Sydney spends eleven months selling sunshine. Then, for three weeks every winter, the city turns the lights off and puts different ones on.
Vivid Sydney runs from 22 May to 13 June this year, its sixteenth edition. The festival started as projections on the Opera House and a walk along the harbour with a crowd and a coffee. It has grown into something with more weight: a 23-night programme of light, music, food and public conversation that now fills venues across the CBD and, for the first time, runs during the day as well as after dark.
The Light Walk stretches six and a half kilometres from Circular Quay through The Rocks and Barangaroo to Darling Harbour, with 43 installations along the route. All of it free. The Opera House sails carry a new projection this year by French artist Yann Nguema: Opera Mundi, a piece that responds to the organic forms Utzon built into the architecture. Nguema, who writes his own software to create his work, has said that technical precision matters to him, but only in service of something less measurable. “They must not overshadow the transmission of emotion,” he has said of his projects. The drone shows return to Cockle Bay, at the southern end of Darling Harbour, after a year off, with 22 performances across 11 nights.
The programming around the walk is where the festival has shifted most. Vivid Minds, the ideas programme, has booked Chloe Zhao for her first Australian appearance, Sean Baker in conversation at the Opera House, Pulitzer-winning art critic Jerry Saltz and designer Debbie Millman. The music runs wide: Mitski and Mogwai at the Opera House, Ella Mai at Carriageworks, Kae Tempest playing two nights at City Recital Hall, Daniel Avery touring his latest album, Sparks, who have been recording for over fifty years and still sound like nobody else. Tempest, whose new album Self Titled came out of a long period of personal change, put it simply in a recent interview: “This album has its own life force, it knows where it wants to go. I’ve just got to follow it for a bit and see what happens.”
Ben Marshall, the Opera House’s head of contemporary music and the curator of Vivid LIVE, described this year’s programme as “the subcultural best coming overground,” which is about right. The lineup covers ground that most single-genre festivals would split across three events.
Vivid Food has Yotam Ottolenghi running a dinner and lunch series called A Shared Table. The Regional Dinner Series pairs NSW producers with Sydney restaurants. Vivid Fire Kitchen has relocated to Barangaroo Reserve, where there is more room and the water is closer.
More than 80 percent of the programme is free. The entire Light Walk costs nothing. For a festival at this scale, that is unusual.
The question for visitors from out of town is where to stay. Most people default to the CBD, near Circular Quay or Darling Harbour, close to the Light Walk. But the walk starts on the southern side of the harbour, and the southern harbour looks best from the north.
View Sydney is in North Sydney, a few minutes from the train station, one stop across the Harbour Bridge from the festival precinct. The hotel faces Lavender Bay and the bridge. From the harbour-side rooms, the lit-up foreshore and city skyline sit across the water, without the crowds.
The north shore means arriving at Circular Quay by train in minutes, walking the Light Walk south, and coming back to something quieter. LB’s is open for dinner. Deck 17 is outdoors, overlooking the harbour, good for a drink when the festival is still glowing across the water but you have had enough of standing in it.
Vivid runs for 23 nights. Long enough to come back twice, catch a talk on a weeknight, eat somewhere you walked past the first time. Book your stay at View Sydney.