Olivia Ansell Will Lead Sydney Festival Through To 2025

Sydney Festival organisers have hailed the 2023 festival a resounding success with festival attendance reaching in excess of 420,000. Whilst Festival Director, Olivia Ansell accepts an invitation to extend her tenure through to 2025.

Organisers saw audiences and visitors surge back to the city and its surrounds as they relished the full-scale return of the beloved event after a challenging few years of lockdowns, cancellations and wild weather. With an exhilarating program of live music, performance, visual art and dance, Sydney Festival 2023 proved yet again that there is nowhere like Sydney to experience an exhilarating summer of art.

Across a packed 25-day program, the Festival welcomed 420,234 attendances into theatres, public parks, outdoor spaces, galleries, clubs, swimming pools and hospitality venues alike. The immersive Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon exhibition, covering 1750 square metres in a major takeover of The Cutaway at Barangaroo, drew returning summer crowds with rave five-star reviews and 86,205 attendees.

The 2023 Festival's emphasis on site-specific programming saw Sydney reimagined anew, from a sandy beachscape in the middle of Sydney Town Hall for the transportive Lithuanian opera-performance work Sun & Sea, and a takeover of Martin Place's "mushroom building" (the Commercial Travellers' Association), featuring 16 nights of contemporary music programming in the club's underground bar and an overnight sonic experience in the hotel rooms above.

Sydney Festival also extended its footprint in Western Sydney, with a sellout season for international circus troupe Kalabanté Productions' Afrique en Cirque at Riverside Theatres; a commanding portraiture exhibition from Brenda L. Croft titled Dyin Nura alongside Garraigarrang Badu, the first ever full-length dance work in Dharug language followed by an evening of song from Emma Donovan; and a contemporised Sydney Symphony Under the Stars concert in Parramatta Park featuring soloist Mindy Meng Wang and local composer Holly Harrison which attracted close to 10,000 people for a stellar Lunar New Year celebration.

The Festival's role as the largest commissioner of new Australian work continued in 2023, with various major productions including Trans-Tasman collaboration Hide the Dog, Stephanie Lake's Manifesto and Mary Finsterer's Antarctica, performed by Sydney Chamber Opera and Asko|Schönberg, all embarking on their world premiere seasons with the festival's support.

This summer's event also brought some of the brightest global stars to local audiences, from circus auteur James Thierrée to Spain's formidable queen of flamenco Sara Baras; and championed Australian talents to remarkable new heights, with the likes of Hamed Sadeghi, Justine Clarke and Elaine Crombie.

An annual hallmark of the festival is its empowering First Nations focused Blak Out program which this year delivered a phenomenally moving performance of Vigil: Awaken on Sydney Harbour - a powerful reawakening of the spirit of Me-Mel, co- directed by Stephen Page AO and Sydney Festival's Artist in Residence, Jacob Nash.