The full program for the 2023 Brisbane Festival is announced. The city will be transformed into a multi-flavoured arts metropolis from 1–23 September with the work of Brisbane and Queensland-based companies and creatives high on the bill.

The fourth program from Artistic Director Louise Bezzina will stage more than 1,000 performances – 230 of which are free – including 19 world premieres, two Australian premieres and 11 Queensland premieres.

Salamander. Photo © Damien Bredburg/Brisbane Festival

World premieres

The Festival’s centrepiece is Salamander, an ambitious new dance-theatre and design work created by the UK-based choreographer Maxine Doyle, designer-artist Es Devlin and Perth-based composer-singer Rachael Dease which will transform an empty Northshore warehouse into an immersive, watery dreamworld inspired by JG Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World.

That book’s prescient first words (“Soon it will be too hot”) struck Doyle hard, she tells Limelight.

“I thought that was such a prophetic line. It’s that conversation we are having all the time – culturally and globally – about warming and about the world.”

In the novel, Ballard...