ideas, spontaneity and fun, offering cultural experiences, from performing arts to street art tours and lots of free family entertainment in between. By day you can also experience Adelaide’s world-class beaches and wineries that are only a stone’s throw from the city including McLaren Vale, the Barossa Valley and more. The 2020 Adelaide Fringe is going to be bigger, bolder and more daring than ever before as we celebrate our 60th anniversary. It will be an unmissable experience for audiences and artists alike. Escape the winter and book your ticket now for Adelaide February 2020!
Rachel Healy Co-artistic director, Adelaide Festival
In a beautiful New York Times piece, Oliver Sacks spoke of his detachment and sense of clarity after receiving the cancer diagnosis that would kill him. ‘There is no time,’ he writes, ‘for anything inessential.’ It reminded me, when considering the role of the Adelaide Festival, that its purpose is to renew and energise our pleasure in the beauty of life and of the world. It’s a vitamin pill for our souls. The work of its artists invades our dreams and, at times, screams in our faces. We come out of the 17-day experience with a renewed connection to the essentials of life, inspired by human creativity that is vivid, joyous, and gloriously uncompromising. The Adelaide Festival gives its audience the opportunity to binge-watch the work of the greatest artists of our time – opera, theatre, dance, music, experimental arts, visual art, and writing are all present – and cities like Adelaide provide the perfect urban context for a full immersion in their work. Adelaide has a gorgeous Mediterranean climate and it’s a famously intimate and walkable city – your Festival experience isn’t spent anonymously in cabs; instead its spent walking from venue to venue in the sunshine, meeting friends along the way, comparing notes with strangers on shows you’ve seen, dropping into Adelaide Festival’s legendary free literary festiva, Writers’ Week, or WOMADelaide, a four day celebration of global music, dance, art and ideas. It’s post-show wine bars and breakfast with the thought leaders of our age, it’s a quick dip in the ocean at 6pm before an 8pm show. It’s parties and summer breezes and unmissable conversations late into the night. And then we do it all again the next day. It’s one of the greatest festivals in the world and since 1960, it’s the international arts festival you’ll never forget.
66 THE LIST 1 Jun–31 Aug 2019