sun without sweeping your arm into the solar plexus of the person next to you? The park. In particular: Hyde Park. That's where lululemon, in association with the festival, will be presenting four free yoga classes each week — Tuesday, Thursday and Friday mornings at 7.15am, and Wednesday nights at 6pm for the non-early birds. The hour-long sessions will guide you through a series of poses suitable for all levels, so you can tackle that next Sydney Festival night out in perfect alignment.

January 8-23 at Hyde Park.

SPONGEBOB SQUARETIMES

Spongebob Squaretimes is an accident. Its maker, photographer Greg Barrett, was shooting stills in Times Square when he left the video recorder running, and when he checked, realised he'd captured a perfect miniature epic of loneliness and alienation in the big city. In it, a SpongeBob SquarePants-costumed stranger tries to attract the attention of passers-by for nearly an hour. The addition of two Pianolas playing Holt’s cult piece Canto Ostinato completes the affect. Adding to the total sense of despair, the video will be played on loop daily from noon–8pm.

January 8-17 at Carriageworks

BILL CULBERT AT THE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL

This exhibition of new works by New Zealand artist Bill Culbert follows the success of his installations at the 55th Venice Biennale of Art in 2013. And he's got some very large-scale stuff in mind. Pacific Flotsam is a twisting forest of fluorescent tube lights and plastic containers, while Strait is a line of milk bottles pierced by a horizontal fluorescent tube. See the artist's illuminated environments at the National Art School Gallery, and consider the colour and magic that was there the whole time in something you'd thrown away.

January 8 to March 7 at the National Art School Gallery (open Mon–Sat, 11am–5pm)