Sydney Festival Responds To Festival Village Criticism

Visitors to the Sydney Festival's Festival Village have voiced their disdain at being shut out of the Festival Village on Friday night, despite it appearing to be hosting well under the maximum capacity of revellers.

Angered revellers took to social media over the weekend to complain about being kept out of the venue, only to discover they had been shut out of a vastly under-capacity venue.

“Understand the need to control numbers but last night was ridiculous - the village was no more than one third full,” one punter wrote. “Seriously, if you're going to keep so many people outside, why even bother? (Shout out to Feelings Friday, who we were really looking forward to supporting - pity you aren't a ticketed event, or we could have skipped the queue!)”

"What a disaster!" another remarked. "I decided to pop down and have a look at the festival village in Hyde Park last night. Massive queue yet no one inside?! The poor security fella has no doubt been given instructions on how many people he can let in at any one time and hasn't the common sense to change this. How can you go to all this effort and expense and then let the whole thing down with a bouncer who can't figure out what he's doing. Very disappointed."

"Don't really feel that welcome," another wrote, referencing the enormous WELCOME sign at the front of the festival village.

A representative from Sydney Festival told theMusic today that a mixture of a lowered capacity due to a logistical issue and simple miscalculation from the public's perspective.

"Capacity includes all the theatre and every venue that's in the village,” they said. “There were people in Scotch and Soda, people in Donny Benet already and people coming out of Limbo. It doesn't look full, because there's 600 to 750 people in the Spiegeltent and 300 people in the Circus tent and people on Sacrilege and in the bars and eating.

"We also had a problem with our sewerage, we had to close our toilets and drop the capacity right down by a number of hundred people."

theMusic.com.au was in attendance on the night in question and can confirm a Sydney Festival staffer wrongly told a large group of attendees that the Donny Benet show at the festival's Spiegeltent was at capacity. Upon approaching a member of the Spiegeltent staff later that evening, we were told that at no stage was the show in question considered to be full.

“It wasn't full and we know it wasn't full,” Sydney Festival told us this afternoon. “It sounds like it was an unintentional miscommunication.”