Adelaide in March: When the Festival City Lives Up to Its Name

Adelaide's March festival season is one of the world's most concentrated arts events, with the Adelaide Festival, the Adelaide Fringe, WOMADelaide, and SALA running simultaneously across three weeks to produce an arts density that transforms the city from its normal pace into a continuous outdoor and indoor cultural event that the city's population and its visitors embrace with the intensity of a community that has been waiting all year for this moment. The combination of the ticketed international arts of the Festival, the enormous open-access program of the Fringe, and the free world music of WOMADelaide in Botanic Park creates a layered experience that different visitor and resident demographics engage with differently but that collectively defines what Adelaide is.

The Adelaide Festival, the ticketed major arts events program that brings international and Australian theatre, dance, opera, and music of the highest quality to the city, fills the Festival Theatre, the Dunstan Playhouse, and the site-specific venues that the Festival creates each year with the productions that arts audiences travel from across Australia and internationally to see. The Festival's curatorial reputation, built through consistent programming of risk-taking and aesthetically adventurous work, has earned it a standing in the international arts calendar that the city's size does not on its own explain.

The Adelaide Fringe is the largest open arts festival in the southern hemisphere and the second largest Fringe festival in the world after Edinburgh, with thousands of artists performing in hundreds of venues across the city for more than three weeks. The Fringe's open-access model, which allows any artist to register and perform, creates the enormous variety of quality and genre that characterises Fringe festivals and that makes the program too large for any individual to fully explore, generating the happy problem of too much to see.

WOMADelaide in Botanic Park, the world music and arts festival that has operated for more than three decades, provides the free outdoor complement to the ticketed indoor programs, with international artists performing on multiple stages to crowds that combine the committed world music listener with the casual park visitor who encounters something they had not specifically sought. The festival's family-friendly atmosphere and its free-to-attend model make it the most broadly accessible of the March programs.

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