Sydney Fringe Festival, New South Wales’ largest independent arts festival, has revealed its most ambitious program yet including a take-over of the Oxford Street precinct and areas of greater Sydney. Presented from 1 until 30 September, Fringe highlights the city’s vibrant culture, with a diverse program spanning theatre, music, comedy, visual art, film, musical theatre, dance, circus, literature and poetry. More than 400 shows will be offered including 120 world premieres, 142 Australian premieres and a further 170 Sydney premieres.

The 2018 program – including performances, exhibitions, large-scale events, a festival club and more – will be presented across six festival hubs around the city this September taking over streets, shop fronts and venues, inviting audiences to engage with ‘what’s new’.

Tickets are available at sydneyfringe.com

Sydney Chamber Opera and Carriageworks, in association with Resonant Bodies (USA), has announced the full program for the first Sydney iteration of Resonant Bodies, an international festival of new vocal music founded in New York in 2013 by American singer Lucy Dhegrae.

This exclusive Australian event presents six dynamic vocalists across two nights on 31 August and 1 September. Swedish-Ethiopian composer-improviser Sofia Jernberg, Indonesian vocalist Rully Shabara, New York soprano Ariadne Greif, and Australian vocalists Mitchell Riley, Deborah Kayser and Sonya Holowell are invited to curate and perform in their own 45-minute sets, with no restrictions on repertoire, format, or style. Sydney-based theatre director and lighting designer Alexander Berlage is the visual director for the Festival, with sound design by composer and technologist Benjamin Carey. Now in its sixth year, Resonant Bodies has made a significant contribution to contemporary new music. ‘An immersion in experimental vocal music, this Festival is as artist-focused as a festival gets’ – New York Times.

Local Resonant Bodies co-directors Jessica Aszodi and Jane Sheldon performed in the NYC Festival and describe Resonant Bodies as a festival that is also a community: ‘Co-directing the Australian iteration of the festival has given us the chance to make links across far-flung geographies, connecting artists from different backgrounds who might otherwise rarely come into contact, but who share common philosophies. We all use our voices to push boundaries. Resonant Bodies’ two-day program will leave audiences stunned by what the human voice can do.’

Sydney Fringe Festival, the largest independent arts festival in New South Wales, has announced four Fringe Ambassadors for 2018 who will curate and contribute to a series of specialist hubs focused on music, physical theatre, dance and performance. The Fringe Ambassadors are: award-winning musician Thelma Plum; acclaimed physical performers Andy Dexterity and Joshua Thomson; and multi-talented singer; and actor Emily Havea.

The 2018 Fringe Ambassadors bring their expertise and vision to specialist hubs, curating programs and, in some instances, performing at select events, as the Festival activates inner Sydney’s Oxford Street Precinct and areas around the city from 1 until 30 September.

Sydney Fringe have also revealed a custom Sydney Fringe print, designed by acclaimed designer, creative director and maker, Stavroula Adameitis of Frida Las Vegas.  The print features unmistakable local icons: the Sydney Opera House, Kings Cross Coke sign, and an ibis atop a palm tree. Katie-Louise Nicol-Ford, one half of the ethical fashion label Nicol & Ford, has designed two vintage-inspired looks worn by two of the 2018 Sydney Fringe Ambassadors, Emily Havea and Joshua Thomson, to celebrate all things Sydney.

Image: Ambassadors Emily Havea and Joshua Thomson wearing custom Fringe print. Images courtesy of Sydney Fringe Festival

Sydney Fringe Festival, New South Wales’ largest independent arts festival, has announced the inaugural Archie Rose Touring Hub to present award-winning performances touring from Fringe festivals around the world and the inaugural Legs Hub of circus and physical theatre showcasing Australia’s only Indigenous contemporary circus ensemble. The Festival’s 2018 Touring Hub will feature nine touring theatre works from five countries and will take place in the Old 505 Theatre, Newtown. In partnership with legendary physical theatre company Legs on The Wall at the Red Box in Lillyfield, the Legs Hub will present shows curated by the company’s Artistic Director Joshua Thomson, a pop-up bar, workshops and more.

The inaugural Archie Rose Touring Hub in 2018, follows the Festival’s 2017 International Touring Fund initiative that enabled the community to make tax-deductible donations to the festival to support international works from other Fringe festivals tour to Sydney. As a result, 2018 has seen the touring program grow substantially in size and stature featuring acts from around the world.

