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A Message from Artistic Director Ruth Mackenzie CBE & Chief Executive Kath M Mainland

This is the first Adelaide Festival program we have created, and we thank the Festival team and Board, the Premier and Arts Minister, all our artists, partners, sponsors, donors and all the communities of South Australia: without you, we couldn’t create this world-class festival.  

Like the new leaders of our sister festivals, Avignon and Edinburgh, we reflect on what a great international festival should be in the 21st century. Avignon’s Tiago Rodrigues described his program as a storm of ideas, desires and urgency about arts, looking at what the world is today and how to deal with the past. Edinburgh’s Nicola Benedetti’s first festival was titled Where do we go from here? – an invitation to artists, citizens and visitors to help her find the answer. 

We start to answer that question in the 2024 Festival with the celebration of a year-long schools project, Create4Adelaide, and a two-year community project, Floods of Fire with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra: giving citizens and young people a voice in the Festival, alongside our extraordinary international artists. 

We’re welcoming back some of the world’s great artists, already loved by our audiences, including Robert Lepage, Stephen Page, Laurie Anderson, Barrie Kosky, Thomas Ostermeier and Marina Abramović. We also welcome new artists, some of whom will become the next generation of world-leading artists. 

Alongside our flagship opera, and ambitious theatre, dance and music programs, we’re exploding our free program so everybody can join us. We co-commission international artists who bring a wide range of cultural traditions, innovation, joy and inspiration and encourage us to look at the world from different viewpoints and see our own lives differently.  

We are inspired by the history of our Festival and ask everyone to help reinvent the Festival for the 21st century. 

This message was originally printed in the 2024 Adelaide Festival program guide.

Read the Writers' Week message from Director Louise Adler AM here >>