The 2021 Adelaide Festival Gives Life Support Of The Best Kind

The 2021 Adelaide Festival program, prepared over this past turbulent year under ever-changing circumstances, may just turn out to be one of the most necessary - and memorable.

Launched on Thursday 3 December at the Adelaide Festival Theatre, the 36th Adelaide Festival offers a total of 70 events in theatre, music, opera, dance, film, food and visual arts - including uniquely local programs Adelaide Writers' Week, Chamber Landscapes at UKARIA and WOMADelaide - over 17 days from 26 February to 14 March.

10 world premieres, 14 Australian premieres, 18 events exclusive to Adelaide* will reaffirm the Festival as the benchmark for Southern-hemisphere cultural celebrations, while developing technologies and new program delivery methods will offer unique and unprecedented audience experiences.

Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield observed
"For us the 'old normal' was spending a third of our lives in an utterly abnormal way: racing from airport to airport, from theatre or concert hall to hotel, from hotel to airport, on repeat. A period of enforced stillness has caused us to reflect on how easy it is to take for granted those precious tenets of arts festivals: that bringing people together to experience something new - whether beautiful, troubling, funny or challenging - is essential nourishment for society. The connection forged between performer and audience, and indeed audiences witnessing human creativity together, is a primal experience. We are longing to bring it back to everyone's lives."

Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on...
Why their fifth Adelaide Festival is special:

"Since March, the question we have been consistently asked is 'how do you plan a festival in a pandemic?' Admittedly, it has not been easy: an enforced hiatus for companies across the world; artists and performers losing months of employment overnight and some leaving the industry in order to secure jobs in other fields; mental health impacts among art workers; a reduction in the number of new productions being created; insurance cover all but disappearing, border closures, reduced flight routes, quarantining requirements; new costs of developing and implementing specialised COVID-management plans, and the severe reduction in venue capacities and therefore box office income and ticket stock."

"So we focused on finding solutions. We wanted to ensure Adelaide Festival remained true to a 60-year tradition of bringing great International Artists and events to our city while simultaneously supporting Adelaide companies and others from throughout Australia. We have always had a very strong presence of local work but in 2021 we supported a number of artists and companies to use this year of enforced isolation to develop new work at a scale and ambition that hadn't been possible before. The 2021 Adelaide Festival has a record number of Australian premieres and we also backed new creative collaborations and made early investments in artists and projects that will bear fruit in 2022 and beyond."

"We've also found ways of giving Adelaide audiences 'international' experiences so they remain connected to the thrilling and urgent creative voices of artists beyond our shores. Some of the works in our program were first created in other parts of the world with artists from the USA, UK and Europe, and these will be will be staged live in Adelaide featuring leading Australian artists and ensembles. These events include our major opera presentation, a significant theatre event, and a series of fine-music recitals."

"There will also be three live international events at the 2021 Adelaide Festival, including two extraordinary new installations from the US and UK - both free to the public - and a classical music concert."

"Finally, we're particularly excited by the potential of the four-part Live from Europe program, which will enable Adelaide audiences to attend live international performances in theatre, music and dance, from Russia, UK, Germany and the Netherlands. The only difference is that they are all happening, in real time, on the other side of the world. Just like in any other Adelaide Festival, the artists and audience can see and hear each other but the difference is that this time the audience-performer connection is mediated through high resolution cameras and the latest in streaming technology."

"And a beautiful thing about streaming is that performances, even our centrepiece opera, can be simultaneously appreciated throughout regional SA, from the South-east through the Riverland to the Iron Triangle. Coronavirus or not, we feel this is a very special innovation."

"It feels like the Festivals in 2020 and 2021 could be the bookends of the COVID-era. The first round of lockdowns started just two hours after our final 2020 event finished and with the expectation of a vaccine in the first quarter of 2021, we are seeing this period as a time when the indispensable aspects of our lives fell into sharp focus. We know that people will look back on the 2021 Festival as one to remember; we hope that it will also offer opportunities for renewal and restoration and a boost of energy, optimism and joy that comes with each Adelaide Festival's abundance of creative imagination."

The AF21 Opening event will feature a free concert by pop icon, actress, musician and songwriter Jessica Mauboy. The beloved, award-winning entertainer will perform at Adelaide Oval on the evening of Saturday 27 February.

