Photos: Sydney Festival announces 2027 program featuring Hannah Gadsby and ONEFOUR

Sydney Festival has unveiled its 2027 program, bringing the world's most visionary dancemakers, major First Nations premieres and a new harbourside playground to the city from 7–25 January. From comedy legend Hannah Gadsby's return and ILBIJERRI Theatre Company's world premiere of THE LINE, to Sydney hip hop icons ONEFOUR performing with the Penrith Chamber Orchestra, high-wire ballet at The Cutaway and cars converted into plunge pools, hot tubs and saunas at Barangaroo Reserve, Sydney's summer is set for extraordinary encounters—on stage, outdoors and in the water.

Stretching from the CBD to Bondi and into the outer West, Sydney Festival unfolds across Greater Sydney this January. First Nations-led Blak Out brings Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and stories to the fore through theatre, dance, music and visual art. Free family performances and large-scale interactive works give audiences room to make, play and explore, while Summer School takes them closer to the artists' ideas through ritual, workshops, talks and cooking demonstrations.

Sydney Festival's $49 ticket program is back, with more than 10,000 tickets available for $49 or less available across every event in the ticketed program. From internationally acclaimed theatre to the Festival's monumental dance program, audiences can experience an extraordinary summer of art from some of the best seats in the house for under $50.

'We want everyone to feel that this Festival belongs to them, and that means making great seats part of the offer,' says Sydney Festival Director, Kris Nelson. 'With terrific seats available for $49 or under at every performance of every ticketed show, we're giving audiences more freedom to take a chance on an unfamiliar artist, try a different artform or bring a friend. Alongside The Yard and free performances across the city, this opens up more ways for people to experience the Festival and make it their own.'

'We've set out to make a Festival that feels unmistakably of Sydney and open to the world,' Nelson continues, 'We have major new First Nations shows, collaborations born in Western Sydney, and an international dance and theatre program on a scale the city deserves. It means turning The Cutaway into a house of dance and bringing an outdoor Festival hub back to Barangaroo. With programming from Penrith to Bondi and a beating heart at Barangaroo, it's a festival to cross town for. This is a line-up full of surprises. It's a festival that transforms ordinary city locations into places for fun and joy. It's a festival full of artists with complex stories and engaging wits and it's a chance to encounter some of the world's most incredible dances - a true feast for the eye and the soul. It's a summer festival calling out to you to feel invigorated and alive in your city - how will you answer?'

Minister for Planning and Public Spaces, Paul Scully said 'From major performances to a free all-night dance party, Sydney Festival will showcase the extraordinary potential of The Cutaway and demonstrate the impact of the Minns Labor Government's vibrancy reforms, creating new ways for people to experience our city, connect with culture and enjoy Sydney after dark.'

'As one of Australia's premier cultural events, Sydney Festival attracts visitors, supports local jobs and businesses and reinforces NSW's reputation as a global destination for arts, culture and entertainment,' Scully continues.

Festival Highlights

On Stargazer Lawn at Barangaroo Reserve, waynapuni pools remakes old cars as a public art park for bathing and gathering. Participatory artist and industrial designer Benjamin Paul works with local and Palawa teen artists to weld junkyard scrapheaps into bathhouses, saunas and steam baths. Cold-plunge Commodores and hot-spring Falcons become places of reprieve, community and care in a healing ceremony held by future leaders.

Around the pools, The Yard marks the much-anticipated return of an outdoor festival hub to Sydney Festival. Free to enter at Barangaroo Reserve from 8–24 January, this harbourside gathering place brings together pop-up restaurants, art and the simple pleasure of spending time by the water. Meet friends before a show, settle in afterwards, or make an afternoon of exploring the Festival before the evening begins. With room to eat, wander and linger, The Yard requires no ticket, no timetable, just the desire to meet, mingle and soak in the festival atmosphere by harbour.

The Australian icon who rewrote the rules of comedy, Hannah Gadsby, returns to Sydney with a new show at Roslyn Packer Theatre. The Emmy, Peabody and three-time AACTA Award winner takes on the idea of a personal foundation myth: the defining moments that rarely announce themselves as they happen and only come into focus with hindsight. Bringing their quick wit and gift for an unexpected perspective, Gadsby finds comedy in the distance between living through something and finally understanding it.

When a soldier shoots a deaf boy who cannot hear his orders, the people of an occupied town become deaf the next day. That startling turn sets Deaf Republic in motion. Irish theatre vanguards Dead Centre and Zoë McWhinney transform Jewish-Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky's lyric poems into a tense drama about grief, solidarity and resistance. Performed through a mix of spoken English, AUSLAN, and Creative Captioning, Deaf Republic comes to Roslyn Packer Theatre for an Australian-exclusive season for Sydney Festival following celebrated seasons in New York, Dublin and London.

