Watch this space

From a bold new ‘skyscraper’ to a repurposed sheep-shearing hut, Adelaide’s festivals are crammed with original and innovative venues. Lucy Ribchester speaks to the visionaries behind some enticing buildings

You can always tell when a festival is about to hit town. It’s not just the posters springing up, or the sighting of a person in an exotic bird costume standing next to you while you’re queuing for a flat white. There’s also the slow, steady shift in the cityscape that occurs as fantasy gardens bloom into life, glittering Spiegeltents are erected, and everyday buildings transform, all ready to host extraordinary shows.

There’s no denying that unusual and pop-up venues make festivals feel special, and Adelaide’s 2023 season is set to be full of them, with brand new spaces sitting alongside creatively repurposed old ones. One of the most striking additions to the city skyline will be the new Pyramid venue, created for the Fool’s Paradise Fringe village, due to lie at the heart of Victoria Square/ Tarntanyangga. Standing 15m tall (the equivalent of six storeys), it’s going to be hard to miss and will be accompanied by sister venue The Vault, as well as hosting rows of long tables for food and drinks outside.

For Pyramid director Max Mason, designing this new venue was his chance to realise an architectural dream. ‘It’s one of the most iconic building shapes ever created,’ he says. ‘My degree was in archaeology and I was obsessed with the genius behind ancient Egyptian architecture.’ The venue took two years to design but erecting it takes only around ten hours, making it potentially transferrable to other festivals in the future: ‘it’s quite a wonder of the world just to watch the process.’

Given its height, The Pyramid is particularly suited to circuses with aerial artists, however there are also deeper resonances to be drawn between the physicality of the space and the performances happening inside. One show Mason is particularly excited about is the aerial-centred Vertiges by Farid Ayelem Rahmouni from Paris. ‘The narrative revolves around the difficulties experienced by people living in the margins of society. While it’s an erudite story of a man of North African descent living in Paris, its application to the First Nations living around their own land is striking.’

Another venue making its debut this year at Adelaide Fringe is The Yurt, a sister venue to sit alongside The Chapel at the Migration Museum. Yurts have been a mainstay for some time at festivals, including the Edinburgh International Book Festival where The Yurt’s creator Nick Phillips first came across the idea of using one as a venue. ‘It was the simple, yet very functional design and natural materials that interested me in a yurt,’ he says. ‘Yurts are constructed using all-natural materials, including various wood types (western red cedar, ash and larch), steam-bent to form the correct shapes for the walls and ceiling.’

Phillips was keen that The Yurt would have no central poles, making sightlines clear for the audience. It’s an intimate venue, seating only 60, but as he points out, not all shows benefit from being lost in a large auditorium. His own production, Werewolves, for example, will use not only the small size, but the ‘deep red backcloth’ and round shape of the yurt to create ‘a perfect eerie atmosphere’. Pop-up spaces, Phillips believes, are central to the feel of a festival, taking as their cue the Spiegeltents of the 1930s (along the lines of Wonderland’s evocative space). ‘People love the Spiegeltent because it is lovingly hand-crafted, and you can feel it as soon as you enter. That is the vibe The Yurt offers.’

Away from hand-crafted bespoke venues, there will also be plenty of existing locations in the city transformed and commandeered for the festivals. The annual Writers’ Week will take place in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, while WOMADelaide takes over Botanic Park/ Tainmuntilla. The Garden Of Unearthly Delights is a festival playground with market stalls, carnival rides, bars and performance spaces. And in Festival Plaza, the huge installation Unvanished brings art into the open air, a mix of sculpture and soundscape referencing the elements as well as First Peoples’ cultural continuity. And at the Fringe, it seems that everything from cemeteries to hotels, libraries, wineries, a boat, and even a belly dance academy will open their doors to events.

But for the chance to sample one of the most unusual historic venues, you have to step outside the city limits and head to Kangaroo Island. There on the Eleanor Downs farm settlement, a 1950s sheep-shearing hut is preparing for the fourth year of its one-day festival programme, Kangaroo Island Fringe. The hut was originally part of a land allocation given to returning soldier Dick Trethewey as part of the World War II Soldier Settlement scheme, and it still serves as a working shearing hut every November. Audiences are encouraged to bring a picnic blanket and prepare to spread out among gum trees and hay bales, where kangaroos and kookaburras provide the support acts to a line-up of circus, magic, theatre and music. Sometimes it’s the venues themselves that steal the show.