‘Evolution, not revolution’: Adelaide arts leaders expect renewal and disruption in 2025 season
From venue shortages to major milestones, South Australia’s arts leaders preview the big shows and new challenges of 2025 in the final instalment of a two-part series.
Petra Kalive, artistic director, State Theatre Company SA
What do you anticipate will be your biggest challenge for 2025?
Change is always a bit of a challenge, but it’s also exciting. As the new artistic director, I know there’ll be a period of adjustment—for the team, the artists, and the wider community. My focus is on evolution, not revolution. I want to build on the amazing work that’s already been done while bringing my own perspective into the mix. Honestly, I’m still pinching myself—it’s such an honour to collaborate with some of the best artists and theatre makers in the country. While I know there will be challenges, I’m incredibly excited to expand the reach of South Australian work across the country, showcasing the remarkable talent we have here to audiences far and wide.
Another big challenge will be the company’s long-awaited move to its new premises. After years of rehearsing and producing the set-designs in less-than-ideal spaces, this is such an exciting step forward — but let’s face it, moving is never easy! It’s going to take plenty of teamwork and planning to make sure the transition is smooth and sets us up for even greater success.
What are you most excited about for 2025?
I’m absolutely thrilled about the 2025 season — it’s packed with incredible works that celebrate the diversity and talent of Australian storytelling. New Australian writing is my passion, and there are so many highlights in the season. Emily Steel’s Housework is a standout, as is the remount of the award-winning Dictionary of Lost Words by Verity Laughton, adapted from Pip Williams’ novel. I’m also excited about Brink’s production of Looking for Alibrandi and our co-production with Queensland Theatre, Dear Son, based on the book by Thomas Mayor and adapted by Isaac Drandic and John Harvey. It’s a moving and heart-warming piece of First Nations storytelling – a really special work.
But if I had to choose the show I’m most excited for, it’s Kimberly Akimbo, directed by former artistic director, Mitchell Butel. I saw it in New York earlier this year and it had audiences leaping to their feet. I can’t wait to see what Mitchell does with it, and for South Australian audiences to experience the magic of this musical.
Emily Steel’s Housework will be on at State Theatre Company SA in February. Photo: Supplied
Penny Camens, general manager, Patch Theatre
What do you anticipate will be your biggest challenge for 2025?
Patch Theatre’s programming opportunities are growing faster than our financial resourcing, making it challenging to keep up with demand. Cost-of-living pressures are creating financial barriers for our key audiences – schools and families – while rising travel expenses are increasing the costs of presenting our productions. At the same time, competition for philanthropic funding and donations is intensifying due to urgent needs of other social causes. To sustain and expand our work, it’s more important than ever to diversify our income streams.
Additionally, Adelaide is facing a shortage of live performance venues – a significant challenge to our future in 2025 and beyond. Due to the Adelaide Festival Centre renovations and the lack of other available venue options we will not be presenting a season of in-theatre work in Adelaide in 2025. For many children, attending a Patch show on a school excursion is their only opportunity to experience live theatre each year, so it’s disappointing to not have something on offer this year.
What are you most excited about for 2025?
We are excited for more children across the globe to discover our work as we tour our performances locally, nationally, and internationally.
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In the January school holidays our interactive installations will be in three Australian capital cities – Sea of Light at ILA in Adelaide, Superluminal at the National Maritime Museum in Sydney, and Sea of Light at Canberra Theatre Centre. In April, Superluminal will show at the Queensland Museum as part of World Science Festival Brisbane.
Sea of Light transforms the venue floor into a glowing ocean where children can paint their own creations in light while immersed in nature-inspired music by talented local musician Rob Edwards. The soundtrack features the sounds of animals recorded by Rob – frogs from Yorta Yorta land, kookaburras on Ngarrindjeri and more, transporting audiences to Country. In Superluminal, children are guided by a performer as they journey through a series of interactive spaces. Children create their own mythical creatures, bring them to life with recorded sounds and spectacular rainbow lighting, and capture their fantastical shadows on a magical glow wall.