In a world premiere season, Sydney Festival and the Sydney Opera House will co-present ILBIJERRI Theatre Company's THE LINE, a darkly comic reckoning with the legacy of the 1830 military operation known as the Black Line. As soldiers and settlers advance across Lutruwita/Tasmania to displace Palawa people, widowed settler Jane and her Palawa servant Muka find their volatile relationship pushed to its limits. Written by the award-winning Trawlwoolway and Palawa playwright Nathan Maynard, and co-directed by Maynard and legendary theatre maker Dr Rachael Maza AM, the work leaps across time, Country and form, tracing the violence of the Frontier Wars from the past into the present.

A major centrepiece of the Festival, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels brings leading choreographers and contemporary dance companies from all corners of the globe to Sydney, from French collective (LA)HORDE and China's TAO Dance Theater to Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Radouan Mriziga. The redeveloped Cutaway will host Festival performances for the first time, with its vast interior becoming a setting for Rachid Ouramdane's ballet on tightrope, Outsider. Alongside these international works, Australia's leading Indigenous intercultural dance and theatre company Marrugeku shares the world premiere of Ngurragabu, drawing audiences into a monumental petrified mangrove forest.

Celebrating the festival's opening weekend, The Party takes over The Cutaway on 8 January for a massive free dance party extravaganza. Bringing together Sydney's party starters, scenes and crews, the after-hours gathering promises DJs, surprise performances and spontaneous encounters, with room to dance, explore and stay into the early hours.

Filipino artist Leeroy New joins BANG-ON Collective and Blacktown communities for the world premiere of Future Fiestas at Darling Harbour, co-presented with Blacktown Arts. New's extraordinary costumes begin with discarded plastics, turning the materials of everyday life into a vision of a different future. Hands-on workshops let families make wearable art from cast-offs before the work spills into a public parade and celebrates the heroes of Sydney's Filipino community.

And in Penrith over the festival's final days, two different sounds of Western Sydney meet on stage for the first time. Local hip hop icons ONEFOUR and the Penrith Chamber Orchestra come together at The Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in a major new commission, with Penrith Performing & Visual Arts, pairing the drill collective with a full string section on home turf.

Blak Out

Led by Head of First Nations Programming Aidan Rowlingson, the 2027 Blak Out program crosses stages, galleries and public space, with the world premiere of THE LINE by Nathan Maynard, and Benjamin Paul's waynapuni pools among its centrepieces. Presented with the University of Sydney as Major Presenting Partner, the program brings together First Nations theatre, dance, music, visual art and gatherings, making room for truth-telling, remembrance and Blak joy.

Marrugeku's Ngurragabu, also part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, imagines a future of great middens and drowned Country. Created by choreographer Dalisa Pigram and director Rachael Swain in dialogue with Yawuru and Bardi custodians, the world premiere season unfolds at Carriageworks within visual artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah's monumental petrified mangrove forest. Indigenous and settler-diasporic performers from Australia, South-East Asia and Melanesia inhabit a world of immersive projections and techno-futurist music, asking how people might live differently with one another and the planet.

Sydney's hottest new blues club, Blak & Blues takes over the Metro Theatre for a series of intimate sessions, melding musical legacies with fire and tenderness, connecting First Nations artists with influential Black American songbooks.

Platinum-selling ARIA Award-winning singer Budjerah reaches across generations to channel the legendary Donny Hathaway. Drawing equally from Hathaway's catalogue and his own music across two nights, Budjerah traces the soul, honesty and groove that connect their songs—and the musical lineage running through his own sound. Multi-award-winning Wiradyuri/Filipinx artist MO'JU brings their distinctive voice to the music of Bill Withers, stripping back and rebuilding classics including Lean On Me and Ain't No Sunshine, while Jamaican/Arrernte artist SOLCHLD steps into the fire and feeling of Etta James, bringing a fresh voice to a songbook that moves from aching ballads to rhythm-and-blues classics.

Megan Wilding's Game. Set. Match. serves up a dark comedy with a brutal backhand at Belvoir St Theatre. The award-winning Gamilaroi actor and playwright stars opposite Rick Davies as two strangers whose encounter after a funeral becomes a night of attraction, bittersweet memories and sharp revelations. Whether the stakes are romance or revenge, nothing is quite as it seems.

Proud Kamilaroi, Barkindji, Ballardong and Whadjuk woman Bianca Hunt takes over Belvoir St Theatre for three nights of Up Late with Bianca Hunt. The television presenter and author brings artists and cultural trailblazers together for crackling conversations, surprise guests, hard laughs and live performances. Each night puts Hunt at the centre of a smart, funny and distinctly Blak late-night show.