Sydney Contemporary has announced a partnership with Barangaroo Delivery Authority for three leading artists, Callum Morton, Mel O’Callaghan and Cameron Robbins to create large-scale, site-specific installation works that will sit throughout Barangaroo’s financial, retail and dining precinct in the lead-up and during the fair from the 20th August – 24th September.

Callum Morton was born in Montreal, Canada and now lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. Morton has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1990. His practice is inspired by architecture and human interaction with designed spaces and facades. For this project, Callum will be creating a Shelter that will protrude from the pavement creating shelter for the passers-by.

Mel O’Callaghan was born in Sydney, Australia and now lives and works in Paris, France. O’Callaghan is a contemporary artist who works across film, video, performance, painting and installation. Mel O’Callaghan presents a new large-scale floor installation and movement-based performance at Barangaroo. Bold, graphic and monumental lines will intersect across the forum pavement of the Barangaroo site, in a coordinated composition — at once a language and musical score guiding the body through an intensive breathwork performance. The ritualistic movement directed by the lines and arcs of the floor transform both the presence of performers and the public within the Barangaroo space.

Cameron Robbins was born in Melbourne, Australia and now works and lives in Castlemaine, Australia. Using his wind-powered drawing instruments on site, Cameron Robbins will transcribe the invisible energies of nature, the wind, the tides and light to create drawings, photographs, and moving image works along the foreshore of Barangaroo.

Acclaimed French conceptual artist Daniel Buren is presenting the Australian premiere of his large-scale installation ‘Like Child’s Play’ at Carriageworks from 7 July until 12 August 2018. The work represents the fourth major international artist project in the Schwartz Carriageworks series.

Inspired by German educational theorist Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel’s famous children’s wooden block toys, the work features 100 upscaled blocks, arches, triangles and pediments.

Buren arranges the works to create sight lines through the space. When we look into the void of one object we are looking through a tunnel made of several blocks lined by Buren’s iconic stripes, each 8.7cm wide, which the artist has featured in his work since the mid 1960s.

While half the exhibition space is a riot of colour, this is juxtaposed with the minimalist look of the other half with its white floor and white blocks. The neat geometric forms of Buren’s work will sit against the vast scale of Carriageworks.

Image: Daniel Buren, Like Child’s Play, Carriageworks, Image Zan Wimberley 2018

Carriageworks presents the Australian premiere of two large-scale audio-visual installations by acclaimed Japanese electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda. The free exhibition, titled micro | macro, explores the intersection of art and quantum physics and will be the third major installation presented by the artist at the Redfern-based multi-arts institution, running from 4 July – 29 July 2018.

Presented in a theatrical context and covering 172.8 square metres of exhibition space inside Carriageworks, the first work titled the planck universe [micro] explores the building blocks of matter and is a representation of nature that is infinitesimally small, brought to human scale by enlarging it by a measure of 10-35m

The second installation in the exhibition, the planck universe [macro], features an immense wall projection over 10 metres tall, that seeks to depict nature, scanned from human scale to the cosmological scale beyond our observable universe. The installation explores expressive new forms at the frontier of the visual arts and promises to immerse visitors.

Images: Ryoji Ikeda, micro | macro, Carriageworks. Image Zan Wimberly 2018

Artspace have announced the next series of actions by artists in the 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS series, including leading Australian artists Mike Parr and Vernon Ah Kee, artists from Tibet, Cambodia, Pakistan, China, New Caledonia, Afghanistan, Mauritius and more, and collectives including pvi collective, FAFSWAG and the Refugee Art Project. The exhibition sees the creation of 52 artworks in 52 unique locations throughout Asia that are shared globally via Instagram @52artists52actions and online at 52artists52actions.com generating a continuously unfolding archive of creative responses to everything from the refugee crisis and mass migration to the impacts of climate change around the world.

52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS is curated and instigated by Artspace in Sydney, working with an extensive network of artists, collaborators and agitators from across Asia. Every week from January 2018 – January 2019 Artspace invites a different artist to respond to a current political or social issue in the form of an action (anything and everything that artists use to communicate: from an artwork to a tour or community event, an image, a shared meal, a performance, or a temporary installation) to build awareness around important concerns locally and globally.