In her four years running Sydney Festival, director Olivia Ansell has brought our fabulous city alive in ways and places you may not have imagined. Sydney Festival 2025 is her last and the program aims to reignite the city in January once again.

“I always wanted people to be able to rediscover this city differently, telling uniquely Sydney stories that amplify this city and celebrate diversity across the globe,” Ansell tells Broadsheet. She will hand the Syd Fest reins to Kris Nelson before she heads to Toronto to run the prestigious Luminato Festival.

Kicking off on January 4, Sydney Festival 2025 boasts 19 world premieres, 15 Australian premieres, 18 new Australian commissions, 17 nights of free live music and 44 free events across 43 locations from the CBD to Bankstown, Parramatta and Walsh Bay, where popular festival hub The Thirsty Mile returns with music venues, theatres, bars and late-night cabaret.

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To celebrate 49 years, this year there will be a limited number of $49 tickets across all 130 events during the three-week cultural feast.

What to see at Sydney Festival 2025

Theatre

A standout hit from Edinburgh Fringe, Dark Noon, is a Danish South African collaboration featuring a South African cast on an open red-dirt stage upon which they slowly resurrect the bones of a pioneer town to dismantle US history, retold as a high-noon Western through an outsider’s lens: Native Americans, cowboys, missionaries, enslaved Africans and European settlers Ansell describes as “irreverent, satirical, funny, deeply powerful and shocking”.

A subversive updating of As You Like It by Canadian First Nations artist Cliff Cardinal is a narrative deep dive into our colonised countries, and is darkly funny, confronting and relevant. Multiple Bad Things is the latest work from Australia’s brilliant disability arts company Back to Back Theatre, which recently won the Venice Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, while local photographer William Yang’s Milestone takes you through his glorious love for Sydney.

Blak Out

Indigenous musicians Dobby and Radical Son perform their new albums for the Blak Out First Nations program, while Belvoir hosts two plays exploring contemporary and historical local Indigenous stories. The program culminates in the annual Vigil: Truths on January 25.

Immersive experiences

Staged at the Darlinghurst Courthouse, A Model Murder puts you in the jury at the very place where Sydney underworld figure and page three girl Shirley Beiger was acquitted of daylight murder in the 1950s. “Witness for the Prosecution meets Chicago meets Rake” according to Ansell.

Wendy Whiteley’s Secret Garden invites you to wander around the garden that has given Whiteley peace following the deaths of both former husband Brett Whiteley and their daughter Arkie Whiteley, whose ashes are scattered there, as William Barton plays the yidaki alongside other musical acts. Stories from Here: An Audio tour of Bankstown is a walking tour of the favourite spots of its narrators: a group of young locals from Outloud Bankstown.

Music

Don’t miss the one-off performance from Rufus Wainwright or US singer-songwriter Jalen Ngonda’s Sydney debut. The program includes a night with the pioneers of house music and founders of Detroit’s Music Institute Chez Damier and Alton Miller; electro-folk artist JFDR from Iceland; and French Moroccan woodwind duo Nosax Noclar, who are in Ansell’s words, “phenomenal”.

Opera, music theatre and cabaret

Tina: A Tropical Love Story resurrects all your favourite Tina Turner hits with superfan and First Nations drag performer Miss Ellaneous; Katie Noonan performs Jeff Buckley’s Grace to celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary; while Converted is a new local musical from Australian Theatre for Young People about young people put into conversion therapy at a Christianity camp.

Dance

Stephanie Lake Company debuts its electrifying The Chronicles, exploring mortality, accompanied by the Sydney Children’s Choir; while 109-year-old dancer Irene Kramer joins Sue Healy’s Afterworld, an interpretation of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Visual Art

The AGNSW, MCA, Australian Museum and Bankstown Arts Centre are all staying up late Wednesday and Thursday nights, when you can catch the Magritte and Golden Empires of Peru exhibitions, Beijing-based contemporary artist Cao Fei, Ethiopian American contemporary painter Julie Mehretu and the Bankstown Biennale.

Sydney Festival 2025 runs from January 4 to 26, 2025.

sydneyfestival.org.au