Colours Of A City

The Sydney Festival is a summer highlight – our city at its best, they say. Lieven Bertels, who last week presented the program for his first Sydney Festival as festival director, has been living here for the last year, embedding himself in the culture of the city, and allowing it to inspire and shape his festival vision.

Prior to his appointment, Belgian-born Bertels was engaged as the artistic coordinator for Amsterdam's Holland Festival, though he already seems at home in the harbour-side city. “It's a bit of a cliché, but as always, cliché's are true,” Bertels justifies. “Sydney is as varied as all the shades of blue and green you have when you actually look at the water in the harbour. The sun will always be a little bit different, the colour of the water will always be a little different, the temperature will always be a little different, and that's really an image for Sydney; every part of Sydney has a distinct feel and has a distinct attitude and the festival really brings it all together.”

Bertels talks excitedly about how the program reflects this – an Australian premiere of Circolombia's Urban, exclusive to Parramatta; Concrete & Bones Sessions, the site-specific performance at Dulwich Hill Skate Park; and the glamorous fashion show-cum-opera Semele Walk, which Bertels says is perfect for Sydney Town Hall.

It is, says Bertels, part of the vision to represent all of Sydney and its kaleidoscopic nature that he alluded to before. “It's not about spreading it out thinly; it's not a small jar of Vegemite and a very big piece of toast,” he says, reaching for another distinctly Australian metaphor. “One of the privileges of working for the Sydney Festival is we actually work with a lot of different arts communities, from really small-scale, workshop kind of stuff somewhere in a small studio, to the big companies, and in the festival we reflect that and not only have a very varied and wide audience, but we also have a very wide and varied artist base.”

Colloquial references to the harbour and a jar of Vegemite suggest Bertels is already feeling at home here, but it is his global experience and vision that reveals why the festival is in great hands for the next three years. “What people want these days is not just a snapshot of them in front of the Opera House, them on top of Sydney Harbour Bridge, what they really want is to share an experience with locals. So there's no better way of finding out about the city as through the festival, where you can actually party with Sydneysiders and that's true for a lot of Sydneysiders themselves, because it's this great meeting place.

“One important notion is that the festival is a coming together of Sydneysiders and visitors, because of course it is a summer festival, we are the one and only true, I would say, visitor-inspired summer festival. We really celebrate summer like no other festival in Australia does, and maybe no other festival in this part of the world, full stop.”