Artistic Director Louise Bezzina “absolutely did not” know that the 2025 Brisbane Festival would be her sixth and final edition of the city-spanning multi-arts festival when she began programming it. “But I think that it’s important to always work as if it’s your last, so that you make the most of every opportunity. And I’m glad that this festival is achieving and delivering a few things that I’ve been wanting to do for many years,” she explains.
Read: Brisbane Festival’s loss is Powerhouse’s gain – Louise Bezzina changes roles
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Seeing Brisbane through the artists’ eyes
One of the most prominent examples of Bezzina’s long-held ambitions manifesting in the 2025 Festival program is a major new commission from internationally-based, Brisbane-raised artists Craig and Karl, who are taking over three of the city’s most prominent pedestrian bridges. The pair’s homecoming project is also their largest and most ambitious work to date: ANZ’s Walk This Way by Craig & Karl, which will see the Neville Bonner Bridge, the Goodwill Bridge and the new Kangaroo Point Bridge transformed into vibrant, large-scale artistic interventions through the strategic deployment of numerous colourful, large-scale inflatables. A citywide public art trail will extend the experience across central Brisbane.
“The walking bridges have been something I’ve been wanting to activate and bring to life as a stage for many years, so it’s so wonderful that that’s actually finally happening now – and [Craig and Karl] are particularly excited about the fact that it’s the biggest commission that they’ve ever had in their career, happening here in Brisbane, their hometown, where they met and connected. It’s just wonderful,” Bezzina tells ArtsHub.
“In essence, what I’m trying to do is create this incredible visual beacon of art that makes the city come to life in this magical and joyous way and that you can’t miss – you can’t miss that the festival’s on, that the city feels like it’s been transformed for September… It should make people feel happy. I hope it is surprising and delightful… And then you can also do self-guided walking tours around the city, and it’s really just about getting out and about – all free – and exploring the city through the eyes of artists, which I think is the most magnificent part of it,” she adds.
The creative duo’s homecoming continues with Craig & Karl: Double Vision, an exhibition presented in partnership with Griffith University Art Museum (where the duo first met three decades ago) and which celebrates their local roots, global influence and signature visual language.
Another likely Festival highlight is Baleen Moondjan (previously seen at the 2024 Adelaide Festival and described by our Managing Editor Madeleine Swain as ‘a tremendous way to be reminded of the eternal and fundamental connection between earth, sky, sea’) by Ngugi, Nunukul and Moondjan man Stephen Page, former Artistic Director of Bangarra Dance Theatre, which is being staged on a floating barge on Maiwar, the Brisbane River.
Bezzina has also programmed several new dance works, including the major work Preparing Ground, co-directed by leading Queensland First Nations choreographers Marilyn Miller, Jasmin Sheppard and Katina Olsen, which has been in development for several years; Bad Nature by Brisbane’s Australasian Dance Collective, created in collaboration with the Netherlands’ Club Guy & Roni, and Stephanie Lake Company’s The Chronicles, previously seen at Sydney Festival and opening this week at Melbourne’s RISING.
A love letter to Brisbane and a celebration of Queensland stories
Overall, Bezzina describes her final Brisbane Festival program as “love letter to Brisbane – bold, joyful, and created with and for the city”.
“My final festival is a celebration of everything Brisbane Festival has become: a world-class event with a fiercely local heart. From world premieres to deeply resonant community works, this year’s program is ambitious in scale and grounded in storytelling, deeply connected to the people and places that make this city so special. As the city comes alive this September, I welcome everyone to take their place in the story,” she said in a media statement.
One particular Queensland story that is sure to have broader resonance is the Festival’s world premiere presentation of Back to Bilo, a new play from celebrated local company Belloo Creative (Boy, Lost), about a Tamil family wrenched from their local community by the Australian Border Force in March 2018 and placed in detention by the previous Coalition Government.
“It is a Queensland story, but it’s such an important Australian story … and, for me personally, one of the reasons that I was so attracted to this work and wanted to have it in the Festival was because it’s an opportunity to celebrate community spirit – the community of Biloela in regional Queensland, who fell in love with this Sri Lankan family. They were part of the community and then they were suddenly taken away. And I love how this play really gets to the heart of the community who rallied and worked so incredibly hard to bring them home,” Bezzina explains.
The story of Priya and Nades and their Australian-born children Dharuniga and Kopiga became something of a cause celebré from 2018 to 2022, highlighting the perceived cruelty and inflexibility of the Morrison Government and then-Home Affairs Minister, later Opposition Leader Peter Dutton on the issue of refugees and border protection. Back to Bilo, written by Belloo Creative’s co-Artistic Director Katherine Lyall-Watson (from an original concept by Matt Scholten) and directed by the company’s co-Artistic Director Caroline Dunphy, is being presented by Brisbane Festival and Queensland Theatre from 4-15 September and was one of the first productions announced for the 2025 Brisbane Festival.