In the tradition of The Workshop and The Palais in previous festivals, the 2021 Festival Club, dubbed The Summerhouse, will be the hub of the Festival and venue for its contemporary music program. The pop-up venue will emerge every year at Festival time adjacent to the northern side of the Festival Centre.

Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on...
The OPERA program - Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream:

NEIL: "I first directed this production in Chicago, Houston and Toronto and I'm thrilled to bring it to Australian audiences. It is an opera of beauty and of joy and it's very much about reconciliation and magic, the perfect work to cheer us and remind us of the beauty of imagination and the beauty of making theatre."

RACHEL: "We're also delighted that audiences across Adelaide and in regional South Australia will have an opportunity to experience this work. Increasing the accessibility of Adelaide Festival events to everyone in South Australia has been a long-held goal and despite the challenges of all our theatres operating at reduced seating capacities, this year's livestream to The Summerhouse and regional venues helps address both the geographical and financial barriers that may inhibit attendance at Adelaide Festival's centrepiece opera events."

Britten's musical transformation of Shakespeare's most loved comedy with its graceful haunting melodies, iridescent orchestration and headily perfumed harmony, directed by Neil Armfield and conducted by Paul Kildea, plays four performances between 26 February and 3 March, at the Festival Theatre. One performance will be live-streamed at Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre, Mount Gambier; Northern Festival Centre, Port Pirie; Chaffey Theatre, Renmark; Middleback Arts Centre, Whyalla Norrie; and on the big screen at The Summerhouse Festival Club, on the evening of Sunday 28 February.

The Live From Europe program

Four unique, specially commissioned live performances on four European mornings, by some of the world's most lauded artists in theatre, music and dance; each introduced to Adelaide audiences by the director or principal artist, in state-of-the-art vision and sound, on four unforgettable Australian nights at the newly-renovated Her Majesty's Theatre:

• Star pianist and bold cultural commentator, Russian-German Igor Levit, 'one of the essential artists of our time' according to the New York Times;
• Australian director Simon Stone's landmark production of Euripides' tragedy Medea, created for Ivo van Hove's International Theatre Amsterdam;
• The Olivier-Award winning dance event BLKDOG, from one of the most thrilling new voices in contemporary choreography Botis Seva; commissioned and presented by Far From The Norm and London's Sadler's Wells
• 'Russian Shakespeare' Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, theatre on an operatic scale featuring a 45-strong company from Moscow's Vakhtangov State Theatre, in their globally acclaimed production.
• Audience responses to the work will be live streamed back to the performers so that the essential connection between audience and artist remains, even when separated by thousands of miles.

Selected works will also be live streamed into regional centres: Igor Levit at Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre, Mt Gambier; BLKGDOG at Middleback Arts Centre, Whyalla Norrie; Medea at Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre, Mt Gambier.

Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on...
The THEATRE program:

"With Medea and Eugene Onegin streamed live from Europe, and extraordinary Australian performers in new international works - notably Robyn Nevin in A German Life - international creative perspectives and ideas are well represented."

"Closer to home, the Australian theatre program is a mix of thrilling new premieres from our most intriguing and original artists, with existing works that arrive with a dazzling track record with Australian and international audiences."

"Local sensations Gravity & Other Myths with their idiosyncratic acrobatic and physical theatre prowess will team up with 30-strong choral ensemble Aurora to launch their world premiere season of The Pulse at Her Majesty's Theatre on our opening weekend. And Branch Nebula will be back defying laws of nature (or Officeworks, at minimum!). Reviewers, please note: High Performance Packing Tape will go ahead this year: they have an understudy for Lee Wilson - we told you physical theatre was risky!"

In A German Life, British playwright Christopher Hampton has fashioned an extraordinary theatrical tour-de-force based on testimony given to Austrian documentary makers by 103-year-old Brunhilde Pomsel who worked as a secretary to Joseph Goebbels. In a highly demanding ninety-minute solo, our finest stage performer Robyn Nevin plays Pomsel, under the direction of Neil Armfield.