We are especially excited to return to Asia with our multi-award-winning theatre work ZOOOM and our state-of-the-art interactive installation The Lighthouse. Both works showcase our incredible use of light and captivating performance style, plus their non-verbal nature makes them accessible for children who don’t speak English.
Patch Theatre have a big year of pop-up children’s programming in 2025. Photo: Supplied
Colin Cornish AM, Chief Executive, and Mark Wigglesworth, Chief Conductor, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra
What do you anticipate will be your biggest challenge for 2025?
Each year ASO strives to offer high-quality performances and experiences across a wide range of musical styles, ensuring every South Australian has the opportunity to participate. With the diversity of programs increasing in 2025 and the quality of performance being acknowledged as going from strength to strength, our biggest challenge to achieving our ambitions continues to be access to suitable venues in Adelaide.
The temporary closure of the Festival Theatre from August 2025 makes this challenge even greater. Yet, challenges also bring opportunities. We’re excited to reimagine how we connect with our community, whether presenting more blockbuster film concerts at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre, bringing the magic of live orchestral music to regional audiences as far as Renmark, or transforming unconventional spaces into vibrant stages – like Hart’s Mill in Port Adelaide or the Maths Lawn at the University of Adelaide, as we proudly did this year. The ASO remains committed to ensuring that live music remains accessible to all, wherever they may be.
– Colin Cornish AM
What are you most excited about for 2025?
The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is an exceptional organisation that takes immense pride in its connection to South Australia and the communities it serves. It is a privilege for me to be part of this and I am looking forward to sharing the musicians’ belief that concerts are so much more than great performances of great classical works.
Music evolved as a means of bringing people together. A live concert blurs the lines between performer and audience as both play an equal part in the process of connection. The active silence in the auditorium is as integral to the experience as the sounds of the music from the stage. The result is a unifying force that creates empathy and understanding through the emotions we all share. We need this more than ever.
Next year, the ASO and I will play music by 18 different composers, including all the symphonies of Brahms. Despite the wide artistic variety this offers our audiences, each masterpiece actually generates the same sense of community. The geniuses behind them have gifted us an opportunity to come together and be part of emotionally unforgettable experiences, reminding us that humanity’s emotional depth is limitless, and inspiring the horizons of our imagination to embrace the infinite.
– Mark Wigglesworth
Marg Wigglesworth says the ASO helps generate a sense of community. Photo: Claudio Raschella / Supplied
Dane Lam, artistic director, State Opera South Australia
What do you anticipate will be your biggest challenge for 2025?
All live performing arts organisations need to make the case to our audiences – existing and potential – for why live performance is essential for our own human well-being and for us as a society. When people can have a Netflix or a Spotify library at their fingertips, what moves us when sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow human beings, having opera singers, the elite athletes of the arts world, throw their voices without amplification over an eighty-piece orchestra and into a huge theatre? I know how it can be transformative, how it can be healing, how it can entertain and make us laugh. Our biggest challenge is communicating this unique, visceral power to our audience.
What are you most excited about for 2025?
I am most excited about the eclectic mix of productions that State Opera is offering to South Australians in 2025. Stay tuned for full details early next year, but we have a new co-production with two Chinese companies of a hugely beloved work by one of the world’s greatest composers. It’s full of colour and fantasy. We are also proud to be building a totally new production of a Shakespearean favourite in South Australia for South Australians that will have audiences falling in love.
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Already announced is a brilliant, funny, arresting production of Flight by Jonathan Dove, which is based on the same true story as Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal. It’s important for us as a company to perform works like this, by living composers, because opera has much to say about the world we live in. In this case: what happens when an unlikely bunch of people are thrown together under extenuating circumstances in an airport? The music is catchy and evocative, there’s a conga line, there are shenanigans, capped off by brilliant singing, acting and sets.
These shows are filled with amazing Australian creatives and singers, many of whom call South Australia home. I’m so proud of what we can do as an opera nation and how South Australia has always been the state that takes opera forward, that leads trends both nationally and internationally and constantly reimagines itself to serve our community. We will continue to celebrate and reimagine this proud legacy in 2026 – our 50th anniversary season – which we are currently planning with relish.
