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City Guide  - Sydney  - Culture
Culture

Beach culture aside, Sydney's cultural life is uniquely diverse, from high classical at the Sydney Opera House to the most cutting-edge contemporary and experimental performance art. Staging some 3000 performances a year, the Sydney Opera House is the major focus of attention for classical music, opera, theatre and dance. The people of Sydney have a great capacity for performance, which is perhaps what makes the performing arts scene such a robustly thriving arena.

An important part of Sydney's cultural life is the contribution made by Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders. The Survival Festival, held every year on Australia Day, 26 January, is the Aboriginal alternative to more traditional national celebrations, and showcases Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture with music, dance, art and food. The Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre brings that culture right up to date with performances, which integrate traditional elements into modern dance.

Tickets can be purchased from Ticketek (tel: (02) 92 66 48 00; web site: www.ticketek.com.au) and FirstCall (tel: (02) 93 20 90 00). The Halftix booth located at 201 Sussex Street, Darling Park (tel: (02) 92 86 33 10), offers reduced price tickets on the day of the show.

Music:
Classical music in Sydney is concentrated around a handful of performers and venues, which is a poor indicator of the city's huge appetite for symphony orchestras, choirs and operas. The Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point (tel: (02) 92 50 71 11), is the premier performance venue, although the acoustics in its Concert Hall are notoriously inadequate. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra (tel: (02) 93 34 46 44) has even threatened to boycott it. The Sydney Philharmonia Choir (tel: (02) 92 51 20 24), Australian Opera (tel: (02) 93 19 10 88) and the Australian Chamber Orchestra still hold most of their performances at the Opera House. The Eugene Goossens Hall, ABC Ultimo Centre, Harris Street (tel: (02) 93 33 20 55), tends to be used for smaller performances of contemporary music, as does Sydney Town Hall, 483 George Street (tel: (02) 92 65 91 89). The Conservatorium of Music, Macquarie Street (tel: (02) 93 51 12 22), hosts symphony, wind and chamber concerts as well as jazz big bands.

Theatre:
The Sydney Theatre Company, Hickson Road (tel: (02) 92 50 17 77), is the city's stylish flagship theatre company delivering an eclectic range of genres, from heavyweight to experimental. Acting luminaries such as Mel Gibson have performed at the minimalist, highly respected Belvoir Street Theatre, Belvoir Street (tel: (02) 96 99 34 44), while The Performance Space, 199 Cleveland Street (tel: (02) 93 19 50 91), is the main venue for contemporary performance, including film, video, dance and theatre. Musicals are staged at the Capitol Theatre, 13 Campbell Street (tel: (02) 93 20 50 00), the State Theatre, 49 Market Street (tel: (02) 93 73 66 55), or Her Majesty's, 107 Quay Street (tel: (02) 92 12 34 11). New Australian playwrights can be found at Stables Theatre, 10 Nimrod Street (tel: (02) 93 61 38 17). Sydney's longest established theatre is the Ensemble, 78 McDougall Street (tel: (02) 99 29 06 44), while the country's oldest continuously running theatre company is the New Theatre, 542 King Street (tel: (02) 95 19 34 03), originally formed in the 1930s.

Dance:
Although headquartered in Melbourne, the Australian Ballet (tel: (02) 92 23 95 22) performs mainly traditional pieces during its summer and winter season at the Sydney Opera House each year. Similarly, the Sydney Dance Company (tel: (02) 92 21 48 11), the city's leading contemporary dance group, performs at the Opera House for two seasons in every year. In a more native vein, the Aboriginal Dance Theatre (tel: (02) 96 99 91 72) performs a fusion of modern and traditional dance at the Seymour Theatre Centre, Cleveland Street and City Road (tel: (02) 93 64 94 44), while Bangarra Dance Theatre (tel: (02) 92 51 53 33) leans more toward contemporary dance.