Set Piece, from the creative team behind the 24-hour performance experience The Second Woman (previously featured in the 2019 Festival), is their highly-anticipated next work. A similar theatrical/cinematic hybrid, it explores two lesbian relationships in the bottle-strewn aftermath of a party, loosely inspired by the intergenerational coupledom of Edward Albee's classic drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Adelaide audiences have waited over a decade to be a part of an ingenious piece that festival-goers around the world have adored since 2005: Back to Back Theatre's small metal objects, its unique style of 'street-theatre-but-not-as-we-know-it' happens in Glenelg's, Moseley Square.

FANGIRLS, with book, music and lyrics all by young Sydney-born writer Yve Blake, was one of the standout Australian theatre hits of 2019 that captured the hearts of the wide-eyed adolescent in all of us. Whether you were screaming for Paul McCartney in the 60's, Simon Le Bon in the 80's, or Harry Styles in the 2000's - we've all been there! With an amazing cast (including Aydan from The Voice), inexhaustibly witty dialogue, and heart-pumping, infectious songs, it had everyone on their feet cheering in its debut seasons in Brisbane and Sydney.

The genesis of The Boy Who Talked to Dogs is the amazing true story of Limerick-born 'Dogman' Martin McKenna, Nimbin's infamous dog-whisperer adopted as a homeless teenager by a pack of strays in this major new co-production between Adelaide's Slingsby, State Theatre Company South Australia and three brilliant Irish artists: playwright Amy Conroy, actor Bryan Burroughs (Beowulf) and songwriter Lisa O'Neill.

High Performance Packing Tape makes it into Adelaide at the second attempt, having been a real-life casualty of this physical theatre company's stationery stock in 2020. Branch Nebula's OH&S nightmare transforms everyday office consumables into the infrastructure of one person's physical ruin: scaling collapsing cardboard-box towers, hanging precariously from sticky-tape bridges unable to carry his weight and asking more of cheap materials than they're ever able to give.

Back for its third and biggest Festival mainstage show, Gravity & Other Myths in partnership with Aurora - Young Adelaide Voices present the world premiere season of The Pulse. With sixty people on stage it sees thirty bodies in close-knit, full-pelt, intimate, sweaty co-operation and another thirty faces singing their lungs out. This exhilarating spectacle is the stuff of lockdown dreams: a massive embodiment of our primal hunger for community and physical touch.

Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on...The CLASSICAL MUSIC program:

"Pianist Igor Levit is one of the most in-demand musicians across the globe right now and he appears via live streaming; but we also love the way the 1:1 concerts (originating in Germany and brought to Australia by Sally Walker) have devised another way around the current inaccessibility of most concert halls - one musician, one listener, two metres apart, experiencing a ten-minute non-verbal 1:1 encounter in a unique and unexpected location."

And longstanding Adelaide Festival attraction Chamber Landscapes, at the breathtaking Adelaide Hills venue UKARIA, this year offers Incredible Floridas: Elders and Outliers, under the passionate curation of Kim Williams: an entertaining and mind-expanding weekend honouring our musical elders, with a specially selected Australian poem read by actor John Gaden prefacing each segment.

Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on...The CONTEMPORARY MUSIC program:

"We are christening the 2021 Festival 'hub', The Summerhouse, with a line-up of great Australian contemporary music. We've moved on from the 'winter of discontent' - welcome to The Summerhouse!"

Musicians and bands confirmed to date include:

