Lorde headlines as ‘A Little Life’ hits the stage at Adelaide Festival

Lorde kicks off her tour, the stage adaptation of A Little Life premieres in Australia and Dogs of Europe by politically exiled Belarus Free Theatre are all part of next year’s Adelaide Festival.

Lorde will play the Adelaide Festival next year, in her first Australian shows since the Melodrama tour.Credit:Ophelia Mikkelson Jones

Led by new artistic director Ruth Mackenzie and devised by Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield – who hand over the reins after seven years jointly programming the event – the acclaimed event returns in March.

Mackenzie started in November and is excited to take up the position. “As an international festival director, I’ve been looking at the Adelaide program for decades, that’s what we do,” she says. “The first thing you do is lots of listening and that’s terribly important.”

She has a long list of highlights but can’t wait to see Spinifex Gum open the event, in a show performed with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Likewise, the Kronos Quartet appearing at WOMAD, who are celebrating their 50th year and who she has followed for nearly as long.

Also appearing is Kiwi superstar Lorde – real name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor – who last toured Australia in 2017-18 with her acclaimed Melodrama album. The 25-year-old released Solar Power in 2021, but next year will be the first time she performs it locally.

Adelaide Writers Week is held in conjunction with the festival, as is WOMADelaide – from March 10-13 – which next year features Florence + The Machine.

A Little Life, as performed by International Theater Amsterdam, will be a highlight of the Adelaide Festival 2023.Credit:Jan Versveyweld

A Little Life is brought to the stage by International Theater Amsterdam, led by director Ivo van Hove. Based on the best-selling novel, one wonders how such a mammoth book with such extreme themes could be adapted: the result is a four-hour odyssey. Theater Amsterdam was last here in 2018 with Kings of War, which reduced five Shakespeare plays into one evening.

Mackenzie worked with van Hove for five years when she was artistic director of the Holland Festival; she describes A Little Life as “a contemporary masterpiece”. “Ivo has played in virtually every capital in the world and has the best ensemble of actors in the world in my view.”

The Adelaide Festival is known for bringing great stars, but it also showcases the up-and-coming. For Mackenzie next year, that is Belgian group FC Bergman. Their work The Sheep Song has a very individual flavour, she says, it’s memorable, quirky, it’s powerful. It’s a wordless production that sees the actors dressed up as sheep together with real sheep on the stage. “My top tip would be that in 10 years time people will say they saw them here first,” she says.

The Sheep Song by FC Bergman.Credit:Kurt Van der Elst

Cate Blanchett had a hand in one of the acts featured; she contacted Neil Armfield to say ‘you’ve got to have this show’ by the Belarus Free Theatre. “They are established cutting-edge theatre makers, started literally underground in a cellar, had to flee to London; it’s theatre on the edge, with the war in Ukraine, it’s particularly poignant,” says Mackenzie.

Every member of Belarus Free Theatre, one of the country’s leading resistance movements, now lives in political exile. Their work Dogs of Europe is an epic fantasy and political thriller about the corrupting influences of dictatorship, with the story traversing 2019 to 2049, a time when Russia has taken over several countries to form a new European super-state under the control of a secretive and brutal regime.

Another highlight is Verdi’s Requiem, the festival’s centrepiece opera, which will feature over 200 performers, choreographed by Christian Spuck. “It’s going to be the most spectacular combination of singers from South Australia plus the ballet from Zurich that has never been to Australia before,” says Mackenzie. “It’s the first time all these forces combine to stage the Verdi Requiem, you will see the choristers singing with the dancers, I don’t think the dancers will sing.”

Finally, the Adelaide Festival’s free program is really important, according to the incoming festival director, “enabling anyone to risk or try anything”. One highlight in the large scale public events calendar is Place des Anges, a work by French company Gratte Ciel, which she commissioned as part of the London Olympics. They create aerial ‘angels’ – trapeze artists suspended overhead – which fly above the audience, dropping thousands of feathers in a magical, joyous performance.

The Adelaide Festival runs from March 3 to 19.

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