In late January, Sydney Festival's logo popped up in the Gaza Strip, of all places — the subject of a mural showing two Palestinian children looking through a damaged brick wall, with the word "COMPLEX" painted above.
Six weeks earlier, it would have seemed like a bizarre scenario. But NSW's premier arts festival has been the subject of unusual scrutiny this summer, at home and abroad.
The public furore started around December 21, with a call to boycott the festival — by a coalition of artists and activists of Arab heritage and/or who were based in Western Sydney — in response to a $20,000 sponsorship arrangement with the Israeli Embassy in Canberra.
Their call spread quickly, spurred by social media and unequivocal op-eds.
Terrorist organisation Hamas announced its support of the boycott and an international cohort of entertainment industry figures — including Israeli-American Kiss frontman Gene Simmons — petitioned against it.
NSW Arts Minister Ben Franklin decried the boycott as "censorship", and his Labor counterpart Walt Secord called for the introduction of a policy whereby any NSW arts organisations who adopted Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) policies would forfeit its state funding.
Federal Arts Minister Paul Fletcher described boycott supporters as "useful idiots".
At some point, an army of bots got involved, tweeting garbled support for the Sydney Festival — "The festival really knows what he's doing!" — and compounding the general sense of discombobulation.
A festival against the odds
Artists started this boycott. It was Arab Theatre Studios' musical ensemble, Dandana, who alerted fellow artists and community activists to the Israeli Embassy logo on the Sydney Festival website. They were the first to boycott, alongside Bankstown Poetry Slam.
In the days following, they were joined by comedian Nazeem Hussain, Darumbal and South Sea Islander writer and academic Amy McQuire, Malyangapa and Barkindji musician Barkaa, artist Khaled Sabsabi, and intercultural dance theatre company Marrugeku.
By the time the festival opened on January 6, more than 20 acts had withdrawn, including high-profile figures Yumi Stynes, Tom Ballard and Behrouz Boochani.
On January 13, facing mounting criticism, Sydney Festival board chair David Kirk acknowledged and apologised for the difficult position the festival had put artists in.
The next day, Benjamin Law resigned from the board.
It wasn't just artists who withdrew their labour: Staff at Carriageworks, which hosted several Sydney Festival-affiliated shows and exhibitions this year, refused to work shifts in protest, after being asked to remove pro-Palestine badges.
By the festival's closing weekend, more than 30 acts or events had withdrawn as a result of the boycott: some explicitly in support of it, others seemingly more out of anger at the festival, or frustration at being, as the band Tropical Fuck Storm put it, landed in a "shit sandwich".
And then there was Omicron. As controversy around the festival built, COVID-19's latest, turbocharged variant swept through Australia.
Before the festival had even opened, companies and productions had withdrawn due to border restrictions, COVID-19 and associated risks, including Geelong's Back to Back Theatre, and drag-meets-Shakespeare adaptation Qween Lear.
All up, 12 events — including seasons of work and one-off performances — were cancelled for COVID-related reasons.
Of the shows that managed to run the gauntlet to their Festival opening, many were stymied by outbreaks among cast and crew, forced to re-crew and replace performers at the last minute and even cancel or postpone performances in some cases.
Audiences were significantly reduced at many performances, and the usual post-show foyer buzz was often non-existent.
Artists presenting work at the festival were not able to see each other's shows, for fear of catching COVID-19.
To say it's been a diminished festival, is an understatement.
And, yet, the festival proceeded. And most artists and major companies stayed the course, including Sydney Dance Company, whose production, Decadance, was at the heart of the funding controversy.
First Peoples' stories
The boycott inevitably inflected the experience of the festival.
After five years of Wesley Enoch's leadership, during which First Nations stories and experiences were central to Sydney Festival, audiences were being invited to consider the plight of Palestinians as analogous — in a month when news reports showed Palestinian families being forcibly evicted from their homes by Israeli police.
This year's program, under new festival director Olivia Ansell, carried on Enoch's commitment to programming First Nations companies and artists, and the pro-Palestine narrative of the boycott took on extra resonance when seen alongside these artists' stories — in works like Bangarra Dance Theatre's collaboration with Sydney Theatre Company, Wudjang: Not the Past — a story of culture, colonisation and resilience; and in Vigil: Songs for Tomorrow, an evening of "contemporary ceremony, song and fire" led by First Nations artists at a site of first contact (now called Barangaroo Reserve) on the eve of January 26 — a day that marks the beginning of colonisation in this country.
Vigil took place between two massive word sculptures designed by Sydney Festival's inaugural Creative Artist in Residence Jacob Nash, a descendant of the Daly River people (west of Darwin) who lives and works on Gadigal Country.
