‘Fifty years is an incredible milestone for any cultural organisation and…I’m absolutely inspired by the Festival’s history,’ says Festival Director Kris Nelson, whose Sydney Festival tenure begins with delivering its 50th edition in January 2026.
‘Every Sydneysider I’ve met has their favourite era of Sydney Festival, which I love. It means that there’s something about the Festival hitting the right moment in time for them, that it’s marked and shaped them,’ he tells ArtsHub.
Sydney Festival 2026 – quick links
A multigenerational Sydney Festival
The Canadian-born Nelson, who has worked extensively on festivals in Canada, Ireland and the UK as well as an independent producer, could have easily – and unadventurously – curated a Sydney Festival program reflecting the highlights of the past 50 years rather than being future-focused. But instead of echoing works programmed by nine festival directors before him, Nelson’s inaugural program takes a more creative and dynamic approach to the festival’s history.
‘In the thinking for this year’s festival, a lot of it was about generations – how the festival has shaped generations of people over time, how it’s been held by generations,’ Nelson explains. ‘And that’s led to one of our major programming strands, [which is] all about intergenerational experience, multigenerational lineups, something I’m affectionately calling “Alpha-Boomer” – creating a place where Gen Alpha and the Baby Boomers and everybody in between can converge and experience their city, and the best [of] Australia and the world’s performing arts and visual arts.’
One such work is Virginia Gay’s mother-daughter roller derby comedy Mama Does Derby, co-commissioned with Adelaide Festival. Directed by Windmill Production Company’s Artistic Director Clare Watson, it will feature an actual roller derby team onstage – with the stage in question being Sydney Town Hall, which will be transformed into a roller skating rink for the production. Nelson says the ‘high octane’ show about a mother-daughter pair whose lives are falling apart – ‘the mum might have ADHD and the daughter is at a new school and having a difficult time of it’ – is ‘something to bring your mum and her friends to, or your kid and their cool friends from school too’.
Read: Adelaide Festival 2026: Matthew Lutton reveals his inaugural program
Another work with multigenerational appeal is Queensland Theatre Company and State Theatre Company SA’s co-production Dear Son, an exchange of letters between First Nations fathers and sons based on Thomas Mayo’s book of the same name. (It’s ‘a powerful 75-minute work that … show[s] distinctive traits of male vulnerability, courage and strength’, according to ArtsHub’s 4 ½ star review of its world premiere season.)
Similarly, the festival’s music program includes intergenerational performances led by American avant-garde blues, funk and soul musician Lonnie Holley, including one night with 80-year old Aboriginal Australian blues and gospel singer-songwriter Kankawa Nagarra, who sings in Walmajarri, Kimberley Creole and English, and another night ‘with an emerging musician from Western Sydney,’ Nelson explains.
Reflecting turbulent times and bringing the world to Sydney
‘I think it’s the role of a festival to bring together artists who are engaging with our times, who are helping audiences kind of wrestle with the headlines and understand the times in which we live,’ Nelson says, reflecting on another of the 2026 Sydney Festival programming strands: works which collectively reflect on power and politics and how such forces play out in the world today.
These include Korean choreographer and dancer Eun-Me Ahn’s Post-Orientalist Express, which aims to ‘shred Asian stereotypes and imagine a kind of pan-Asian utopian future,’ according to Nelson, and Indian collective Conflictorium’s interactive installations and participatory activities at Carriageworks. Also called Conflictorium, this work invites Sydneysiders and visitors to consider ways that conflict can become a pathway to empathy, understanding and repair.
‘There’s lots of opportunity for people to get involved with this year’s festival, which is [creating] a kind of common ground for everyone to experience its themes and ideas and works,’ Nelson explains.
Like all major international arts festivals, Sydney Festival 2026 also brings world class international acts to Sydney. ‘We have this massive Irish wake, but it’s an Irish wake from THISISPOPBABY, Ireland’s club kid-cum-theatre sensations, and they’re imagining a wake as if it was a cabaret, complete with striptease, aerialists, step dancing, DJs [and] spoken word poetry,’ says Nelson. ‘I mean, it’s going to be pretty tough, but a pretty electric night too.’