Wiradjuri Yuin actor Angeline Penrith brings Redfern Renaissance back to Sydney Festival for a third year. Expanded by popular demand, the series of performance readings and discussions returns to the revolutionary artists and activism of Redfern's 1970s National Black Theatre—and the questions their work still raises.

For families, Jillian Boyd-Bowie's The Boy Who Found His Way Home stars Jimi Bani in a spirited story of returning to Country. Directed by Jason Klarwein, the production follows a city boy negotiating outspoken Aunties, mango season chores and a gripping fishing competition as he finds his place back home. Touring the city to venues in Bondi and Parramatta.

Emily in Sydney brings paintings by one of Australia's most significant artists Emily Kame Kngwarreye, drawn largely from private Sydney collections, to S. H. Ervin Gallery. Returning her work to the gallery where her first painting was exhibited in 1989, the exhibition offers audiences the opportunity to encounter celebrated and rarely seen works by the senior Anmatyerr artist.

Deep Surface is the first career survey of Los Angeles–based Palawa artist Jemima Wyman at UNSW Galleries. Curated by Katherine Dionysius and presented in partnership with QUT Art Museum, the exhibition spans three decades of Wyman's vividly patterned, politically charged practice, tracing her investigations of camouflage, protest and collective identity through painting, textiles, video, performance and collage.

For the first time, Vigil will move to Redfern in partnership with Moogahlin Performing Arts, continuing to evolve through ongoing conversations with First Nations leaders and community members. In a place of profound cultural, historical and political significance for Aboriginal people, Vigil will continue its legacy of remembrance, reflection and truth-telling.

Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

A major celebration within Sydney Festival 2027, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels brings twelve of the world's most celebrated international choreographers and dance companies together to Sydney. High-wire spectacle, house dance, club culture and a First Nations world premiere of Ngurragabu from Marrugeku take over stages and public spaces across Sydney, with The Cutaway becoming a house of dance for the month of January.

French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane showcases two Australian-exclusive works that put bodies, gravity and trust in constant play. In Outsider, 20 dancers from Switzerland's Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève and four extreme sports athletes push their limits on a cat's cradle of tightropes at The Cutaway, driven by the late Julius Eastman's propulsive music. Outsider explores the dynamics of crowds, where risk, trust and collective momentum are in constant play. For Contre-nature, Ouramdane assembles ten performers from Compagnie de Chaillot who move through mist at the Opera House. Every lift, catch, and fall in this poignant work is an exercise in grace and trust, asking, who holds you in the moments that matter most?

The body becomes a universal language in 15 | 18, a double bill from Chinese choreographer Tao Ye and TAO Dance Theater. Presented together for the first time in the Southern Hemisphere, the newest entries in Tao's Numerical Series, 15 and 18 flow together like ink across the stage, creating shifting geometric patterns and inhabiting the precise grace of Chinese calligraphy.

Built from the simple acts of walking and breathing, ten dancers move as one while remaining fiercely themselves in My Fierce Ignorant Step. Acclaimed Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos draws on the intensity of adolescence—first encounters, shared laughter and the sense that anything might be possible. As small gestures gather into an urgent act of collective dance, the work finds in togetherness a defiant source of hope.

Fresh from choreographing Rosalía's LUX tour, France's hottest choreographers (LA)HORDE make their first Australian appearance with CROSSOVER. Known for their collaborations with the likes of Spike Jonze, Sam Smith and Madonna, the artistic directors of Ballet national de Marseille bring their inventive approaches across dance, film, fashion and music into a brand-new show for Sydney Festival.

Violin, dance and a planet in crisis meet in Il Cimento dell'Armonia e dell'Inventione at Carriageworks. Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Moroccan choreographer Radouan Mriziga, with Rosas and A7LA5, reimagine Vivaldi's Four Seasons through four dancers who embody the seasons—and their breakdown—in a haunting response to climate change.

Known for her work with Beyoncé, choreographer Leïla Ka's exhilarating international hit sees five extraordinary dancers bring to life the stories embedded in forty thrift-store dresses. Performed across the globe and now heading to Australia for the first time, Maldonne reveals the threads of strength, vulnerability, and resilience woven in every woman's life.

Eight performers storm an arena where club culture faces off against military drill in F*cking Future co-presented by Powerhouse Parramatta. Portuguese choreographer Marco da Silva Ferreira's slow-fuse explosive of a work dismantles ideas of masculinity through relentless movement, fierce physicality and radical Queer joy. F*cking Future unloads on conformity, celebrates difference and serves as a call to action. It's raw, scary-awesome and impossible to look away from.

