Sydney Festival has announced its 2027 edition, with international dance heavyweights, major First Nations premieres, a new harbourside festival hub and some very unconventional ways to cool off.

Running from 7–25 January, the festival will stretch from the CBD to Bondi and Western Sydney, bringing together theatre, music, comedy, visual art and large-scale outdoor spectacles. Among the headline attractions are Hannah Gadsby’s return to the stage, ILBIJERRI Theatre Company’s world premiere of THE LINE, a high-wire ballet at Barangaroo’s Cutaway and a new collaboration between Western Sydney hip hop collective ONEFOUR and the Penrith Chamber Orchestra.

There will also be cars converted into public bathing facilities, a free opening-weekend dance party and a program of international contemporary dance that promises to make the redeveloped Cutaway a major festival destination.

“A festival to cross town for”

Future Fiestas. Photo supplied

“We’ve set out to make a Festival that feels unmistakably of Sydney and open to the world,” says Festival Director Kris Nelson, pointing to a program that combines major First Nations works, collaborations born in Western Sydney and an international theatre and dance lineup.

“It’s a festival to cross town for,” he says.

Accessibility is also a central plank of the 2027 program. The festival’s $49 ticket initiative returns, with more than 10,000 A-reserve seats available across every show and every performance in the ticketed program. Free performances and public events will provide further opportunities to experience the festival without committing to a ticket.

A new playground by the harbour

At Barangaroo Reserve, the festival’s new outdoor hub, The Yard, will offer a place to eat, meet friends and soak up the atmosphere between performances. Free to enter from 8–24 January, it will bring pop-up restaurants, art and informal gathering spaces to the waterfront.

Waynapuni Pools. Photo Jesse Hunniford

One of the more unusual installations nearby is waynapuni pools, a public art park created by Tasmanian participatory artist and industrial designer Benjamin Paul in collaboration with local and Palawa teenage artists. The project transforms discarded cars into bathhouses, saunas and steam baths, with cold-plunge Commodores and hot-spring Falcons repurposing automotive scrap as spaces for bathing, gathering and care.

The recently revamped The Cutaway, meanwhile, will host a different kind of immersion. On 8 January, The Party takes over the venue for a massive free late-night dance celebration, bringing together Sydney DJs, party crews and surprise performers for an after-hours gathering designed to continue into the early hours.

The venue will also become the centrepiece of the festival’s ambitious dance program, with its vast interior providing the setting for works that push physical performance into spectacular territory.

Dance takes centre stage

The centrepiece of Sydney Festival 2027 is Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, bringing 12 international choreographers and dance companies to Sydney.

Among the most eye-catching attractions is Outsider, by French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane. The Australian-exclusive work brings together 20 dancers from Switzerland’s Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève and four extreme-sports athletes, who navigate a network of tightropes in a performance exploring risk, trust and collective momentum. The propulsive music of the late Julius Eastman provides the score.

Rachid Ouramdane’s Outsider. Photo supplied

Ouramdane also presents Contre-nature, in which 10 performers from Compagnie de Chaillot move through mist in an exploration of grace, vulnerability and the act of supporting one another.

Other international highlights include CROSSOVER, the first Australian appearance by French collective (LA)HORDE, whose work spans dance, film, fashion and music, and 15 | 18, a double bill from Chinese choreographer Tao Ye and TAO Dance Theater. The latter brings together the newest works in Tao’s Numerical Series, using tightly controlled movement to create shifting geometric patterns inspired by Chinese calligraphy.

Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Moroccan choreographer Radouan Mriziga join forces in Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione, a reimagining of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons that places climate breakdown at the heart of the choreography.

Elsewhere, Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos explores the energy of adolescence in My Fierce Ignorant Step, while Leïla Ka’s Maldonne, featuring five dancers and 40 second-hand dresses, examines the strength and vulnerability woven through women’s lives.

The program also extends beyond conventional performance spaces. The Trisha Brown Dance Company presents Roof Piece at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, positioning dancers across the building in a work where the audience’s view determines what can be seen.

Belgian choreographer Cassiel Gaube’s Soirée d’études, presented free at Carriageworks, strips house dance of its familiar soundtrack before allowing the music to flood in.

First Nations stories take the spotlight

Led by Head of First Nations Programming Aidan Rowlingson, Blak Out brings Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and stories to stages, galleries and public spaces across the festival.