Scottish opera Flight. Photo: Supplied
Michelle Ryan, artistic director, Restless Dance Theatre
What do you anticipate will be your biggest challenge for 2025 as an arts organisation?
Our biggest challenge for 2025 will be securing funding for our international collaboration with the Pina Bausch Foundation to create an iteration of Pina Bausch’s iconic work Kontakthof. This project will feature a cast of 21 Australian dancers with disability alongside a full team of Australian creatives. Financial support for mainstage performances remains critical to ensuring the success of this significant and groundbreaking project
What are you most excited about for 2025?
Seeing Through Darkness will be remounted for WOMADelaide 2025. Originally presented at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2020, this powerful work features seven Restless dancers, Geoff Cobham’s immersive lighting design, and the hauntingly beautiful score by South Australian composers Hilary Kleinig and Emily Tulloch. For WOMADelaide, Seeing Through Darkness will incorporate live music, with Kleinig and Tulloch performing their evocative score live. As two of South Australia’s most innovative and accomplished musicians, their extensive experience in composition, performance, and cross-disciplinary collaboration further enriches this moving and immersive production.
We are also excited to be premiering a new work specifically designed for hospitals, offering a unique and meaningful performance experience in healthcare settings. Later in the year we launch an international residency program, collaborating with dance companies globally to share our renowned training programs. This initiative marks an exciting step for our company in creative exchange, showcasing Restless Dance Theatre’s unique approach on a global stage.
Restless Dance Theatre’s Seeing Through Darkness will be performed at WOMADelaide this year. Photo: Shane Reid / Supplied
Anthony Peluso, chief executive, Country Arts SA
What do you anticipate will be your biggest challenges for 2025?
In 2025, the biggest challenge for us at Country Arts SA will be meeting regional communities’ expectations around arts and culture. It’s a big remit across the state. We have such high ambitions about what we would like to achieve each year and we know that regional audiences and regional artists also, rightly, have great expectations around what arts and culture they can experience in local art spaces that are relevant and up-to-date.
Another challenge for us, which is ever more present this year, is that we know some communities are really doing it tough right now. Whyalla comes to mind immediately, but also the Riverland and other communities. I think the pressure is even more acute in the current cost-of-living crisis – how do we think about arts and culture as a way of bringing communities together and providing opportunities for celebration? It’s important that – even with everything that’s going on – people have opportunities to let their hair down and celebrate what’s great about living in the regions.
Of course, for artists working and living regionally, there’s always that additional challenge of distance. They have the most amazing opportunities in terms of the environments and landscapes they work in, and the opportunity to make art differently. How do we meet the needs of regional artists and bridge the geographic divide between artists living and working regionally and those in Adelaide and interstate?
What are you most excited about for 2025?
I’m always most excited for the unique work that Country Arts SA creates and the partnerships we build with other arts and cultural organisations when we undertake these projects. This year have another incredible exhibition commissioning nine regional First Nations visual artists to create a completely new body of work for exhibition at this year’s regional Tarnanthi. I’m really excited about that.
We’re passionate about supporting regional artists to build their careers and we have exceptional performances across the state with outstanding artists such as singer Charlee Watt and choreographer Lewis Major. Then there’s a completely new exhibition by our 2024 Breaking Ground Award winner Susie Althorp. This exhibition, at Praxis Artspace in Bowden, provides an invaluable opportunity for Susie to showcase her work to metropolitan audiences, artists, curators and collectors.
2025 is a special year for Whyalla’s Middleback Arts Centre which will celebrate its 40th birthday. One of the highlights will be an extra special performance of Ten Thousand Hours by Gravity and Other Myths in April.
Later in the year, we are thrilled to work with Barkindji songwoman, the most amazing Nancy Bates, touring her Blak Country show which premiered at last year’s Guitar Festival. What makes Nancy’s tours special is her close connections with regional communities and artists. There’ll be opportunities on that tour for local musicians to take to the stage with Nancy. I’m really looking forward to seeing audiences having a great time enjoying Nancy’s fantastic music-making.
Read part one of this story, with insights from Adelaide Festival, Adelaide Fringe, Brink Productions and more.