His installation, titled Future Dreaming, consisted of the word CHANGE facing the word HOPE, both in reflective lettering.
"The space between them is a place to gather, a place of acknowledgement, truth telling and commitment to the future," Nash wrote in an artist statement posted nearby.
Ali Murphy-Oates, managing director of NSW First Peoples performing arts company Moogahlin, whose premiere of Troy Russell's play The Last Shot was programmed in this year's festival, says that their decision to 'stay in' had a common goal with artists like Barkaa and Marrugeku, who withdrew.
"[Those decisions] are working in parallel with the point of this conversation, which is that there is a serious issue that Palestinians are facing: genocide and removal from their homelands. And each of those responses was about drawing focus to that."
"[Moogahlin] felt it was a stronger message for us to continue to tell a story of resistance against the colonial power, using the platform that we had at Sydney Festival, and draw attention through that work [The Last Shot] to the same things that the boycott is attempting to draw attention to, more broadly."
(Moogahlin ultimately withdrew the show before the festival opened, due to COVID concerns.)
The 'shit sandwich'
In coverage and Twitter commentary around the Sydney Festival boycott, the artists' experience was often reduced to binaries: they were "in or out"; heroic or idiotic; showing solidarity or bullied into submission.
In reality, the ways and reasons artists responded to the boycott were varied.
Decisions were influenced by personal politics and by financial situations, and different contractual relationships with the festival.
Some productions were commissioned or co-commissioned — and thus significantly funded — by Sydney Festival (including Legs on the Wall's THAW, Wudjang: Not the Past, and Nat Randall and Anna Breckon's Set Piece).
Others were produced by external companies and received a fee to be part of the festival.
Marrugeku's Jurrungu Ngan-ga [Straight Talk], for example, was commissioned outside the festival, and in withdrawing from the program the company was nevertheless able to proceed with its season as planned (though any tickets purchased through Sydney Festival were cancelled and refunded, requiring patrons to re-book).
And then there were the outliers: independent artists who were operating outside a larger institution or commissioning framework — and often in a position of heightened precarity.
Seeking to capture a more complex picture of artists' experience, ABC Arts set out to talk to participants in this year's festival.
Those we talked to described a stressful, anxious experience of trying to mount works that had been delayed repeatedly due to COVID, during its latest wave, while facing private and public calls to boycott — and often simultaneous pressure not to.
The artists we spoke to said their conversations with the boycott organisers were respectful.
This is not to say that artists didn't experience harassment, however, as the boycott attracted vehement supporters and critics.
Murphy-Oates says distress ran high within her networks.
Artists also spoke of losing audiences, fractured relationships, and a loss of their sense of pride in being part of the festival.
Amongst the angst, there was also immense gratitude for having been able to finally stage work.
A cultural practice, not a festival event
Nardi Simpson is a Yuwaalaraay storyteller and performer best known for her work with Indigenous folk duo Stiff Gins and more recently her acclaimed debut novel Song of the Crocodile.
For the Sydney Festival program, she worked with her sister Lucy Simpson and cousin Brendan Odee Welsh, and acclaimed experimental music outfit Ensemble Offspring, to create a kind of one-off concert-style performance that she describes as "a visual and aural journey through Yuwaalaraay clan lands" in north-western New South Wales.
It was titled -barra, after a suffix in Yuwaalaraay language that means "people of" or "place of".
The performance was just one outcome of around five years of work in the community around Walgett and Lightning Ridge to document cultural knowledges.
On stage, Simpson talked and sang accompanied by a five-piece ensemble and a 15-voice choir, while her sister and cousin's works were projected on a large screen above.
"It was important for me to be able to provide an opportunity for our [First Nations] makers outside of Sydney, for their work to be seen in that beautiful artistic context — as well as [for] what it is, which is really important documenting [of cultural knowledges]," she says.
When the boycott was called, the Simpson sisters and Welsh decided to proceed with -barra as planned, on the basis that it represented an enactment of "a modern-day ceremony".
"Yes, it's a work that's going to appear once in the Sydney Festival — but actually, the ownership of this belongs to our communities," Simpson explains.
But Simpson says the experience of making that decision, as an independent artist, was "confronting. I felt very lonely; isolated".
"I really would have loved to have heard early on from senior Indigenous arts organisations, showing leadership in how to move in that difficult space … [such as] Bangarra, or even the blackfullas on the board of Sydney Festival."
She says the experience has thrown up lots of questions that she continues to grapple with: How can Indigenous artists communicate and support each other in these situations? And more broadly, "How do Black artists and Palestinian artists and Muslim artists have solidarity offstage?