Its major theatrical premiere is THE LINE, a darkly comic work by Trawlwoolway and Palawa playwright Nathan Maynard, co-directed by Maynard and theatre-maker Rachael Maza.

ILBIJERRI Theatre Company’s THE LINE. Image supplied

Co-presented by Sydney Festival and the Sydney Opera House, the production confronts the legacy of the 1830 military operation known as the Black Line, which sought to displace Palawa people in Lutruwita/Tasmania. As soldiers and settlers advance, the volatile relationship between a widowed settler, Jane, and her Palawa servant, Muka, becomes a prism through which the violence of the Frontier Wars reverberates into the present.

Another major premiere comes from Marrugeku. Ngurragabu, created by choreographer Dalisa Pigram and director Rachael Swain in dialogue with Yawuru and Bardi custodians, unfolds within a monumental petrified mangrove forest by visual artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah. Indigenous and settler-diasporic performers from Australia, South-East Asia and Melanesia inhabit an immersive world of projections and techno-futurist music, imagining a future of great middens and drowned Country.

Music features prominently in Blak Out, too. At Metro Theatre, Blak & Blues connects First Nations artists with influential Black American songbooks. Singer Budjerah draws on the music of Donny Hathaway alongside his own material, MO’JU reworks the songs of Bill Withers, and SOLCHLD takes on the repertoire of Etta James.

Game. Set. Match. Photo supplied

The program also includes Megan Wilding’s dark comedy Game. Set. Match. at Belvoir St Theatre, Bianca Hunt’s late-night conversation and performance series Up Late with Bianca Hunt, and the return of Redfern Renaissance, exploring the legacy of the 1970s National Black Theatre.

Visual art is represented by Emily in Sydney, an exhibition of works by senior Anmatyerr artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye at the S. H. Ervin Gallery, and Deep Surface, the first career survey of Los Angeles-based Palawa artist Jemima Wyman at UNSW Galleries.

Comedy, theatre and cabaret

Hannah Gadsby returns to Roslyn Packer Theatre with a new show examining the idea of a personal foundation myth: the defining moments that often become clear only in hindsight. The Emmy and Peabody Award winner brings their characteristic wit to the gap between living through an experience and understanding it later.

Deaf Republic By Dead Centre and Zoë McWhinney. Photo © Johan Persson

The festival also presents an Australian-exclusive season of Deaf Republic, adapted from Jewish-Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky’s work by Irish theatre-makers Dead Centre and Zoë McWhinney. Beginning with the shooting of a deaf boy by a soldier, the production imagines a town whose inhabitants become deaf the following day. Spoken English, Auslan and creative captioning shape a drama about grief, solidarity and resistance.

Other theatrical offerings range from Korean theatremaker Jaha Koo’s Haribo Kimchi, which combines cooking with reflections on migration and identity, to Brazilian artist Jéssica Teixeira’s Monga, a provocative solo performance challenging the gaze placed on her body.

Cabaret fans can look forward to the return of US performer Salty Brine with He’s So Unusual, a camp murder mystery set to songs by Cyndi Lauper, while Australian performer Gillian Cosgriff invites audiences into the unpredictable contests of Nothing Like a Game.

From drill to improvisation

Music across the festival moves freely between genres and traditions. ONEFOUR, whose rise from Mount Druitt to international attention was documented in ONEFOUR: Against All Odds, will perform with the Penrith Chamber Orchestra at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre. The new commission brings the drill collective together with a full string section for a major hometown show.

ONEFOUR. Photo supplied

Pakistani-American singer, composer and author Ali Sethi makes his Australian live debut at City Recital Hall, bringing a sound that blends South Asian melodies, ghazals and Sufi poetry with pop and electronic music. British sibling duo Wasia Project, meanwhile, moves between pop, classical influences and jazz.

A very different musical encounter comes with The Others, an improvised meeting between Paul Grabowsky, James Morrison, William Barton and Spiderbait drummer Kram. With no rehearsals and no discussion of what they will play, the four musicians will follow one another’s ideas wherever they lead.

For families, the free program includes Future Fiestas, in which Filipino artist Leeroy New and Blacktown communities turn discarded plastics into costumes for a public parade; Kite Choir, featuring handmade kites carrying recorded wishes from children around the world; and Waverider, a combination of surf culture and acrobatics by Legs On The Wall that transforms a giant inflatable wave into a play space after the performance.

For more information on the 2027 Sydney Festival and bookings, visit sydneyfestival.org.au