Sydney Festival is built on the belief that art brings people together: across backgrounds, ideas and experiences. As a major public festival, we hold a deep responsibility to foster a welcoming and respectful environment for all who participate: artists, audiences, staff and volunteers.

We affirm the importance of artistic freedom and recognise that the right to express, challenge and create is central to a thriving cultural life. Art can be joyful, confronting, unifying or provocative, and its power lies in its capacity to reflect the full range of human experience, including our many differences.

As an organisation, we are committed to creating space for difference and to ensuring that everyone who engages with the Festival can do so with a sense of respect and safety. We ask all those who take part in the Festival to uphold our values of care, openness and mutual respect – values that enable art to do what it does best: connect, delight, challenge and inspire us.

A message from the Festival Director

I’m a believer in the power of festivals. They gather us in time and space to experience, to interact and to connect. Festivals change how we see space. For a few weeks each summer we say, “see you at the festival,” and a different map of Sydney emerges. Streets become corridors for story, piers and foyers become places where we come together as a group of ‘festival-goers’, seeking something that transforms the everyday, where we recognise ourselves as a community.

At Sydney Festival, that community is for everyone – not everyone who agrees, looks, worships or votes the same. Everyone. To host this assembly, we’re making a festival that is a creative space, an engaged space, a space to test things out. It’s a space where freedom of speech and expression is enjoyed. Enjoyment is important. Pleasure matters. We want you to feel invited, included and safe enough to be surprised. At times the work will walk straight into the hardest parts of our shared lives. That may unsettle, confront or cause pause. Freedom of speech, artistic expression and the responsibility that comes with both are not slogans for us, but our raison d’être.

Come ready to make up your own mind, to question that confounding issue, to wonder about something in a conversation and turn to the person in the next seat and ask “what did you make of that?.” A festival of ideas is not simply something you watch. It is something you actively co-create as a participant.

Sydney Festival is also for sampling new genres of music, or wrapping yourself in what you already know is your favourite, about finding new friends on the dance floor. It’s for immersing yourself in movement, and feeling the world through the impulses of a choreographer or admiring new visual art. It’s about delight, novelty and adventure, and about creating a community that knows how to have a good time together.

We offer you a festival full of substance and spectacle. I can’t wait to see how you shape it.

Kris Nelson