Film:
Sydney's numerous cinemas offer every genre of film from arthouse to mainstream. The city's cinema strip is on George Street, near the Town Hall, with three multi-screen theatres, Hoyts Centre (tel: (02) 92 73 74 31), Greater Union (tel: (02) 92 67 86 66) and Dendy (tel: (02) 92 64 15 77), clustered in one small area. Arthouse cinemas include the Academy Twin Cinema, 3a Oxford Street (tel: (02) 93 61 44 53), home to the Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Film Festival (tel: (02) 93 32 49 38); Chauvel Cinema, Paddington Town Hall (tel: (02) 93 61 53 98), the venue for the Australian Film Insitute's (tel: (02) 93 32 21 11) screenings; the Art Deco Hayden Orpheum, 380 Military Road (tel: (02) 99 08 43 44). The Sydney Film Festival (tel: (02) 96 60 38 44) takes place every year in June, with most screenings in the magnificent marble auditorium of the State Theatre. First-run movies open on Thursdays, and discount night is on Tuesdays.

Cultural events:
Sydney Festival, held in January, features open-air concerts and street theatre from around the world, alongside Sydney's best. Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras is a month-long festival in February/March, which is famous for its spectacular costumes, colourful parades, and spirited partying along Oxford Street. This is the largest event of its type in the world, with the unmissable 'dogs and their owners look-alike contest'.

Royal Easter Show
is a traditional 12-day show that brings farm life to the city. The two-week long Sydney Film Festival, held in June, features up to 250 international film screenings, predominantly at the State Theatre and includes the Dendy Awards, awarded to Australian short film-makers.

Biennale of Sydney
is an international arts festival presented in conjunction with the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museums of Contemporary Art, featuring works in parks and public spaces including Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay.

The Festival of the Winds is Australia's largest kite-flying competition, held annually in September at Bondi Beach. Kite-making talent from Australia and abroad compete for title of Best Home Made Kite.

Manly Jazz Festival
, held on Labour Day long weekend in October, is Australia's largest, longest and best-known jazz festival features trad, big band, fusion, bop and contemporary jazz.

A fundraiser for the Mardi Gras Parade and Festival is held on the Labour Day long weekend. About 16,000 gays and lesbians dress to a theme and party all night at the Sleaze Ball at four venues at the Old Sydney Showgrounds.

Held in September and produced by Belvoir's Company B, the Sydney Asian Theatre Festival has, over the past five years, become an increasingly prominent feature on the Sydney festival circuit.

Literary Notes
: '... One of the finest, most beautiful, vast and safe bays the sun had ever shone upon ...'. So wrote inveterate traveller Joseph Conrad in 1906. Sydney Harbour continues to inspire eulogies from writers including Miles Franklin who, in 1946, wrote, 'A month would not be long enough to imbibe such beauty.' More recently, Clive James, the writer, satirist, broadcaster and critic, was rather more blunt: 'Sydney is like Venice without the architecture, but with more sea.'

Sydney's literary luminaries include Peter Carey, who lived in the city before moving to New York, and set his Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda (1988) in nineteenth-century Sydney, where country girl Lucinda dreams of self-reliance and an industrial utopia. Carey is one of Australia's most prestigious writers, having won a series of prizes both at home and abroad. Novelist David Malouf has also set some of his work on home ground, with New South Wales the backdrop for his novel The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996). An idiosyncratic streak led Thomas Keneally, who was born in Sydney and lives there today, from the priesthood to the life of a full-time novelist. He published his first novel in 1964 and was awarded the 1982 Booker Prize for Schindler's Ark. In 1983 he was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to Australian Literature.

Modern Sydney receives a sanction of sorts from Robert Hughes, who wrote in The Liberation of Sydney: 'The provinciality that seemed to characterise Australian society, and could be plainly seen in Sydney twenty-five years ago, is all but gone. To a striking degree, the city's habits have softened. Its harsh intolerant machismo - the bad-dream side of 'mateship', which ran from the Anglophilic stuffiness of the Establishment clubs to the raucous all-male suburban pubs - has toned down. Sydney is no longer quite so keen on the ocker (Pacific redneck) image of the Australian: beer gut, thongs, nasal foghorn voice, and a truculent certainty that, short of Paradise itself, Australia is the only ticket and that the rest of the world only displays its inferiority by not necessarily wanting to come here.'



Copyright © 2001 Columbus Publishing
    
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