• Indie/pop/rock/folk band San Cisco with their new album Between You and Me;
• Infamous DJ Late Nite Tuff Guy's dedicated tribute show to Prince;
• A night with two of the great identities of Australian jazz Paul Grabowsky and Vince Jones;
• Instrumental Afrobeat band The Shaolin Afronauts playing the live soundtrack to the screening of Mad Max 2;
• Indie pop singer-songwriter Ben Lee returning from the US with songs from his new album Quarter Century Classix;
• Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Wafia with her unique pop anthems including songs from her Good Things EP;
• Cult hero Donny Benét and his 80's post-disco Italo-style nostalgia;
• Multifaceted artist and star-in-the-making Jaguar Jonze including her new single Murder;
• Melbourne band The Tarantinos performing the live soundtrack to the film Pulp Fiction;
• One of the most revered pop artists of the new millennium Dami Im; including her new single Paper Dragon;
• Style icon and songwriter George Maple performing her new album Myth;
• A night with Melbourne singer Mo'Ju (previously known as Moju Juju) including her new single Put It On Hold;
• A rare concert by jazz supergroup Torrio! comprising three giants of Australian improvised music: pianist Paul Grabowsky, drummer Niko Schäuble and expatriate Italian saxophonist Mirko Guerrini;
• Vinyl Destination, a skillfully curated history of vinyl from the nationally acclaimed DJ Brendon including the sounds of Adelaide's famous clubs including the Arkaba, Heaven, the Synagogue and LeRox in one huge purely vinyl night;
• A one-night highlights reel of the current wave of new First Nations voices shaking up Australian hip-hop culture: Ziggy Ramo, (whose Black Thoughts was hailed by NME as 2020's most important Australian album), JK-47 (Triple J Award-winner for 2020 Unearthed Artist of the Year), J-MILLA (whose tracka??Unlock the Systema??about Kumanjayi Walker earned him Triple J Spotlight Artist status) and comparative veteran Jimblah, (Face the Fire), the inaugural Hilltop Hoods Initiative winner whose tireless efforts led to the formation of First Sounds: First Nations Collective for Traditional and Contemporary Music.

Michael Tippett's seminal 1942 oratorio A Child of Our Time, rivalled only by Britten's War Requiem in terms of popularity and relevance (yet performed only rarely in Australia), will be interpreted by associate conductor and chorus master Brett Weymark. He will be joined by four extraordinary soloists (to be announced), the Adelaide Festival Community Chorus gathered from the diversity of choral singers in Adelaide's city and suburbs and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, described by a veteran New York Times critic as 'a complete artist... possessing a gift for intimate communication in a vast hall, combined with a voice of velvety gentleness' has made a comet-sized impact on the international opera world since he won New York's prestigious Metropolitan Opera Auditions Grand Final. The remarkable counter-tenor, seen in Adelaide as Oberon on the Festival Theatre stage in A Midsummer Night's Dream, returns with a recital of Duparc, Brahms, Ravel and others, accompanied by one of Australia's greatest pianists, Russian-born Adelaide resident Konstantin Shamray.

Outspoken advocate for Australian music Kim Williams (also curator of 2021's Chamber Landscapes at UKARIA) has curated a passionate retrospective of the last hundred years of composition in Pierrot Lunaire: Sex & Madness, featuring internationally acclaimed Australian singer/actor Jessica Aszodi.

1:1 Concerts sees the Australian bush, a goat's stable and an airport become 2021's alternate concert halls, while Musica Viva presents Australia's most internationally acclaimed oboist Diana Doherty with the Streeton Trio.

Festival Joint Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on...
The DANCE program:
Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on...
The VISUAL ARTS program:

"While Botis Seva's BLKDOG represents one of the most thrilling new works in contemporary choreography via live streaming, Australian dance is represented by four very individual premieres. Two come from Australia's most accomplished and renowned dance companies, Australian Dance Theatre and Sydney Dance Company. The third work - a double bill - has been created by rising star Lewis Major, and the fourth is from the dynamic creative force that is Restless Dance Theatre."

Our own Australian String Quartet appears alongside the dancers in Impermanence by Sydney Dance Company. Commissioned and choreographed by Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela, Bryce Dessner's score draws inspiration from the tragic Australian bush and Notre-Dame Cathedral fires: a work imbued with beauty, radiance and hope in the face of devastation.

The world premiere of Supernature, the culmination of a trilogy of works choreographed by Australian Dance Theatre's Director Garry Stewart, postulates potential futures for our species - with compelling relevance to recent history.

In the spirit of their 2017 Festival hit Intimate Space - performed throughout Adelaide's Hilton Hotel - Adelaide's unique, multi-award-winning Restless Dance Theatre have again created a site-specific event, Guttered, this time in the ten-pin bowling alleys of Kingpin Norwood.

S/WORDS and Unfolding is the world premiere of a double bill by rising star of Australian dance, Lewis Major, presenting two very different shades of his vision. Major, of French, Bungandidj, Jewish, Ngarrindjeri and English heritage, was born and raised on a sheep farm in the state's South East. Perhaps not a typical start to a career in experimental dance theatre, but his original choreographic voice has already been seen on six continents and has been described as 'mesmerising and sinuous'.

