Adelaide Festival 2024: Top Picks

Antigone in the Amazon

Dunstan Playhouse, until 17 March

Swiss theatre director Milo Rau returns to Adelaide Festival in 2024 with his latest piece, in which he creates a political Antigone for the 21st century. Featuring Brazilian and European actors, musicians and indigenous activists, Antigone in the Amazon was filmed in Brazil and is mixed with live sequences on stage.

I Hide in Bathrooms photo by Sam Oster

I Hide in Bathrooms

Waterside Workers Hall, until 16 March

Working with collaborators including Ingrid Voorendt, Zoë Barry and Jason Sweeney, performer Astrid Pill’s new work fuses fiction with autobiography, reflecting on the experience of losing an intimate partner, falling for someone whose partner has passed away and traversing a relationship while dying. 

Electric Fields photo by Enzo Frisini

Floods of Fire: Our Celebration with Electric Fields & the ASO

Adelaide Festival Centre, 17 Mar, 7.30pm

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and electronic music duo Electric Fields partner up for a program featuring new music created for the two-day festival within a festival, Floods of Fire. The first half of the concert includes the world premiere of the Floods of Fire Symphony, while in the second half, the orchestra is joined on stage by Zaachariaha Fielding and Michael Ross, the pair behind Electric Fields.

The Nightingale and Other Fables photo by Michael Cooper

The Nightingale and Other Fables

Adelaide Festival Centre, until 5 March

Director Robert Lepage takes on Stravinsky’s first opera, which was written between 1908-13 during the composer’s Russian period. Inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, the story is brought to life by shadow play, Taiwanese hand puppets, and the ancient art of Vietnamese water puppetry, as well as a cast of singers from Ukraine, the United States, Canada and Australia.

Time Machine photo by Ralph Alswang

Time Machine

Grote Street, until 17 Mar

Award-winning performer Elizabeth Streb brings her Extreme Action art form to Adelaide for the very first time, in a work for all ages that combines physics and force with dance. Using prototypic ‘Action Machines’, her dancers become ‘Action Heroes’ who push the boundaries of the human body.