"What's my process in difficult times? How can I be better? And then how can I support other people in what they need?"
A matter of tactics
British-Iranian theatre-maker Javaad Alipoor was one of a handful of international artists in this year's program.
His 2019 work Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran was presented at Riverside Theatres in Parramatta alongside a new 'work-in-progress' co-commissioned and produced by the National Theatre of Parramatta, who hosted Alipoor's company for a 2.5-week development in January, working with local creatives.
Alipoor describes himself as a political artist, and combines digital technology and social media with theatre to investigate political and social issues — and the way we see the world and ourselves. ("There's definitely, you know, jokes and stuff like that as well," he quips.)
Rich Kids springboards from the heady milieu of the 'rich kids' of Tehran, using a mix of digital theatre and live Instagram feeds to explore the uneasy, ubiquitous feeling that we're living in 'end times'.
It is the second part of a trilogy that started with The Believers Are But Brothers (which showed at Riverside Theatres in 2019), which went down the rabbit hole of online chat forums to explore the radicalisation of young men by fundamentalist groups.
Alipoor "grew up in a mixed-race family in northern England, in a working-class neighbourhood … that part of the world has very diverse neighbourhoods," he says.
He aspires to bring a genuine "internationalism" to the work he creates, and the teams he makes it with.
"It was so natural for us to be in a neighbourhood like Parramatta," he says.
Presenting the work-in-progress to a festival audience is also a rare, valuable opportunity: "You really push the ideas harder," he says.
Alipoor didn't find out about the funding controversy until he had landed in Australia.
"I have my criticisms of that decision that Sydney Festival took," he says, adding that his own company is selective about partnerships.
He characterises his decision to remain in the festival as a matter of "practicality and tactics".
"The politics of the Middle East in some way loom large in a lot of my work; and having heritage from Iran, having family there, and doing solidarity work with the Syrian revolution and with the Iranian struggle for democracy — you really do pick up how important the idea of freedom of speech is, and how important that is for having a space to be able to say something," he explains.
"I feel a responsibility, to some degree, around not throwing away the opportunity we have to make that kind of work. At the end of the day, for me there is a creative and editorial freedom I have which was not at all impinged on [by the Sydney Festival's sponsorship arrangement]."
But staying came at a price.
"An important part of my audience is other young-ish artists of colour and minority artists; that's partially who the work is for," he says.
"We got quite a diverse audience [this time], but that diversity almost entirely came from Iranian people — whereas the last time we played here we did get a broader representation of Australians of colour, especially with Middle Eastern and North African heritage."
Fourth time lucky
This year's Sydney Festival was Bec Massey's first as a producer — with her fledgling independent company Club House; but as an actor, she has performed in many.
"All of my greatest, peak creative experiences have been at festivals," she says.
"The sense of being at a smorgasbord with other artists, I find really exhilarating. And there's suddenly much more oxygen [in the room] — the work really improves."
This year she produced and starred in the raucous theatrical 'sex gig' 44 Sex Acts in One Week, by playwright David Finnigan (Kill Climate Deniers). Sheridan Harbridge (recently on stage in the return season of Prima Facie) directed.
44 Sex Acts had a typically torturous path to the stage for our COVID times; the Sydney Festival season was the fourth attempt to get it up in two years.
Finnigan's play — nominated for the Griffin and Patrick White awards in 2020 — was reworked as a hybrid 'staged radio play' (complete with foley desk) as part of Belvoir's 2020 'COVID response' program Artists At Work, then programmed for a short season in December 2020. It closed after just two nights due to the Avalon outbreak.
Then the production was booked for the 2021 Brisbane Festival and Belvoir's Festival of Everything (slated for September) — but both of those seasons were also COVID casualties.
In this context, being booked by Sydney Festival felt like a blessing — it meant money to make the work (Club House also received funding from Create NSW) and stage it.
Massey stocked up on Rapid Antigen Tests and asked the cast and crew to isolate as much as possible during rehearsals — which were done wearing masks.
When the boycott was called, Massey wrote to the cast and crew, and they discussed it as a group.
"There were so many different responses, even within our company," she says.
"[We asked everyone]: 'What do we want to do? How do we all feel about it?' And then we just kept checking in. Because it changed, you know — our responses changed."
Ultimately the company donated — and promoted audience donations to — an NGO in the occupied Palestinian territories established by refugees.
"I do feel like the conversation [raised by the boycott] is a really great one to have," she says.
