The 41st edition of the Adelaide Festival – the first curated by Artistic Director Matthew Lutton – will play host to 59 events, among them 10 world premieres, 22 Australian premieres and a further 22 exclusives.

Announcing his inaugural program, Lutton said, “The 2026 Adelaide Festival invites you to lower your guard and throw yourself into an ecstatic 17 days of exploration. It does not seek to narrow to a specific theme, instead, it elevates Australian and international artists who push boundaries and embody virtuosity.”

He also promised “narratives focused on the need for love, belonging and a sense of self; the brutal barriers – some strong, some crumbling – the world hurls at us and the determination for hope, eccentricity, humanity and art.”

AF Artistic Director Matthew Lutton. Photo supplied

The Festival kicks off with a free concert in Elder Park from British rock icons Pulp. Jarvis Cocker and his long-time bandmates will blend glam rock, disco, new wave and British indie styles, performing classics like Common People and Disco 2000, as well as tracks from More – their first album in over 20 years.

In addition to the free opening night, audience members under 40 and full-time students can access $40 tickets to the majority of ticketed events, reflecting the Festival’s commitment to making art financially accessible.

Sure to raise eyebrows is the absence of a large-scale opera as the Festival centrepiece, although Lutton tells Limelight it will be reinstated in 2027 and 2028. Next year, however, it is being replaced by two intimate works that herald the return of the Festival’s former Artistic Director Peter Sellars.

The first is Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, in which Grammy Award-winning soprano Julia Bullock “reincarnates” singer and activist Joséphine Baker. Directed by Sellars with spoken interludes written by the poet Claudia Rankine, it has already been performed to great acclaim at the Ojai Music Festival in California, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oberon American Repertory Theater at Harvard, Dacamera in Houston and the Dutch National Opera.

Blending opera, jazz, spirituals and early 20th-century French music hall, the score is written and arranged by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tyshawn Sorey, who performs it with the International Contemporary Ensemble. Sorey will also give a one-night-only solo piano concert, Alone, at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

Julia Bullock in Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine. Photo © Ruth Walz

The second production is El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, Bullock’s own chamber reworking of John Adams and Sellars’ oratorio, which had its Australian premiere during the 2002 Adelaide Festival and brings the voices of women and Latin American poets to the fore. For this one-off performance at the Adelaide Town Hall, Bullock is joined by the Adelaide Chamber Singers and players from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

Continuing the Festival’s focus on enigmatic women of history, French actress Isabelle Huppert returns to Australia in the already-announced Mary Said What She Said from Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, written by Darryl Pinkney and directed by Robert Wilson with a score by Ludovico Einaudi.

“Robert Wilson’s productions have never been to Adelaide Festival before, which shocked me,” Lutton tells Limelight, adding, “I only discovered that after I’d invited them to Adelaide.”

Following the success of Innocence, Thyestes and Medea, Australian director Simon Stone also returns to the Festival with his Korean-languague production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

Premiering in Seoul last year and featuring award-winning actors Doyeon Jeon (Cannes Best Actress) and Haesoo Park (Emmy-nominated star of Squid Game), it stays true to the original play’s enduring themes of social change and the tension between tradition and modernity.

“Simon’s written a brilliant piece about what it means for generational change to occur,” Lutton explains. “Here is a South Korean matriarch who lives in New York and runs a conglomerate. Denying that it’s all falling apart, she returns to her children and, in typical Chekhov style, things do fall apart and ripple through the family.”

Simon Stone’s Korean-language staging of The Cherry Orchard. Photo © LG Arts Center

The Cherry Orchard isn’t the only reimagined classic in Lutton’s program. New York-based theatre company Elevator Repair Service presents Gatz, its acclaimed eight-hour adaptation of The Great Gatsby, set in a modern office environment (last seen in Australia in 2009); and Adelaide’s Slingsby concludes its three-Festival fairytale trilogy with A Concise Compendium of Wonder, exploring Hansel and Gretel, The Selfish Giant and The Little Match Girl in a purpose-built venue in the Adelaide Botanic Garden.

Queer male relationships are explored in Griffin Theatre Company’s production of Dylan Van Den Berg’s Whitefella Yella Tree about teenagers Ty of the River Mob and Neddy of the Mountain Mob, while Thomas Ostermeier’s adaptation of Édouard Louis’s autobiographical novel History of Violence for Schaubühne Berlin puts a sexual assault victim’s empathy for his perpetrator under the microscope.

“There are a lot of works about individuals fighting for their right to love, fighting for their right to speak freely, fighting for their right to their own culture; and about who their oppressors are, whether they are systemic, the government or their own families,” says Lutton, noting that next year’s program also seeks to embrace a sense of hope and human resilience. “There’s a determination in humanity to find a way to navigate through dark times. It’s about art and playfulness and the beauty that’s made from it.”

