Arts festivals love to rock the boat, and the upcoming Sydney Festival will see Puccini's Il Tabarro performed on the city's Carpentaria lightship.
The one-act piece from Victorian Opera will be staged on the historic ship by the wharf at the Australian Maritime Museum to mark 100 years since the death of composer Giacomo Puccini.
The audience, thankfully, will stay on the land for the spectacle, seated in a natural amphitheatre that can fit about 800 people - and somehow, there will be a live orchestra too.
It's part of an intense two-week program that features 26 world premieres, more than 1000 artists and 150 events, with almost a third of them free.
The 2024 program also launches a mid-city music festival called Summerground, at Tumbalong Park in Darling Harbour, with three nights of live performances.
"We want to kick the year off with a bang, we want to bring in Sydney and summer in absolute style," festival director Olivia Ansell said.
The first night will feature Cimafunk (billed as the James Brown of Cuba) and his band of Havana all-stars, as well as Tanzanian-Australian singer-songwriter Beckah Amani.
There's much more in and around the water with what's possibly the world's first slow global music tour, sailing music outfit Arka Kinari, dropping anchor in Sydney Harbour to stage four nights of shows by US musician Grey Filastine and Indonesian artist Nova Ruth.
The Festival's Blak Out bill includes the theatre show Big Name, No Blankets, the tale of the Warumpi Band, which made history as the first rock'n'roll band to sing in Aboriginal languages.
For the first time all eight venues in the city's Walsh Bay art precinct will be part of proceedings, with performances in and around the wharf theatres.
At the Roslyn Packer Theatre, one of Europe's foremost contemporary dance companies GoteborgsOperans Danskompani presents a double bill, with 17 dancers contending with a 34 degree slope for Damien Jalet's In Skid, followed by Sharon Eyal's SAABA, which features demi-pointe dancing inspired by catwalks and clubbing.
At the ACO Neilson, Latin jazz pianist Harold López-Nussa brings songs from Timba a la Americana, his first album on Blue Note Records, and there's also Norwegian guitarist and composer LILJA and Berlin-based trumpeter Konstantin Döben and his band Conic Rose.
The Sydney Opera House will host the dance show Encantado by celebrated choreographer Lia Rodrigues, which features 11 dancers and 140 blankets in a show inspired by spiritual and environmental struggles in Brazil.
Belgian theatre troupe Ontroerend Goed return to the festival with a palindromic allegory of climate destruction, Are we not drawn onward to new erA, a mix of theatre, poetry, art and protest.
There's also a dive down the rabbit hole of murder mystery podcasting with Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, an investigation of cold cases centred on the unsolved killing of Iranian pop icon Fereydoun Farrokhzad.
In western Sydney, Parramatta's Riverside Theatres presents Bananaland, a musical from Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall, and the theatre will also host the Australian debut of puppetry spectacular Dinosaur World Live.
As for installations around the city, a giant female octopus sculpture made from more than 1000 pieces by Maori artist Lisa Reihana will be set up at Watermans Cove.
There's all kinds of cabaret too, with the world premiere of Send for Nellie, the story of singer and cabaret artist Nellie Small.
From UK singer-performer Sarah-Louise Young and Russel Lucas, there's the award-winning An Evening Without Kate Bush, while Michael Griffiths celebrates The Pet Shop Boys with It's a Sin: Songs of Love and Shame.
Grammy-award winner Rizo returns to the festival with her cabaret showcase Prizmatism, and jazz star Alma Zygier redefine songs made famous by Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday in her show Premarital Sextet.
The Sydney Festival runs January 5 to 28, with Summerground from January 5 to 7.
