Concrete Playground

If you're like me and make it a bit of a project to complain about a city dominated by cars, or how there should be an energetic density to any metropolitan machine, you might agree that Festival First Night is a step in the right direction. For the opening of the Sydney Festival roads will be closed and made available to pedestrian traffic, parks will be occupied and stocked with food and drinks, and various musical acts will seek out ears to enter.

Traditionally (for Medieval men and women) the carnival was a temporary reversal of regulations, a chance for the general population of a city to converge in blasphemous celebration, where social roles and stigmas could be momentarily laughed at or ignored. While to promise such things here could be a little misleading, there are things to look forward to, such as circus lessons and music for the family in Hyde Park, The Manganiyar Seduction preview at dusk, Al Green's first Australian performance in the Domain, Voodoo Daddy in Martin Place, as well as 'Sax in the City' (involving saxophone players performing on mass around the city). Importantly, this is all free.

Who knows, maybe we will get close to experiencing what Goethe (a clever German) eloquently wrote regarding public festivals:

Crowded together, its members are astonished at themselves. They are accustomed at other times to seeing each other running hither in confusion, bustling about without order or discipline. Now this many-headed, many-minded, fickle, blundering monster suddenly sees itself united as one noble assembly, wielded into one mass, a
single body animated by a single spirit."