July 03, 2025
Festival Art Radar || 3 July 2025
Welcome to the first 2025 edition of our Festival Art Radar! A short periodical selection of anything and everything that has been moving us, inspiring us and piquing our curiosity from right across the creative world.
Adelaide Festival is a festival dedicated to celebrating bold new performances, radical creativity and boundary-pushing talent. Every day we get to engage with a wonderful range of incredible works and creatives that are shaping the cultural conversation and we would love to share some of them with you.
So! Take a peek behind the curtain at some of the happenings that have caught our attention this week. You never know, a few may even be appearing on a stage or a street near you before long. We hope you discover something new!
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A Year without Summer
One of the most thought-provoking theatre artists in the world right now is Florentina Holzinger. Audiences can have complex responses to the provocative nature of her work, yet her gestures about what bodies are allowed to express on stage and whose stories they can share demand attention. Her latest work just opened, and it’s called A Year without Summer. The show’s title sent us down a rabbit hole, as it’s inspired by the year of 1816 when a volcanic eruption blacked out the sky and there was no summer (literally). Plus, this was the year Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. You can see how this is rich material for Holzinger to explore.
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Benedict Andrews
Benedict (Benno) is an Adelaide-born director, now living in Iceland, who has been creating extraordinary work around the globe. He directed Streetcar Named Desire with Gillian Anderson and War of the Roses with Cate Blanchett. We are always watching what he will make next! His recent production of Tchaikovksy’s “The Queen of Spades” is very impressive:
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Roomful of Teeth
You may remember this US contemporary choir from their extraordinary show in Adelaide Festival 2020. The music they choose to perform is adventurous yet intentional, playful yet disciplined. They truly are dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice, head to their website to check them out!
Hard not to love this clip! Wally De Backer's hit single strikes again, this time with Netherlands-based dance collective CDK. Every time this video pops up (and for some reason it popped up this week) we find ourselves watching it multiple times, the choreography is so compelling. It makes us smile and hope it does you too.
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This multi-disciplinary, long-form performance installation as part of Illuminate Adelaide features a who's who of Adelaide and Melbourne-based light artists, musicians, live video artists and performance artists. With an evolving series of "sculptural interventions" and visual dioramas that crescendo toward a feature performance on 05 July, after which the performance will live on through the installed screens until late August at ART POD. We can't wait to see what this multi-layered installation performance work will reveal!