WAKE is one of three funerals in the 2026 Sydney Festival, alongside Opera for the Dead 祭歌 by guzheng virtuoso Mindy Meng Wang and experimental sound designer Monica Lim, and ‘a queer PowerPoint funeral experience at the Hurstville alternative funeral home,’ he adds.
‘On the wedding side, we have Lacrima, which is this incredible theatre piece – big, juicy storytelling – and fiction from Carolyn Guiela Nguyen, who’s a Vietnamese-French author and writer. It’s the story of what happens when a French atelier gets invited to make the dress for the Princess of England’s wedding. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. Will they make the dress in time?’
Unfolding over three hours and exploring themes of workplace exploitation, the mental and physical costs of labour and international and colonial tensions, Lacrima (‘a chokingly emotive story of overwork and enslavement,’ according to The Guardian) is co-presented with the 2026 Perth Festival.
‘We’re really happy to partner with them on this, because it’s a big piece. We’ve got this coast-to-coast partnership that will mean Australian audiences can see [this work by] one of the world’s best directors,’ Nelson says.
Read: Perth Festival 2026 makes the most of its city’s cultural infrastructure shortage
International acts also feature prominently in the contemporary music program, including Grammy-nominated Tibetan artist Tenzin Choegyal in residence at Bankstown Arts Centre, and Mexican Indigenous hip-hop artist Mare Advertencia making her Australian debut. Mare Advertencia will be sharing the stage with 12-year-old Noongar Wongi hip-hop artist INKABEE from Boorloo/Perth – another example of Sydney Festival’s cross-generational programming approach.
Sydney Festival: celebrating the world’s oldest living culture
An integral part of Sydney Festival is its Blak Out program – curated for the final time in 2026 by Jacob (Jake) Nash, the Festival’s departing Creative Artist in Residence – which celebrates and highlights Australia’s First Peoples.
At the heart of Blak Out 2026 is HELD, a series of commissioned sculptural works on Barrangaroo’s Stargazer’s Lawn by Yuwaalaraay Wirringgaa woman Lucy Simpson, which will also be the setting for Vigil: Belong, Sydney Festival’s annual shared closing ceremony held each year on 25 January – the day before Invasion/Australia Day.
Also returning next year is Redfern Renaissance, a documentation and honouring of the 1970s art and activism of the National Black Theatre, curated by Wiradjuri Yuin actor Angeline Penrith. And on the shores of Sydney Harbour, festival-goers can take part in a contemporary corroboree.
‘Joel Bray’s going to extend and expand his brilliant Garabari, inviting audiences to dance in a ceremonial dance that’s kind of a rave, a dance party on the northern broadwalk of Sydney Opera House…It’s a chance to learn traditional Wiradjuri dance and it’s going to be pretty fantastic. I saw a version of it they just did in Wagga Wagga, and it was so moving and so uplifting,’ Nelson says.
Strengthening the sector and looking to the future
Having first visited Australia in 2014, Nelson says he loves the ‘ambition and the drive in this sector…and I’ve had some of my greatest successes and the most fun presenting artists like Hot Brown Honey in Dublin, or The Second Woman in London with the Young Vic at LIFT [London International Festival of Theatre] – which The Guardian said was the best thing in theatre in 2023, which is pretty awesome when you can make London lose its mind with a team of seven putting on a major show like that.’
He continues: ‘I’ve always loved the Australian context, and it’s a personal connection as well – my partner is Australian, so I’ve been very, very, very lucky to have made my home in so many different places, with Vancouver, Montreal, Dublin, London and now here…and I also know the Australian art sector is fragile and is in a precarious spot.’
Nelson says he is genuinely excited by the quality of work being made by local artists, especially First Nations artists, adding: ‘On a really personal note, I’m genuinely looking forward to getting to know and collaborate with so many artists I’ve admired from afar, and so many artists and cultural institutions that I’m learning about.’
He also wants to help bolster the local arts sector. ‘I want to be able to say to Australian artists, what are you going to do if you have the keys to Sydney? What can we make happen that you could only make happen in the context of Sydney Festival? Who are the partners? What are the venues we need to get on board? How do you want to write your signature across the sky?’
‘It’s so exciting to be in the place and in a context where that’s possible. The Festival is loved. It’s well resourced, and it means something. It has really meant something to Sydneysiders over its 50 years, so it’s a real honour to continue that,’ Nelson concludes.
