01 This was our summer A message from the festival director
Sydney Festival is a unique and playful celebration of summer in Sydney. It lets us reconnect with our inner creativity, provides food for thought and inspiration for life. It boosts our city’s mojo and brings us together to share intense, amazing moments. The Festival celebrates summer, art and life in Sydney, engaging with audiences and artists across the city and beyond. We offer a colourful kaleidoscope, where the experience transcends the sum of its parts. These parts were of course manifold: from a giant Rubber Duck in Darling Harbour to a Handel-Westwood opera spectacular, the 2013 Sydney Festival truly had something for everyone. With a vast array of cultural and entertaining offerings across Sydney, our Festival reached well over half a million people directly and many more online across the globe. The Festival demonstrated its unique ability to activate unusual and often surprising spaces and embraced its catchline This is Our City in Summer with a diverse and buoyant program. Together with our artists and hundreds of volunteers we presented an ambitious program that delighted our audiences with small and big surprises. We were pleased to see that our quest to bring back opera and highlight the joy of live music in dance and theatre, as well as in concert, was well-received.
Sydney Festival 2013 was made possible through the generous funding from its principal stakeholders the NSW Government – supporting the Festival through Arts NSW and Destination NSW – alongside City of Sydney and Parramatta City Council. The Festival was delighted to see the return of principal sponsor ZIP Industries and leadership partners ANZ and China Southern Airlines, as well as Honda through the Honda Festival Garden. Sydney Festival acknowledges the increased and ongoing support of many private donors including its own Directors’ Circle and the Balnaves Foundation. Over its 37-year history, Sydney Festival has become a central force in Australia’s rich cultural life, and a key factor in making Sydney an attractive city for visitors and locals alike. As its seventh Director, I feel privileged to be working with a stellar team of arts professionals to make Sydney Festival the most wonderful summer festival in the world. In this document, we invite you to relive with us the beautiful month of January that Sydney Festival 2013 offered. Lieven Bertels Festival Director 2013–2015
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