Towering headdresses, vibrant costumes and projected colour fill the Sydney Opera House in We Wear Our Wheels with Pride…, an exuberant work by South African choreographer Robyn Orlin. Dancers from Moving Into Dance Mophatong draw on the history of Durban's Zulu rickshaw pullers, who transformed everyday labour into acts of style, performance and resistance. Traditional movement meets hip hop, electronic music, spoken word and Afro-fusion in a work alive with humour and pride. Beneath its dazzling energy runs a history shaped by colonialism—and a determination to reclaim dignity through creativity.

First performed across ten blocks of lower Manhattan in 1971, Trisha Brown's Roof Piece turned distance into part of the dance. Now the free work comes to the Art Gallery of NSW, where the American Trisha Brown Dance Company positions dancers across the building, each within sight of another. No audience member can take in the whole performance: what they see depends on where they stand, making the gallery's architecture—and their own point of view—part of the choreography.

On a stark white square, three dancers in jeans and sneakers move to a beat the audience cannot hear. In Soirée d'études, Belgian choreographer Cassiel Gaube strips house dance of its familiar soundtrack, letting the dancers' footwork supply the pulse. Solos become duos, then a trio, as each performer studies and transforms the movements of the others. When the music finally floods the space, the dance they have been building in silence finds its full force. This playful, Australian-exclusive work is presented free of charge at Carriageworks.

Theatre, Comedy and Cabaret

Sydney Festival's theatre, comedy and cabaret program moves from Hannah Gadsby's return and Dead Centre and Zoë McWhinney's Australian-exclusive Deaf Republic, to artists turning family histories, body politics and anxious inner monologues into performance.

Jaha Koo brings a pojangmacha—a Korean late-night snack stall—to the stage in Haribo Kimchi, co-presented with Powerhouse Parramatta. The Korean theatremaker cooks classic dishes for two audience members while sharing stories that are funny, absorbing and sometimes absurd. As the food simmers, Koo moves through migration, identity, racism and homesickness, finding both comfort and complicated memories in the tastes of home. In 2026, Koo was the youngest ever and first Asian winner of the International Ibsen Award, widely regarded as the Nobel prize for theatre.

Two ghosts return to glittering 1930s Manhattan to solve the mystery that ended their cabaret careers. US cabaret sensation Salty Brine gives the story an unlikely soundtrack—Cyndi Lauper's debut smash, She's So Unusual—in the Australian premiere of He's So Unusual co-presented with the Sydney Opera House. Drawing on New York's drag scene, Brine spins a camp murder caper with biting repartee, fabulous vocals and a streak of queer resistance.

Brazilian iconoclast artist Jéssica Teixeira makes her Australian debut at Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf 1 Theatre with the award-winning solo show Monga. Drawing on the troubling history of Brazilian circus 'freak show' acts, Teixeira challenges the gaze placed upon her body and refuses to be defined by it. Music, comedy and poetry meet a splash of cachaça in a performance that breaks free of theatrical form with wit, verve and a spirit that is beyond punk. Teixeira transforms the stage on her own terms, making self-acceptance a daring act.

Queer performance icon Emma Maye Gibson, aka Betty Grumble, is known for anarchic art, powerful politics and riotous stripping. In the world premiere of A Loved Woman, directed by Declan Greene and produced by Performing Lines and Griffin Theatre Company, she exposes something more personal: her complicated relationship with her mother, Karmyn Gibson. Gibson, a former bodybuilding champion and national aerobics titleholder, has long held strong opinions about what her daughter does for a living. From teenage runaways to smashed dinner plates, the pair confront their chequered history and ask what passes between mothers and daughters.

Multi-disciplinary Sydney artist Jonny Hawkins' Truck Driver invites audiences into the world of Bev, an opinionated highway philosopher whose dry observations emerge from a life on the road. From the cab of an 18-wheeler, Bev spins a funny, sometimes crude yarn about an Australia changing faster than he can accelerate in a return-to-Sydney season at the Seymour Centre.

At The Grand Electric, award-winning US clown Spencer Novich's CHATTER turns an anxious inner monologue into an absurdist physical comedy. Drawing on a performance career that includes Cirque du Soleil and American Horror Story, Novich's solo show is a surreal and deeply personal revelation. A twisted comic journey complete with naked balloon nightmares, eight-hour enemas, and shock-collar surprises.

The rules are loose and the competition just a little too serious in Nothing Like a Game, Australian performer Gillian Cosgriff's riotous variety show co-presented with the Sydney Opera House. Quizzes, guest stars and audience participation collide in contests ranging from niche musical knowledge to gleefully unskilled physical challenges. Each performance promises its own gloriously unpolished chaos.

Music

Music moves between worlds throughout the Festival, from drill and strings to Sufi poetry, club sounds and free improvisation, while Blak & Blues, a highlight of the Blak Out program, brings First Nations voices into conversation with Black American