"A diverse range of female voices and concerns are strongly in evidence in the Festival's 2021 exhibition program, in very different media with vastly differing subject matters, histories and contexts. We are thrilled as always to present SAMSTAG's Adelaide//International program, this year in its third and final iteration, and especially pleased to support a major showcase of the work of Clarice Beckett at the Art Gallery of South Australia."

Adelaide//International: For the past three years, Adelaide//International, a special project developed for the festival, has provided consistently unexpected and refreshing work by local, national and International Artists. Tremble, Tremble is a massive film, sound, light, sculpture and performance-based installation created by Ireland's Jesse Jones at the height of the abortion referendum with acclaimed Irish actor Olwen Fouéré (Cursed), incanting the death-knell of male-centric law, as gigantic holographic arms part curtains and mysterious figures manipulate supernatural objects. Fayen d'Evie's Endnote: the ethical handling of empty spaces considers how we might publish ideas for future audiences, embedding stories in granite, gesture and sound, while James Tylor in The Darkness of Enlightenment investigates the mistakes, mistranslations and loss of knowledge resulting from European attempts to document Kaurna culture. Taloi Havini's beautiful video-tryptic Tsomi wan-bel examines acknowledgement and reconciliation via close up footage of three young men taken during traditional Bougainville victim-offender mediation.

The Image is not nothing: Yhonnie Scarce is a Kokatha and Nukunu woman whose famous sculpture Thunder Raining Poison reimagines the Maralinga blast 2000 hand-blown glass yams hung in the form of a post-nuclear cloud. Together with artist and writer Lisa Radford, she travelled to sites around the world investigating the commemoration, or deliberate sequestration, of acts of genocide, colonisation and nuclear trauma. They have jointly curated a comprehensive exhibition that unites the responses of international and Australian artists to the implications of Maralinga as an example of how terra nullius has seeped into this country's psyche. And it goes further, presenting provocative reactions from Japanese artists to Hiroshima and Fukushima, New York artists to Ground Zero, Samoan to Pacific test sites, Croatian to Ustaše concentration camps, Georgian artists to Soviet monumentalism.

Clarice Beckett: The present moment: Clarice Beckett's story of neglect and remarkable rediscovery is one every Australian should know. Misunderstood in her lifetime, then forgotten for years after her 1935 death at just 47, she's one of our greatest artists, but still far from a household name. This exhibition, the most comprehensive retrospective of Beckett's work ever staged, features 130 paintings, including a donation of 21 oils from Alastair Hunter OAM. The artist's famed ethereal images of her bayside surroundings included in this exhibition reveal that despite enduring bias and scant recognition, Beckett was working at the avant-garde of international modernism. Arranged to chronicle a single day, the exhibition takes visitors from the first breath of dawn to the hush of sunset and finally into the enveloping mists of nightfall. It will move you - there is an ineffable melancholy in even her sunniest works - leaving you grateful that the veil was finally lifted on her genius.

Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on...
FILM, INSTALLATIONS and SPECIAL EVENTS:

"We are particularly delighted to partner with the Adelaide Film Festival in presenting the gala world premiere of Molly Reynolds and Rolf de Heer's documentary My Name is Gulpilil. This film is the culmination of a series of collaborations David Gulpilil has had with the Adelaide Festival, beginning in 2002 when The Tracker, commissioned by Artistic Director Peter Sellars, premiered with accompanying live music score sung by Archie Roach. David also appeared in the same year alongside Greg Rowe at the unforgettable Tarntanyangga screening of Storm Boy. The collaboration continued for the next two festivals with Neil Armfield's production of his one-man stage show, Gulpilil, in 2004, and in 2006 with the world's first screening of Ten Canoes. We also saw this event as an important opportunity to program a retrospective look at the career of one of Australia's greatest actors - a series of eight films selected by David himself"

My Name is Gulpilil is David's story, in his own words. He boldly takes us on the journey that is his most extraordinary life. The David Gulpilil Retrospective includes his films Ten Canoes, The Tracker, Rabbit Proof Fence, Charlie's Country, Mad Dog Morgan, Another Country, Walkabout and of course, the original Storm Boy.

