Sharon Jones at The Domain. Picture: Prudence Upton Source: Supplied
THERE is not a right way or a wrong way to start a festival, but visitors to the most recent Melbourne and Sydney editions may be asking themselves what's missing.
Brett Sheehy's final Melbourne Festival last October opened with Michel van der Aa's multimedia opera Afterlife. The piece was brilliantly done but was not the celebratory occasion some in the audience at Melbourne's grand Regent Theatre were apparently expecting. There were walkouts and complaints.
Lieven Bertels, a genial Belgian who launched his first of three Sydney Festivals at the weekend, has prompted similar head-scratching. It wasn't only that he had to drop -- reluctantly, he says -- the hugely popular Festival First Night street party. The trio of events he chose as an alternative, grouped under the banner Day One, were too disparate and too spread out to make a coherent opening statement. Similarly, the three ticketed events that opened at the weekend -- a dance piece, a puppet show and a comedy act, each a small-scale ensemble piece lasting about an hour -- lacked the collective oomph to get the big festival wheel turning.
Raimund Hoghe's Sacre -- The Rite of Spring at Carriageworks was an eloquent and emotionally involving performance, with just two dancers and two pianos.
It was never going to excite a riot, such as the famous one that attended the Rite's 1913 premiere, but the response from the auditorium on Saturday evening was underwhelming.
This ensemble piece would hold its own in a performing-arts program anywhere but it was the wrong choice for a festival opener. It is too specialist, too introspective in tone.
One longed for bells and whistles, something to start the festival with a bang. Last year's I Am Eora indigenous revue, at the same venue, had its shortcomings but did not lack for energy and pizazz.
Day One started on Saturday morning with Fun Run, in which a man runs 42.2km on a treadmill, accompanied by a disco-dancing cheer squad and with an accompanying narrative of the first marathon run by Greek messenger Pheidippides during the Persian wars.
It was an occasion for community groups, such as the Marching Koalas schools band from the Hunter region, the Northern Beaches Gym Stars and the 80 or so dancers who stood in for the Athenian army, Gangnam style.
Actor Tristan Meecham is no champion athlete but he valiantly went the distance on his treadmill, under a blazing sun. A small crowd was there to see him at the start -- there appeared to be as many volunteers as onlookers -- and only a slightly larger crowd cheered him across the line several hours later.
A much larger crowd of several thousand gathered at Darling Harbour for the afternoon arrival of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman's 15m Rubber Duck. Hofman intends his duck to be a symbol of joy, and it is difficult to describe the irrational happiness this yellow inflatable brings, surrounded as it was by a flotilla of miniature tugboats in an oversize bathtub.
Between times on Saturday, your correspondent crossed the harbour twice in search of festival joy. At Middle Head, past Mosman, Bertels has installed one of the several unobtrusive sound installations in his program.
Harrison Birtwistle's Chronometer from 1971 is one of those landmarks in composition: an early example of electronic music that includes a pioneering form of digital sampling. The 25-minute piece involves sounds taken from Big Ben and the 14th-century Wells Cathedral clock: a symphony of tick-tocking, mechanical groans and chiming bells. The speakers are mounted in trees and under the grating that covers the historic gunnery at Georges Heights. The festival has provided beanbags so visitors can enjoy the harbour views while listening to this evocative soundscape in comfort. (Tip: take refreshments.)
Back at Carriageworks in the afternoon, the enormous and intricately laid-out installation by Chinese artist Song Dong was being unveiled. The piece, called Hu Jin Qi Yong, or Waste Not, comprises the thousands of items Song's mother Zhao Xiangyuan hoarded after his father's death.
The objects are arranged like with like -- ceramic pots, pairs of shoes, radiators, little red books and bottle tops -- so that they become a schematic of memory. The piece speaks to the soul that wants to preserve and cherish, even as the affluent Westerner protests at the accumulation of junk.
I finished the day with the outdoor concert in The Domain -- long a fixture of the festival and of Sydney summers -- featuring soul revival act the Daptone Super Soul Revue. Daptone is another of the good musical things to come out of Brooklyn, a record label whose artists faithfully recreate the sounds of 1960s soul and funk.
Not quite full to its 60,000 capacity, The Domain was jumping with a lively crowd for the final act of the evening, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Jones is a little sequinned powerhouse with a big voice and funky moves. Her band had the grooves to keep people up and dancing under the night sky.
Something I have not noticed in previous years was the marquee, at one of the Domain gates, marked "Sydney Festival Donation Point". I'm told it has been there before, but now it seems to indicate a festival in leaner times. The festival received a reduced subsidy from the state government this year, which led to the axing of Festival First Night. Because of this decision, the attendance figure will be less than that of previous festival openers, which regularly topped 200,000. Stakeholders including ANZ -- whose festival sponsorship is up for renewal -- will no doubt take this into their reckoning of success. Indeed, Sydney Festival headquarters has been extremely reticent about pre-empting the public's response to this year's program, and has refused to reveal box-office figures. This, too, makes a change from the triumphalist tone of some previous years.
SF13 has got off to a modest start but with headliners Semele Walk and The Secret River to come later this week, the festival may yet get into full swing.
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