This weekend is the last chance to catch a New Annual show, including an internationally renowned performance described as "circus with fangs".
In its Newcastle debut, acrobatic production Wolf will hit the Civic Theatre stage on Friday night and Saturday afternoon with a mix of artistry and primal instincts.
A cast of 10 artists will tear, climb, grasp, leap and balance with fierce abandon, according to the show's blurb.
Director Yaron Lifschitz said the production delivered an evolution of intense choreographies that overflowed with "raw energy and astounding physicality".
"Wolf is a savage, thrilling ride, a fierce maelstrom of acrobatic bodies. The way they hold, the way they crash and connect," Mr Lifschitz said.
"Circus can move you and be a powerful, emotional medium ... Wolf is that distilled and clarified," he said.
The 10-day New Annual program will come to a close on Sunday October 4 with events and performances across the Civic Theatre, The Playhouse, Civic Park, Newcastle Museum, Newcastle Art Gallery, Wheeler Place, City Hall, Watt Space Gallery and University House.
Festival director Tory Loudon said eight events had sold out and they had to extend the run of Damien Frost's Night Flowers exhibition at Watt Space Gallery to meet demand.
""It's been wonderful to see audiences engaging with the program from dawn to dusk and late into the night, creating a real buzz across the city from Sea Stories at Dixon Park Beach to First Night Art Party in Laman Street and the costumed delight of the Twisted Night Flowers Party at Bartholomews," she said.
If your arts appreciation nerve endings were somehow cauterised at birth such that, after the weekend's barnstorming New Annual opener, you found yourself thinking 'it's cool, but needs more dinosaur', then rest easy.
In the first instance, you have our sympathies. In the second, New Annual has dinosaurs.
Of course, it is New Annual - Newcastle's flagship arts festival, celebrated for pushing the boundaries of culture and performance to platform revelatory new voices in a showcase of regional creativity - so, the dinosaurs wear crocs.
They will make you laugh, and probably cry, and experience the gamut of emotion in between, before sending you on your way with a new lease on the big questions.
Consider yourself braced.
The 10-day festival spotlighting the best and most innovative of fresh regional theatre, art and culture was under full steam this week.
Among a packed line-up of performance, celebrated Hunter dramaturg Ang Collins - who stole the show in 2025 with her takeover of the Newcastle Ocean Baths for a soundscape production, Meet Me at the Baths, co-written with Janie Gibson - returns with a premiere staging of an all-new work.
Triceratop is written and performed by Lingua Franca principal Adam Deusien, spinning the "wild, sexy, sad re-imagining" of the demise of the dinosaur set cast as a moving meditation on modern loneliness, romance, and the pursuit of true love in a world gone to chaos.
Deusien, who has worked in regional theatre for more than a decade, and served as Lingua Franca's artistic director since 2018, writes and performs as lonely dinosaur "tucked away from impending disaster" in a "make-shift but fabulous survival bunker" in the last days before the asteroid strikes.
The production, billed as a gay romance in the Jurassic jungle, follows the prehistoric protagonist on the search for "his perfect triceratop" as the Cretaceous civilisation crumbles around him.
Triceratop brings camp sci-fi, storytelling and cabaret theatre in a form enlivened by one of regional NSW's celebrated artists.
"This is a really fun, silly story about a camp dinosaur at the end of the world," Deusien said online before the show's opening on September 30.
The production promises a moving, theatrical meditation on the precariousness of everyday life - especially LGBTQIA+ lives - approaching middle age at a time when it feels like the world is crumbling around us.
"There's a really beautiful story in there," Deusien said online.
It's a cool story. And it has dinosaurs.
The show runs until Sunday, October 4. Tickets are available via the New Annual website.