“Belloo have such a gift in their ability to tell really sensitive stories and do it with such integrity, which is why I think I was really interested to work together and to enable this production to have its world premiere,” Bezzina adds.
Connecting Olympic cities
In 2032, Brisbane will host the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, a fact Bezzina and the city as a whole are extremely conscious of. Before that, the 2028 Summer Olympics will be held in Los Angeles, and Bezzina is deliberately highlighting the connection between the two cities with the exclusive Australian presentation of LA Dance Project’s Gems, featuring three works choreographed by Benjamin Millepied (who initiated the company and led it from 2011 to 2014) and which collectively feature the talents of composer Philip Glass, visual artist Barbara Kruger and fashion designer Alessandro Sartori.
“There was obviously a wonderful opportunity to connect our two cities, Los Angeles and Brisbane, given that they’re both the next two Olympic cities. It helps that there’s such a wonderful array of amazing artists and creatives in Los Angeles that I think our audiences will really be inspired by, and at the same time, [it means we can] start to establish long-term relationships between our cities’ artistic communities,” Bezzina says.
“And so while LA Dance are here, they will be doing a range of different engagements with the local dance community, and we’ve also got a program set up where artists from the regions will be able to engage with the company. Arts Queensland has come to the party to help us with that, which we’re really thrilled about.”
She adds: “The fact that the three [dance works] will be performed for the first time together here in Brisbane, is very exciting – each of them has been performed individually before, but never as a triptych in one show – as is the fact that Benjamin Millepied has put this [production] together for us.”
United through music
Music remains a key part of Bezzina’s programming, with this year’s Festival including Gatsby at the Green Light, a night of cabaret, variety and contemporary music inspired by F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic Jazz Age novel, The Great Gatsby, at the Twelfth Night Theatre in Bowen Hills.
“The Twelfth Night Theatre is a much loved part of Brisbane theatre history, and it’s the first time that the Brisbane Festival will have a production in this venue. I love activating new spaces and having the Brisbane Festival as a catalyst for audiences to experience different parts of the city, and Gail Wiltshire, the owner of The Twelfth Night, has gone to an extraordinary amount of effort to bring the theatre into a new era for audiences. So the fact that Gatsby at the Green Light will be the first production in the newly renovated venue is just so exciting, and it makes so much sense from an artistic point of view. It’s the centenary of the book this year, and so then to stage this show at The Twelfth Night, they’ll sit together quite beautifully,” Bezzina says.
Adding a distinctly local note, Community Choir: The Musical – created by local Brisbane musician, composer and choirmaster Emma Dean – celebrates diverse Brisbane voices and features a cast of non-professional performers.
“Emma Dean is an amazing singer-songwriter from Brisbane – she’s been leading the community choir Cheep Trill, and through that experience she was inspired to write a musical about all of the wonderful people that she has had the great pleasure of connecting with over her time. And I love that that’s going to be featured in this year’s Festival.”
Bezzina’s final Brisbane Festival program also features a home-grown Australian musical: Laura Murphy’s The Lovers, a pop-infused reimagining of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring original songs and an adapted script. Originally produced by Bell Shakespeare, this iteration “is a new production by [Brisbane company] Shake & Stir, but it is Laura’s book that we are ‘redoing’, for want of a better word,” Bezzina says.
“The songs that she has written and the script is absolutely fabulous. I just loved it so much. It’s such a fun, entertaining, edgy, contemporary pop musical. I really am convinced that it will be a huge hit of this year’s Brisbane Festival.”
Fittingly, Bezzina’s final Brisbane Festival also features the latest evolution of a series of suburban live music gigs that were, in 2020, a COVID pivot and which have subsequently taken on a life of their own: Suburban Serenades.
“It absolutely has been a celebration of Brisbane and suburbia and music. And, you’re right, it was a pivot in 2020 – and in 2020 and 2021, Street Serenades [featured] 190 concerts. Once the Festival was able to come back in all of its glory, it was not possible to continue 190 concerts, but the spirit of that program has stayed with the Festival throughout the last six years. And so this year we have four mini, free festivals for Suburban Serenades, so there’s still a beautiful free program of incredible local and national artists that will perform around the city. They’re all different in style and nature, all in gorgeous, wonderful, unique locations, and it’s a really important part of the Brisbane Festival program that our audiences have come to expect and love.”
Love is a word that Bezzina returns to when asked to reflect on all six Brisbane Festivals she’s programmed since taking on the custodianship of being its Artistic Director.
“A sense of love of Brisbane – being boldly Brisbane – has been the thread through every Brisbane Festival I have curated. And that is not a parochial lens, I hope. It’s a lens that invites the city to have a connection to the Festival, one that inspires the community to feel like they’re part of something and that they are welcome. That’s very important to me, and I have tried really hard to make the Brisbane Festival a festival that’s loved, really loved by the city of Brisbane – and so I hope that that’s the legacy that I leave as I move into my next role,” Bezzina concludes.
Brisbane Festival 2025 runs from 5-27 September. Visit the Festival website for full program details.
