Concrete Playground

art film music play The Arrival

Sunday, 10th January - Sunday, 17th January
@ CarriageWorks

Crowded House, Jane Campion, Russell Crowe. Any time a New Zealander does anything noteworthy we wander over like the swaggering older siblings we are and claim them as our own. Now, finally, it seems that the Kiwis have claimed one back in some sort of covert sting operation.Shaun Tan is...

art music performing play Smoke and Mirrors

Thursday, 7th January - Sunday, 31st January
@ The World Famous Spiegeltent

Details on what you can expect from Smoke and Mirrors, the new show debuting at this years Sydney Festival, are about as vague and mysterious as the show's name would suggest. We could tell you that it's a "part vaudeville, part fantasy" and also that it's "a lavish and lyrical...

music performing Isy Suttie: Love Lost in the British Retail Industry

Saturday, 16th January - Saturday, 23rd January
@ Seymour Centre

31-year-old comedian and musician Isy Suttie is probably best known for playing the overtly sexual I.T. misfit, Dobby, on the UK sitcom Peepshow. (If you havenâ€™t seen it already I urge you to check it out â€“ itâ€™s brilliant)Sheâ€™s coming down to Sydney as part of Sydney Festival to bring...

performing Tim Key: The Slutcracker

Saturday, 16th January - Saturday, 23rd January
@ Seymour Centre

Tim Key is a bad poet. A bad, terrible, awful poet. Or so he would have you think.Key's show, The Slutcracker, is actually a deadpan stand up act masquerading as a sincere piece of performance poetry. A carefully constructed shambolic mess. It begins with him lurching on stage, drinking a...

art free David Griggs - New York, London, Paris, Rome, Manila City Jail

Friday, 25th September - Sunday, 11th October
@ MOP Gallery

David Griggs is a contemporary artist from Sydney who documents the seamy underbelly of the third world, Australian style. Which means his works are bold, garish and larger than life. For his latest exhibition, opening this Thursday at MOP Gallery, he just got back from spending four months in a...

art film music performing Cabinet

Monday, 12th October - Sunday, 22nd November
@ The Red Rattler

Nowadays, in the 21st century where everyone works in New Media sitting on laptops in cafes smugly sending each other Kanye memes via bluetooth, the threat of an impending Monday morning has become irrelevant. So why not celebrate this fact with Cabinet.Cabinet is a series of four fortnightly Sunday events...

art free Gabriella Mangano & Silvana Mangano: In The Stillness of Shadows

Saturday, 3rd October - Saturday, 31st October
@ Anna Schwartz Gallery

Twins. Freaky deaky twins. The Mangano Sisters are identical twins who draw. They make videos and performances about the nature of drawing and their relationship to each other. It would be cliched and lazy to suggest that because they are twins they seem to be symbiotically, almost telepathically, linked. But...

art free Gaun Wei - Fragments of History

Friday, 25th September - 4AM
@ Kaliman Gallery

The People's Republic of China has really chilled out and let its hair down over the last few decades. Sort of. Not really. But they have relaxed just the teeniest, weeniest, bit and Chinese artists have responded by exploding with the most exciting Contemporary Art anywhere in the world.Chinese born...

art free music Soft Glue - Charlie Sofo & Mary MacDougall

Saturday, 26th September - 11AM
@ Black&Blue Gallery

Charlie Sofo is a very talented artist out of Melbourne who makes slightly psychadelic 60â€™s style Op Art exploring colours and shapes. Mary MacDougal is a brilliant Sydney based painter who was recently shortlisted in the Lempriere prize for her watery portraits of wacked out 60â€™s Pop Svengali Phil Spector....

film Journey Among Women screening & Q&Aâ€”CANCELLED

Tuesday, 3rd November - Monday, 2nd November
@ Event Cinema, Bondi Junction

Convicts, early settlers, lesbian covens, rape and vengeance. No, Old Sydney Town hasnâ€™t re-opened its gates, itâ€™s a screening of the long lost 1977 Ozploitation classic Journey Among Women in a remastered 35mm print. With the bulk of the cast stemming from feminist rock band Clitoris, Journey Among Women was a low down...

performing play God of Carnage

Sunday, 4th October - Saturday, 21st November
@ Drama Theatre, Opera House

God of Carnage begins with two sets of parents sitting down in a modern Parisian apartment to discuss a fight that occurred between their children. What starts out as quite civilized, rapidly descends into a maelstrom of tears, name-calling and fist-fights. The play seems to have a bit of an...

film Sister Smile

Thursday, 12th November - Wednesday, 9th December
@ Selected Cinemas

Sister Smile is a biopic about Jeanine Deckers, a singing nun who, in 1963, had a chart-topping hit in Europe and North America with her song Dominique, a jaunty little tune that goes like this: "Dominique, nique, nique, S'en allait tout simplement...Il ne parle que du Bon Dieu."The song is a...