"Installation - the medium where visual art and performance intersect, sometimes offering an immersive experience to viewers - can challenge, inspire, amuse and provoke. Between them, the two examples in our 2021 program do all these things. We are especially excited to welcome New York artist Robin Frohart and her team to Adelaide - following two weeks in quarantine - to personally oversee the recreation of her acclaimed Plastic Bag Store into Rundle Mall, fresh from its successful run in Times Square in New York City."

The Plastic Bag Store, created by New York artist Robin Frohardt, is an installation that appears, superficially, at least, to be a regular supermarket. Located in the old Harris Scarfe store in Rundle Mall, on closer viewing it is a tragicomic ode to the foreverness of plastic: every hand-made box of breakfast cereal, frozen dinner, milk container, deli salad, or fruit and veg aisle is 100% plastic, sourced from the streets and bins of New York City. At various intervals, viewers can take a 45-minute 'guided tour' through the supermarket where the supermarket comes to life through puppetry and film. Chronicling centuries of human throw away culture, you'll find yourself struck by a simple and discomforting realisation: there's no 'away'.

In Race Cards we see the results of Birmingham-based performer Selina Thompson's work one weekend in 2015 when she sat and wrote a thousand questions about race:

#220 My mum does not talk about race any more. It makes her uncomfortable, tired. Will this happen to me?

#71 What are the dangers of making art about race?

#541 Whatever happened to Kony 2012?

You are invited to take as long as you need to read them, then to choose one to answer. In the last six years the 1000 questions have been regularly updated and it comes to the Festival as both an installation and a durational performance event (on film), following seasons in Canada, Ireland, Germany, USA and across the UK.

"We can't wait to host Ngarku'adlu - that's Let's Eat in Kaurna language - a very special two-day food event: one casual and perfect for family groups or friends, the other a special fine dining event. Whichever you choose, expect to be enriched and excited by tasting and talking about South Australia's incredible native foods. Just as the bushfire crisis focused urgent attention on Indigenous land management, many have realised that, when it comes to rethinking agriculture or simply invigorating a genuinely national cuisine, we all have an opportunity to listen to those who have 'shopped' in the bush with joy and respect for countless generations. So... Let's eat!"

On the final weekend of the Festival, four picnics, held on the Barr-Smith Lawns at University of Adelaide and two fine dining dinners hosted at the SA Museum, offer diners a chance to awaken taste buds to extraordinary new sensations, and minds to a whole new understanding of how spectacular South Australian food can be - unencumbered by imported ingredients and imported knowledge.

Ngarku'adlu offers menus specially curated and prepared by Australia's finest First Nations chefs and suppliers, expert in South Australian native foods. Interwoven with stories and knowledge shared by cultural leaders, diners will experience the contemporary flavours inspired by our diverse landscapes, unique plants and animals, and the culture and traditions of Kaurna, Adnyamathanha, Ngarrindjeri, and Narungga nations spanning tens of thousands of years. Ngarku'adlu has been created with Adelaide University and SA Museum in partnership with a First Nations Steering Committee of curators and cultural leaders.

Adelaide Festival Artistic Directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on...
ADELAIDE WRITERS' WEEK:

"We are proud that Adelaide Writers' Week will be one of the very first literary festivals in the world to return, with authors and audiences gathering together in person - while international authors appear virtually, livestreamed into the traditional venue of our Pioneer Women's Memorial Garden."

The 2021 line-up of leading Australian authors and thinkers appearing in person will include Richard Flanagan, Kate Grenville, Trent Dalton, Craig Silvey, Cerdiwen Dovey, Richard Fidler, Alex Miller and Sofie Laguna, as well as two ex-Prime Ministers in Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull, over six days of free open air readings, panel sessions and literary conversations.

...and there's more:

Opportunities to reflect on the Festival themes, current affairs and behind-the-scenes stories from the Festival artists and writers themselves can be seized every morning in The Summerhouse Festival club with Tom Wright and a panel of fascinating guests at Breakfast with Papers; and as David Marr interviews artists appearing at AF21 in the weekday Festival Forums - a free event, and place to be during the Festival lunch hour.

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