Welcome to the 2022 Adelaide Festival. What a joy it is to reveal our program!

Even in these most difficult of times, we have searched for and unearthed works from across the theatrical spectrum. You’ll find those that are grand and lavish in scale, sitting alongside events that are designed for large swathes of the community to enjoy, right down to works that are built purely for moments of delicate, human intimacy.

Let the 2022 Adelaide Festival give you cause for celebration as we gather a community of artists from across Australia and the globe to deliver this unforgettable program. Our beautiful city will once again come alive with hope, pleasure and possibility.

We can’t wait to share this Festival with you – of course including beloved Adelaide Writers’ Week, with Monday – Thursday’s East Stage sessions being live-streamed in to communities all over Adelaide, thanks to Office for Ageing Well and Seniors Card.

“We were together. I forget the rest.”
Walt Whitman

We are writing this in September 2021, half way through the second year of the pandemic. We know that as you read it, probably sometime between November and March 2022, September will feel prehistoric. Such is the pace of change as we progress from fear to hope for a better future  in which we can return to live performance with joy and anticipation, rather than pessimism  and anxiety.

We have come back from Europe full of optimism having witnessed audiences return with gusto to theatres, fully masked, double vaxed and filling every seat, but we’re all too aware that this sunny ideal has as its dark twin inevitable illness, anxiety and super-human demands on health workers. In the face of all this, our commitment to deliver a festival that energises, comforts and reasserts the necessity of human creative imagination remains.

With so many millions across the globe still fighting this illness, so many women caged with monstrous partners, so many young people facing despair and loneliness, we’ve seen ill-directed explosions of rage. Let the 2022 Adelaide Festival unleash those feelings with a positive defiance: a feisty festival that won’t lie down and shrink; that gathers a community of artists from across Australia  and across the globe, a festival that begins with  a phalanx of young bodies colliding and hurling each other through space, and ends with the breath of a hundred humans pleading for the  pain in our souls to fly away.

Experience the release of primal dance, of exhilarating performance, of how the spark of collegiate music making can jump centuries. It’s all there again for the taking: a celebration of body and soul and how great it is to keep them together.

Neil Armfield AO and Rachel Healy
Artistic Directors