The Sydney Morning Herald managed to get some pennies out of its elder brother Rural Press to run a blog entry on the Sydney Festival.
At the end of the festival that is.
A kind reader brought my attention to it as a comment on my previous post. The entry makes for great reading, especially when you consider that the last Green Room they had was on March 21... last year. Welcome back from the dead! 
Interestingly, the first comment was from 'Rocket Scientist' who said, "Was there a festival in Sydney? Sorry I must have blinked. I'll keep my eyes peeled for it next year."
If you had been reading the Herald print version or online, you'd be right in making that assumption. But then again, as one Fairfax journo said to me the other day - "what happened to you? You start working for the telegraph and suddenly you become an a******?!"
Bryce Hallett and Valerie Lawson penned a summary article yesterday complaining that, "the program, on the whole, was energetic, fascinating and entertaining, particularly its range of contemporary music and dance, yet it wasn't especially coherent or intellectually challenging."
At the end of the day, the festival left Lawson and Hallett with very little to write about and was more geared towards the Terrier's demographic... intellectual or otherwise. There were no Sir's or Dame's from the RSC for them to gush over or an Italian Maestro for them to swoon.
They also mention there wasn't a genuine hub during the festival. Now I understand why I never saw either Lawson or Hallett down at the Spiegeltent gardens having a drink and chat with all the artists that were hanging out there night after night after night.
They do however bring up some big points that I totally agree with... specifically that the dance programme for the About An Hour series could have been better curatored and that Cirque Ici was... well... I think you and I have had enough... No more writing about the Sydney Festival any more...
In the meantime Fairfax, what do we have to do to get you lot to keep that blog going???
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
From the dead it re-emerges
Posted by Nicholas Pickard at 10:34 am
Labels: Arts Journalism, General Comment, Sydney Festival
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1 comments:
It's too depressing to think about. Both the fact that the Fairfax press doesn't give a stuff, and perhaps worse, when they do make a half-hearted attempt at a theatre blog it dies a death from lack of public interest. A quick browse through their blogs shows that sports, sex, dating and grooming tips all get huge responses. The arts? Nothing. After a month in the cold bracing intellectual air of Europe, to return to this soupy miasma is ghastly. No wonder Henry Lawson said the only logical course of action for an artist in Australia was to kill himself. But thank you, Nicholas, for, King Canute-like, raging against the tide.
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