Tag Archives: Sydney Festival

Enter the Duck

Whatever the ghost of Rembrandt might think about the state of Dutch art in the early 21st century the arrival of Florentijn Hofman’s magnum opus in Darling Harbour today was a hit, even after the seeming endless and mostly lame concert and tumbling act that preceded it. The figures beneath the yellow banners up on the Pyrmont Bridge are taiko drummers. They were splendid.

ducky

And so the 2013 Festival of Sydney begins. No first night celebration in which the city becomes a giant concert venue, but a giant rubber ducky isn’t too poor a substitute.

Enter the Duck

Whatever the ghost of Rembrandt might think about the state of Dutch art in the early 21st century the arrival of Florentijn Hofman’s magnum opus in Darling Harbour today was a hit, even after the seeming endless and mostly lame concert and tumbling act that preceded it. The figures beneath the yellow banners up on the Pyrmont Bridge are taiko drummers. They were splendid.

ducky

And so the 2013 Festival of Sydney begins. No first night celebration in which the city becomes a giant concert venue, but a giant rubber ducky isn’t too poor a substitute.

The festival is over …

… the Sydney Festival, that is, and it’s been spectacular. In the fraction of it that I got to see (nothing at all in the Spiegel Tent, for example), we’ve had:

incest
rape
cannibalism
murder, including infanticide and uncle-murder
suicide
accidental beating to death
genocide
grave robbing
race riots
scalpings
cruel and unusual sexual acts
and two men pushing each other in the chest as they moved around the stage, creating the impression that they were stalling until someone remembered what came next.

At different times I had a  jaw that wouldn’t close, a churning stomach, a singing heart, hands that stung from applauding, a mind in awe. A festival isn’t a festival without one brave failure. This was definitely a festival.

LoSoRhyMo #11: Here comes January

Not so much a five finger exercise as a 112 foot warm-up, fourteen lines every second day isn’t such a big deal, but it pushes me to make rhymes about things previously in the Prosaic basket, like booking theatre tickets:

Sonnet 11: Festival City
The end of autumn’s here, November,
drizzle one day, next day sun.
Summer’s coming, must remember:
January’s time for fun.
I’ve tickets for the Festival
of Sydney
(this one’s estival,
unlike the ones for Film, Rides, Writers,
Vivid, Mardi Gras and Kiters).
Yang and Foley, Glass and Ford
Cheek by Jowl and on the Harbour,
all dressed up in fancy garb or
motley as the first night‘s horde.
My heart is going patter pitter –
can’t wait, as they say on Twitter.