This sentiment is embodied in productions such as Works and Days, based on Ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s original verse. Tracing human adaptation from agricultural traditions to the age of AI, it is performed by Belgium’s FC Bergman, which returns to Adelaide after the success of The Sheep Song in 2023.

Schaubühne Berlin’s History of Violence. Photo © Arno Declair

Lutton also highlights his commitment to Australian storytelling and local talent. In addition to Griffin’s Whitefella Yella Tree, re:group performance collective’s POV is an experiment in onstage filmmaking where two unrehearsed actors play the parents of a teenager who directs the action, and Windmill Production Company presents the world premiere of Mama Does Derby, co-created by Artistic Director Claire Watson and Virginia Gay. Featuring a mix of professional actors and members of the Adelaide Roller Derby League as well as an onstage band, it follows a mother and daughter, played by Amber McMahon and Elvy-Lee Quici, as they find their way after moving to a regional town.

“There’s a roller derby on stage every night,” Lutton says, describing it as a story for all ages. “A lot of the show’s done on roller skates!”

Classical Music remains a cornerstone of the Festival, with UK violinist Anthony Marwood and Helsinki-born pianist Olli Mustonen as Artists in Residence.

“They’re master instrumentalists,” Lutton says. “Olli’s doing a Beethoven cycle up at UKARIA Cultural Centre, performing 13 of the piano sonatas, while Anthony’s doing three daytime concerts at Elder Hall. The first two will be with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and include Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 2 and Beethoven’s Septet.”

“When we were programming this, we realised that Anthony and Olli had never performed together. We asked them if they’d like to, and they said yes, so that’s going to be the third concert at Elder Hall. It’s going to be electric to see them together.”

In another Festival highlight, Bordeaux-based choir and orchestra Pygmalion makes its long-awaited Australian debut with founding director Raphaël Pichon conducting Bach, Monteverdi and Rossi. (Read our interview with Pichon here.)

Anthony Marwood. Photo © Walter van Dyck / Olli Mustonen. Photo © Laura Malmivaara

Further classical programming sees Master yidaki player William Barton and the Brodsky Quartet combine First Nations traditions and European chamber music, Italian-based violinist Sergej Krylov and Australian pianist Konstantin Shamray unite in a recital of French music at UKARIA, and the Alma Moodie Quartet joins forces with Shamray and double bassist Robert Nairn for Alma’s World – a celebration of the pioneering Queensland-born violinist.

The Festival also delves into contemporary music and experimental performance, underpinning Lutton’s wish to whet the appetite of younger audiences. “We haven’t had a contemporary music program since David Sefton’s time [as Artistic Director from 2013– 2015] and Tryp will lean into Adelaide’s underground electronic music scene,” Lutton says, describing it as a two-day “hell-to-heaven journey” that brings together the most daring electronica and sound artists from Japan, the USA, Ireland, Finland and Australia.

“It will be curated by Thorsten Hertog, who runs [Sydney’s arts and music festival] Soft Centre and curates a lot for Vivid and Dark Mofo. There’ll be a Japanese experimental rock and noise artist starting on the opening night at Hindley Street Music Hall, and it’ll continue late into the night at Divide Club downstairs.” The following afternoon, Lutton promises “more ambient, electronic, celestial music” at Adelaide University’s Cloisters.

Having last appeared at the 2017 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, The Tiger Lillies are back in Serenade from the Sewer, inspired by London’s seedy Soho district of the 1980s. Described by The Guardian as “a provocative mix of anarchic opera and gypsy street theatre”, they are bringing their unique style of Brechtian post-punk to Her Majesty’s Theatre for two nights only.

Re-shaping Identity. Photo © Shenzhen Fringe Festival

Dance is well represented, with Australian choreographer Stephanie Lake’s The Chronicles performed by 12 contemporary dancers and the Young Adelaide Voices. The UK’s Hofesh Shechter Company dives into the subconscious in Theatre of Dreams, and Australian Dance Theatre presents the world premiere of Jenni Large’s fairytale-infused Faraway, described as “a floral and fetishistic exorcism of the darkness that lurks around us”.

Re-shaping Identity promises to be another highlight, bringing together five international dancers from different ethnic backgrounds – among them Tibetan, Yao, Uyghur and Han – who share and transform their regional traditions into contemporary expressions of liberation.

“It’s a fantastic piece by choreographer Guo Rui,” says Lutton, who saw it at the China Contemporary Dance Biennial in Shanghai two months ago. “Each of the five dancers talk about the traditional dance they learned as a child, and the importance of being able to subvert that and continue the tradition by changing it. They then turn them into club dances with this amazing electronic score where they take their tradition and make it utterly new. It’s really, really sexy.”

Rounding out the program, Festival staples WOMADelaide and Adelaide Writers’ Week return, as does the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanic Garden.