School-shooting opera leads first 2025 Adelaide Festival announcement
Acclaimed director Simon Stone’s opera Innocence – which sees the intertwined stories of a wedding and a school shooting in Helsinki unfold via a multi-level rotating set – is one of the first three shows announced for the 2025 Adelaide Festival.
Today’s program announcement – which includes Club Amour by Pina Bausch’s German dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal, and Australian Dance Theatre’s 60th anniversary show A Quiet Language – comes just three weeks after it was revealed that Adelaide Festival artistic director Ruth Mackenzie was leaving the event midway through her tenure to take up a new role with the State Government.
Former AF artistic director Brett Sheehy has been brought on board to finalise and deliver the 2025 program, as well as continuing preparations for 2026, and thanked the Festival’s 2015-22 artistic directors, Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy, for securing Innocence.
Based on a book by Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen and directed by Simon Stone, with a score by composer Kaija Saariaho, the opera premiered at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in France and has also had seasons at London’s Royal Opera House, the Dutch National Opera and San Francisco Opera.
Innocence is set during a wedding reception, where terrible secrets are spilled when a waitress recognises the groom as the brother of a man responsible for a shooting at an international school 10 years earlier in which her daughter was a victim. It will be performed at the Festival Theatre from February 28 to March 5, with a multi-level rotating set enabling the action to switch between different locations and times.
The production garnered mostly glowing reviews from its seasons in Europe, with The New Yorker’s music critic saying it contained one of the most unnerving scenes he had ever witnessed in a theatre. The UK Times critic described it as “a visceral, volatile thriller”, The Telegraph declared it a “modern masterpiece” and Limelight said it was “raw, uncompromising and utterly gripping”, although the Financial Times reviewer found it “clever but cold”.
Australian film and theatre director and writer Stone’s previous works include an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, livestreamed to Her Majesty’s Theatre from Internationaal Theater Amsterdam during the Adelaide Festival’s COVID-era series Live from Europe in 2021, and a version of Seneca’s Thyestes that had a sold-out season at the 2018 Festival.
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In a video clip accompanying the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence season of Innocence (see below), Stone says the opera is “an incredibly beautiful exploration of the scars we carry with us”.
“Innocence is this extraordinarily therapeutic opera about the need for honesty in the process of grief, and honesty in the process of recovering from a trauma.”
Neil Armfield, who with Healy programmed a succession of highly successful operatic centrepieces during their time at the Festival, describes Innocence as “urgent, powerful and brilliant”.
“Rachel and I went along to the premiere of Innocence at the 2021 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence full of hope – the great Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho with our own Simon Stone, whose extraordinary Thyestes was one of the most reverberative hits of our 2018 Festival, and who had gone on rapidly to become one of the world’s most in-demand opera directors.
“At the end of the opera our mouths were agape in wonder: Innocence was about to be talked about as one of the great operas of the 21st century. We immediately urged the AF Board to do the unthinkable – to book it for a festival beyond our tenure, and 2025 was to be the lucky year.”
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The score for Innocence – the last opera composed by Saariaho before her death a year ago – will be performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and sung by a combined chorus of 32 Adelaide Chamber Singers and State Opera South Australia Chorus members in the nine different languages of the characters. Baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes is one of the confirmed principals, alongside international opera singers Sean Panikkar, Jenny Carlstedt, Tuomas Pursio and Claire de Sevigne.
Aatt enen tionon, part of the dance triptych Club Amour, features dancers performing over three elevated platforms. Photo: Marcus LieberenzIn announcing the first three productions in the 2025 Adelaide Festival program, Sheehy says they are each “extraordinary artistic achievements’’.
Germany’s Tanztheater Wuppertal – the ensemble founded by internationally renowned choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch – has been to the Adelaide Festival a number of times before, most recently with The Rite of Spring/common ground[s] in 2022. While that show saw Bausch’s Rite performed alongside a companion piece created by Senegalese choreographer Germaine Acogny and Tanztheater Wuppertal founding member Malou Airaudo, Club Amour (March 10-16) comprises a triptych of works by Bausch and the dance company’s current artistic director Boris Charmatz, one of the pioneers of French conceptual dance.
As the title suggests, the Club Amour works are all dedicated to love and desire. Bausch’s Café Müller combines her choreography with “the operatic sound of Henry Purcell’s arias”, while Charmatz’s pieces – Aatt enen tionon and herses, duo – will both be watched by audiences standing on the Festival Theatre stage.
“Considered by many to be Pina’s masterwork, Café Müller is a pivotal creation in dance history, and to have it accompanied by two of the finest works by Boris Charmatz gives us an holistic dance experience as outstanding as any previously seen at an Australian festival,” Sheehy says of the triptych, which was programmed by Mackenzie.
Rounding out what Sheehy dubs the Adelaide Festival’s “avant-launch” is the world premiere of Australian Dance Theatre’s A Quiet Language, to be presented at the Odeon Theatre in Norwood from February 26 until March 5. It is choreographed by artistic director Daniel Riley, who says the Adelaide-based company is excited to be launching into its 60th anniversary year at the Festival.
“A Quiet Language takes inspiration from the founding spirit of the company, and the fearlessness of our founding artistic director Elizabeth Cameron Dalman OAM,” Riley said in a statement.
“This is a work that celebrates our ongoing connection to identity, culture and country here on Kaurna Yerta. We can’t wait to tell a story that is deeply connected to time and place, at a festival that means so much to South Australian audiences.”
The full 2025 Adelaide Festival program will be launched on November 4.