The possibilities of festival work
S. Shakthidharan is behind one of the most memorable — and ambitious — shows in recent Sydney Festival history: the epic, Helpmann Award-winning Counting and Cracking.
Three years on, that show — which took over Sydney Town Hall with a cast of 19 and a transformative set design — feels like another era to the Western Sydney-based artist.
"It feels like we made a show that was virtually impossible to make in that time — and in this time, would definitely be impossible," he reflects.
"The industry, I think, is on its knees in terms of the impact of the pandemic."
For this year's festival, Shakthi wrote and directed 宿 (stay): a hybrid of dance, theatre, film and music about three women — a Maltese-Australian farmer, a teacher and descendant of the Tagalaka people, and a Singaporean businesswoman — brought together by the discovery of two entwined human skeletons in a dried-up creek bed in remote Queensland.
Stay is more modest in scale than Counting and Cracking — but it was made across two continents, with Singapore's SAtheCollective; COVID inevitably complicated its journey.
Two years into the show's development, the team realised they wouldn't be able to bring the Singaporean artists to Australia — and so pivoted: they filmed the Singapore-set parts of the story on location and incorporated this on stage via screens.
But this meant they were effectively doing two shows — one filmed, one staged.
And then, just as they started rehearsals in Sydney, three members of the ensemble — including Shakthi — got COVID. They lost two weeks of rehearsals.
"It's not just the COVID, it's also the isolation — and [in] the time you're waiting to find out how many people have got it, you can't really work," he explains.
Stay was co-commissioned by Sydney Festival and OzAsia Festival, and Shakthi says arts festivals are key to his life's mission: to make work that combines contemporary, Western theatre with the kind of traditional art forms (including forms of music and dance) that he grew up with.
"To explore that form of storytelling, and to be able to put on a work of scale with that form, is absolutely impossible in Australia without festivals."
He says he has talked to the board and executive staff about the Israeli Embassy sponsorship.
"I think everything [the boycott] brought up and all the things that it has forced our industry to confront deserves further interrogation.
"It needs to be an ongoing conversation; it requires a lot of broad and nuanced and systemic thinking."
Getting comfortable with discomfort
For his play Black Brass, which showed at Belvoir as part of Sydney Festival, Mararo Wangai interviewed people who had moved to Perth from Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Congo, France, Réunion and Sudan.
Some were refugees; some came to work, or with their families, or for love — or like he had, to study.
He asked them about the things that got them through the day; the small acts of resilience.
The resulting play, directed here by Matt Edgerton, takes place in a recording studio late at night, where a young man (played by Wangai) is cleaning — and angsting over his immigration meeting the next day.
But he's not alone: the figure of an older man (performed by singer, songwriter, musician and composer Mahamudo Selimane) appears, needling him with guitar riffs and song — prompting recollections of his former country and life.
Perth-based Sudanese playwright and poet Afeif Ismael, who worked with Wangai on the script as dramaturg, describes it as "a challenge to the mainstream expectations of refugee narratives".
Wangai says: "It's a show about creating conversations, not so much about entertaining people … It needs to be unsettling as well, when we talk about the deep, hard truths."
He was inspired by shows he had seen at Perth Festival — including National Theatre's immersive production of Barber Shop Chronicles, and Exit/Exist by South African choreographer Gregory Maqoma — and a desire to diversify our theatres.
"As a Kenyan, as a Black man working in theatre in Australia, I don't see myself in the theatres that I go to; I don't see myself in the theatres that I work in," he says.
For the Sydney season, Wanyika Mshila and Niwa Mburuja (of creative agency 2 Sydney Stylists) dressed the foyer in art, African fabric and nostalgic decor; audience members were served Ethiopian coffee.
"It's about making that space comfortable [so that] especially Africans come in and see themselves in that space and feel that they're at home, feel like they belong, and that their stories belong on that stage as well," Wangai explains.
When the boycott was called, Wangai and his team talked to Belvoir — which has a long history of presenting work as part of Sydney Festival — and reached a compromise: they returned festival funding but remained within the program.
"But honestly, I'm learning more and more that it's OK to be uncomfortable, it's OK to have difficult conversations."
A sense of precarity
Sydney Dance Company alumni Charmene Yap and Cass Mortimer Eipper delivered their first major choreographic collaboration at Sydney Festival — on the heels of their first parental collaboration in September last year.
"We're a bit tired," Yap laughs when we talk after their final show.
Not only did they develop a feature-length work with seven dancers during the pandemic, while nursing a newborn, but they pulled off a season during Omicron — despite three of their dancers getting COVID in the lead-up, two of whom had to be replaced a week before opening night.
"We never knew whether we would make it. It's always been this precarious situation," says Eipper.