performing play Page 8

Wednesday, 21st October - Sunday, 1st November
@ Belvoir St Theatre

Page 8 is an autobiographical one-man show about growing up black and gay in 1970â€™s Australian suburbia. It could, potentially, be awful when you think about it. The "Growing-Up-Gay One-Man Show" is one of the most painful theatrical genres ever created. Up there with French-Canadian puppetry.Luckily for us, this one-man...

performing Bliss

Thursday, 22nd October - 7PM
@ Belvoir St Theatre

Bliss is the new play on right now at Downstairs Belvoir. It's not, as I actually thought, a theatrical re-imagining of the awesome 1985 Australian movie classic Bliss based on Peter Carey's novel. That was the one where Barry Otto was stuck in a surreal suburban nightmare full of Freudian fish...

film 2012

Thursday, 12th November - Tuesday, 29th December
@ Cinemas Everywhere

In 1996, me and my friends skipped school to see Roland Emmerichâ€™s Independence Day as soon as it opened. Aliens blew up the White House, Randy Quaid drove a cropduster right into the mothership and Will Smith punched an alien the face and said, â€œwelcome to Earthâ€ while chewing on...

music Al Green

Monday, 11th January - Tuesday, 12th January
@ State Theatre

The Rev is in town! When I was a sad and creepy 16 year old the only way I could deal with a particularly harsh break-up was to lock myself in my bedroom and listen to Simply Beautiful and How Can You Mend A Broken Heart on repeat. As cheesy...

performing play Giselle

Wednesday, 20th January - Tuesday, 26th January
@ CarriageWorks

Giselle is a very famous classical ballet from 1841. Itâ€™s usually performed by very stuffy traditional ballet companies. Luckily for us contemporary dance company Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre has taken this seminal text and ran with it - pushing it in a far stranger direction than anyone would expect. The...

art music Severed Heads & The Reels & DJ Stephen Mallinder

Thursday, 14th January - 8PM
@ Becks Bar & Recital Hall

I canâ€™t believe the Severed Heads are playing Sydney Festivalâ€™s Becks Bar. Itâ€™s mental. How did that even happen? I'm sure that somewhere deep within the bowels of the Sydney Festival H.Q. thereâ€™s an acid casualty candy-raver giggling hysterically into their Hello Kitty backpack.Most people would remember Sydney based Severed...

music Neko Case

Monday, 11th January - Saturday, 12th December
@ City Recital Hall

Bittersweet alt. Country songstress Neko Case is making her way to Sydney as part of the Sydney Festival. She writes beautiful haunting songs about loneliness, madness and generally being a bit of a mess. Sheâ€™s also an animal activist and famously refused to pose for Playboy after the nominated her...

performing Happy As Larry

Friday, 22nd January - Sunday, 24th January
@ Riverside Theatres

Two years ago Contemporary Dance wunderkind Shaun Parker astounded Sydney Festival audiences with his show This Show Is About People. It cleverly blended contemporary and classical dance with operatic singing and acrobatics to make a story about ordinary people stuck in a mundane transit lounge feel exhilarating. The show won the Australian...

Party

Tuesday, 12th January - Sunday, 17th January
@ Seymour Centre

University comedy troupes and political satire can either be the best thing in the world or the worst. Just look at The Chaser, as an example of either, depending on your taste.I'm guessing that we are in pretty safe hands with The Invisible Dot though. They're a team of 6...

music Medeski, Martin and Wood

Wednesday, 27th January - 8PM
@ City Recital Hall

Medeski, Martin and Wood's music is lush, spooky, psychadelic and super cool. Like a soundtrack to a Jim Jarmusch film. Its improvisational free jazz, a musical genre who's very name would have warranted me hurling their albums across the room in disgust about two years ago. Now I love it,...

performing Crestfall

Wednesday, 6th January - Saturday, 30th January
@ Griffin Theatre

Irish playwright Mark O’Rowes Crestfall is made up of three monologues for women. The trio of intersecting stories all take pace on the same day, based around the site of a messy abattoir known as "The Bonelands". The themes are as dark as you could expect. Prostitution, drug addiction, beastiality and...

film Up In The Air

Thursday, 14th January - Friday, 12th March
@ Various cinemas

George Clooney has been making a habit of anthropomorphising himself this summer. First he played a fox in Wes Anderson's spell-binding Fantastic Mr Fox and now, in Up In The Air, he plays an entirely different kind of predator.“We are not swans,” his character Ryan Bingham says to a room...

performing The Fence

Wednesday, 13th January - Saturday, 30th January
@ A Backyard In Paramatta

Alicia Talbots latest work, The Fence, is quite different to most other shows you’ll see in the Sydney Festival. For starters, in the venue listing where you would expect to see the names of places like “ The Seymour Centre” or “The Sydney Theatre” it simply says “A Backyard...