Sydney is home to a vibrant community of street artists, always ready to bring a splash of colour, a touch of provocation, or just the perfect Instagram backdrop to our city’s streets. But as with just about every piece of real estate in Sydney, these unlikely canvases are hotly contested spaces.
“There are decades where nothing happens, there are weeks where decades happen.” Sure, Lenin may have been referring to his own problems when he said this – he was in exile in Switzerland on the cusp of the 1917 Russian revolution – but it could as readily be applied to the year we’ve had. So how does the curator of a big ideas festival set about wrangling the most pressing issues of our time when there are about three giant elephants in the room, at least one of them looking set to step backwards and smash everything to smithereens?
In a year which started with smoke-smothered cities and will end in the aftermath of another history-making US election, while the pandemic continues to leave its indelible print on almost every aspect of our lives, festival curator Edwina Throsby’s decision to go ahead with the Sydney Opera House’s Antidote Festival was as much out of necessity as it was anything else. “If bad things are happening in the world, if there are lots and lots of problems facing us as individuals and as a global community… The answer has got to be coming together, finding a sense of community, and constructively engaging with the ideas that have an impact on our system and our ways of thinking.”
“It’s part of the reason the festival was called 'Antidote'.”
So, are big ideas the antidote to the problems of our time? Throsby thinks so. And she’s no stranger to them. After heading up the curation of TEDxSydney, the platform which launched a thousand regurgitable quotes from a revolving door of charismatic orators, she became the Opera House’s head of talks and ideas in 2017. Having steered the cultural icon through festivals like All About Women, and more recently the digital Our House to Yours program, which kept audiences immersed in past Opera House performance during the relative cultural wasteland that was lockdown, Throsby is ready to bring people together in a room again.
Antidote will be the first multi-event festival to be staged at the Opera House – with IRL audiences and actual speakers taking the stage in front of them – since it shuttered its doors in March.
“An audience is a great, big living organism,” she says. “And that’s what I’ve missed so viscerally.
“Knowing that you’re going to be sitting in a room with a lot of people in a room who are here for the same reasons as you – there’s something lovely about that. And something focusing… One of the things I love about the theatre is that for an hour, your only job is to sit and listen.”
Mandated focus does feel like rare freedom in a world where devices whir and ping in the background, fighting for your attention (Netflix’s Social Dilemma, anyone?). While theatre has experienced a staggered, halting return to Sydney stages, Throsby knows that it’s the energy and fizzing atmosphere of audiences gathered together in the hush of a theatre – sharing laughter with neighbours and rolling eyes in solidarity at the too-long audience question that’s always more of a statement – that makes festivals like Antidote such a profound space for ideas to flourish.
Optimism and hope come not just in the form of the community coming together, but in the kind of the content they engage with in the festival. “I personally derive a huge amount of optimism from the sense that there are people like Rutger Bregman and Jefa Greenaway and many of the people are engaging with these sorts of ideas… If anything gives me hope, it’s those things,” says Throsby. “It’s that clever people are applying themselves to ways that these problems might be solved.” Greenaway, a First Nations architect and designer, will take the stage with economist Jessica Irvine and social researcher Rebecca Huntley to talk about the most casual of topics – their panel conversation is billed as ‘Resetting the World’.
While there's great hope for the in-person nature of the festival, that’s not to say that Antidote is eschewing the digital sphere altogether. International speakers like American author Kiley Reid will be beamed into the Concert Hall via videolink while Jan Fran sits on stage and asks her about the intersections of race, class, and privilege – topics Reid renders with wit and nuance in Such a Fun Age, her bitingly funny and irreverent novel about a black babysitter working in a white household. New Yorker staff writer and historian Jill Lepore will also join Antidote through the internet ether, in conversation with New York Times Australian bureau chief Damien Cave, to talk about the U.S. election and the nation beyond.
Digital tickets also go on sale soon. One of the great leaps made through lockdown was the democratisation of content to those who otherwise would be excluded from certain physical spaces – be that as a result of financial incapacity, disability or location – and Throsby was committed to making the festival accessible to those who are staying at home. The challenge for the Antidote team was to make even the online iteration of the festival feel real and intimate, without that glue of communal participation. Throsby’s first agenda point? Let’s not make it look like Zoom. “Think about how quickly Zoom parties just died. Zoom is work now,” she says. So don’t expect shakily filmed videos taken mostly up by people’s chins with connection dropouts. And in a world like this, contingencies aren't just an afterthought in the game plan – things can change in a minute. "We need to be able to flip to full digital at any point if we need to."
As if to demonstrate the fickleness of techology, that's when Throsby drops off the call for a second or two, her mellow voice replaced with crackling static. Just as suddenly, she's back. "You know, it's this weird spot in my home. If I lean back in my chair, I cut out," she laughs. Not that comfort is exactly a natural realm for Throsby, anyway. She and the Antidote panellists aren’t shying away from the real conversations – here, finally, in the aftermath of a tumultuous year, seems something like an opportunity. After all, pandemics throughout history have functioned as clarion calls for huge social and political shifts.
“People around the world are wanting to change things, but we’re talking about really big and entrenched social, economic and political structures that are being dismantled and need to be rebuilt. But if ever there was a time, it’s 2020,” says Throsby.
“Do we have an opportunity, now that everything’s upturned, to think about what we want to rebuild?”
Buy your tickets online for Antidote Festival, taking place at the Sydney Opera House on November 29. Digital tickets are set to go on sale soon.