Their work, Grey Rhino, dealt with a problem of human behaviour that is increasingly urgent but also timeless: our tendency to avoid dealing with obvious, imminent danger until it's too late.
The term was coined by author and policy analyst Michele Wucker, and popularised in her TED Talk.
"It really resonated with us in terms of global things like climate change and the growing wealth gap, but also our own personal 'grey rhinos'," says Yap.
In December 2019, they self-funded an initial 10-day development with eight dancers, as a "Christmas present" to each other.
Yap jokes that Grey Rhino is their "nutcracker show" — because they only ever got to work on it over the Christmas holiday period, scheduling around other work commitments.
Along the way they picked up a producer (Performing Lines) and a berth at Sydney Festival; then funding from Create NSW and the Australia Council for the Arts. "That [funding] was tied up in the festival also presenting us," Eipper explains.
When the boycott organisers got in touch, the two choreographers responded saying they sympathised with the cause — but felt unable to withdraw.
They also felt that in performing the work, they were making a statement on issues important to them. "And as artists, we feel that is the best way we are able to express our values."
Queer politics
Maeve Marsden has been part of Sydney Festival previously with her Queerstories storytelling event and her 'gin cabaret' Mother's Ruin. This year, she directed Lizzie: a queer, Oz noir take on an American musical about the much-mythologised axe-murderer Lizzie Borden.
It's a bold spin on the US productions of the show, which have been decidedly American in content and style, with a "pop" sheen and rock concert sound design and lighting.
"The aesthetics of most of the productions is heavy glam rock, corsets and Victoriana and fishnets, and that kind of femininity," says Marsden.
Her version transposes it to small town Australia, and gives her heroine a second-act butch transformation; stylistically, it's less 'rock musical' and more 'gothic cabaret'; less 'sincere' and more tongue-in-cheek — while remaining sensitive to themes of sexual abuse and trauma.
Initially, Lizzie was meant to open in October 2021 at the Hayes Theatre, who produced and fully funded the show.
"It was a particularly wonderful opportunity because as opposed to most of my work, I'm not financially responsible for the success of the show — and I have the full force of the Hayes team and creatives and crew behind it," Marsden explains.
When the season was postponed due to COVID, Lizzie scored a spot in Sydney Festival — which seemed like a blessing.
"It would mean we got to reach the kind of people who come to Queerstories and my cabarets, or who might go to a Spiegeltent show in Sydney Festival — but wouldn't necessarily go to a Hayes musical," says Marsden.
When the boycott was called, Marsden and her team wanted to withdraw Lizzie from the festival.
Ultimately, however, the Hayes board decided to stay.
Marsden was disappointed, but says that "as a small theatre, they had to make the choice for themselves".
"And in that process, they really engaged with all of us as a company, and made a lot of time to listen to us and hear our concerns."
Marsden donated the remainder of her fee for Lizzie to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.
"It ended up being a really difficult position where we're kind of simultaneously trying to promote a show that we're really, really proud of, and I've worked really hard on, and it's essentially my directorial debut — but it's associated with a festival that I believe has acted against the interest of both Palestinian artists and artists in general," she says.
Between hope and change
On the eve of Vigil, we asked festival director Olivia Ansell how she felt the experience would shape the festival going forward.
She spoke of the festival's history of "supporting an inclusive and diverse offering in terms of artists on its stages, for 46 years" and said that "we [the festival] support all opinions and viewpoints and respect artists that want to make a stand and have a viewpoint".
She pointed to the board's commitment to "review its practices in relation to funding from foreign governments or related parties" — and added that "it's a rigorous discussion around public funding that we're really keen to have, in consultation with the sector".
We also asked her what lessons the festival might take from the experience in terms of its relationship with artists.
"I think what's unfortunate is that artists felt like they had to make a choice between performing or not performing. And there has been a lot of intimidation and pressure put on artists," she responded.
"Some artists have a very particular viewpoint and standpoint, and that's to be absolutely respected. And other artists may not have had time to form a viewpoint about the boycott, but were in front of a lot of pressure to make a decision either way.
The artists we talked to spoke of a desire for nuanced, ongoing, multilateral conversations with the festival and the arts community.
One thing is for sure: neither the festival nor the arts community can easily afford to walk away from the table. In a small ecosystem, they're somewhat reliant on each other.
Moogahlin's Ali Murphy-Oates speaks of the continuing, often hard work of relationship maintenance.
"Moogahlin has a very strong stance on Sydney Festival's choice to take money from the Israeli Embassy. [But] we're in relationship with each other."
The festival is over. The show goes on.
