Deep in the Arts Hole!

 Why was I so busy for a month? What is this Adelaide Festival business?

Every two years Adelaide, which is the 1.1 million population capital of  "The Festival State" of South Australia, holds a major international arts festival which is paired with a huge Fringe Festival. This brings some 450 shows and exhibitions to this gentle winemaking world by the sea. It brings thousands of artists and performers, thousands of tourists and hundreds of international media. The city simply goes into party mode - which is not difficult, since it has a benign Mediterranean climate and an avid sidewalk cafe society.

The Adelaide Festival is the highbrow, mainstream, big budget affair -which has its headquarters at the Festival Centre - a big, modern, streamlined arts complex set on the lawns beside the river. Therein, apart from theatre activities in the 3 main performance spaces, forums and cabarets, they establish the International Media Centre. A large open-air late-night, free entry cabaret club is built on the Festival Centre Plaza - this year in the shape of a church. This club opens at 10.30 pm and closes somewhere around 4 am each Festival night.

The Fringe takes over the East End of the city which, once the old artists' quarters, is now an arty restaurant/cafe/winebar precinct. The low budget alternative arts Fringe transforms old warehouses, restaurant and even carparks into performance spaces and this year, built from red shipping containers, a huge open-air cabaret venue called Big Red. It set up its Fringe Club - stage, bars, food stalls - on the ground floor of a carpark.

Both the Festival and the Fringe use every theatre in the city (of which there are lots) and assorted unconventional performance spaces to accommodate their huge programs.

The thing that makes this work so well, the characteristic that makes Adelaide into one of the world's great arts festival cities, is that one can walk most everywhere. It is a compact city - perfectly designed to be user-friendly. And the whole city blossoms into festival mode - streets lined with flags and banners, performance artists and artworks all over the place and, of course, a suddenly more exotic than usual pedestrian flow.

For me, as arts editor of the metropolitan morning daily, the Festival means an almost military style of arts operation. I take on extra staff to bolster my four-strong arts department and ring in a huge team of critics - about 30 of them. We try to have a critic at every opening performance - which is no mean feat. Our coverage is presented in 8-page daily liftouts in the paper, so I am assigned additional copy editors and layout subeditors. Apart from liaising and co-ordinating the coverage and production, I am expected to review the major shows, see and vote for the Fringe Award nomination shows (sometimes 3 in a night), write overviews and analyses and have time to pop out and make speeches or chair events here and there. The only way to manage all of this is to sacrifice a lot of sleep - and to live on caffeine and guarana, with a total abstinence from alcohol. The other essential management strategy is to ignore the housework, refuse to see the domestic chaos, buy new clothes on the run because everything is in the washing machine, and to eat any food you can grab between shows and make sure you always have Tums in a pocket somewhere.

Oh, and one must travel with a complete office on the shoulder. The bag must contain notepads and pens, programs, camera, tape recorder, opera glasses, painkillers, throat lozenges, kleenex, media passes as well as the usual paraphernalia. Oh...and a fan!!! It can get very hot in March - and some of the Fringe venues, particularly, can be veritable steam baths.

SO....

Iris has asked me to describe the Festival - but the task defies me since it was so massive and no one has the sort of time or interest to sit around reading a show-by-show description.

Writers Week -

a gathering of international and Australian writers along with publishers and readers which lasts for a week. This is held in a series of marquees under the tall, shadey trees near the Festival Centre - famous for its wonderful wines and beautiful catering and glamor under-canvas bookstore. A very civilized affair of talks and forums and readings. The whole thing is like a literary garden party - and hats are the fashion item. Everyone at Writers Week sports wonderful hats, men and women.

Artists Week -

Not nearly as organised or civilized as Writers Week, because it is run by artists. And they do it all indoors.

The Seven Streams of the River Ota -

a seven and a half hour production directed by Robert LePage of Canada. I never knew 7 1/2 hours to pass so siwftly - a magical piece of ever-evolving stagecraft in a saga which spans from wartime Hiroshima to present day NY.

Flamma Flamma -

one of the many free outdoor events, this a new opera performed on the river banks by the Symphony Orchestra, the State Opera chorus and assorted soloists with 2000 citizens of the city of Adelaide participating in illuminated processionals bearing icons of all faiths and symbols of peace or spirituality. These were symbols of what people find as really important as the  millenium draws to a close. Pyrotechnics and amazing fire sculptures also were a part of this breathtaking event.

Cloudgate Theatre's

The Songs of the Wanderers from Taiwan -

with 3.5 tons of rice and a monk standing for the duration of the show with a thin stream of rice pouring onto and cascading from his head and piling up slowly around his legs. A dance work about religious pilgrims and the path to spiritual enlightenment.

The Foreign Legion -

a group of American and Canadian companies setting up their own program in their own venue. Some of the hottest shows on the Fringe. If you ever get a chance to see the work of Seattle's Theater Simple or LA's Stephen Rappaport or Toronto's Daryl Cloran....

Every Night a Wedding -

and every night people got married at the Rotunda by the River...different cultural weddings and some very offbeat weddings. One woman married her car!