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The program for the 40^th edition of South Australia’s premier arts festival - the Adelaide Festival - to be held in 2025 has been announced and promises an array of international and Australian productions and artists.

For 2025, popular Adelaide Festival programs - Adelaide Writers’ Week, WOMADelaide, Chamber Landscapes and Daylight Express - will make their anticipated returns and next year will see a new festival hub, The Courtyard. Located on the Festival Plaza, this vibrant new meeting place will offer food, drinks, and nightly programming from Wednesday to Sunday evenings.

The Festival kicks off with Australia's opera event of the year – the epic, international thriller Innocence. Following its sellout triumph at the Royal Opera Covent Garden, and immediately before its New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera, this astonishing and epic production has its exclusive Australian season in the 2025 Festival.

The score will be performed by Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Clément Mao-Takacs, with a combined chorus of 32 Adelaide Chamber Singers and State Opera South Australia Chorus members.

Also for the opening weekend, there’s still time to register to be part in the 30-minute dusk ‘happening’ in Elder Park, with the world premiere of Stephanie Lake Company’s MASS MOVEMENT on Saturday 1st March at 7pm, co-commissioned with The Australian Ballet. Over 1000 dancers ranging in age from 12 to 88 and representing a diverse mix of dance styles will come together for a breathtaking one-time-only free performance on a balmy summer evening.

Adelaide Festival Artistic Director Brett Sheehy AO enthused “I’m thrilled to be back at the helm of our nation’s major cultural drawcard for the past 65 years, rightly deserving its moniker of ‘Australia’s International Festival’.

‘I want to thank my predecessors in this role – Ruth Mackenzie CBE, Neil Armfield AO and Rachel Healy – who set the groundwork with their prior commitments to several productions, and I’ve relished the opportunity to complete the program of extraordinary opera, dance, theatre and music works you won’t experience anywhere else in the country.

‘Since my first Adelaide Festival in 2006, I’ve had the privilege of continuing to present live performances and to analyse exactly why the artforms of theatre, music, dance and opera continue to thrive. The explosion in recent research into what makes us happy has landed on a not-surprising though now scientifically validated conclusion – humans are made happy by the experiential over the material. Simply put, we reach our greatest enjoyment and satisfaction through experiences over things. And Adelaide Festival is a living embodiment of this.”

The 40th Adelaide Festival runs over 17 days and nights from Friday 28 February to Sunday 16th March, 2025. Adelaide Writers’ Week runs from Saturday 1st to Thursday 6th March and the full program will be announced in January 2025.

BOOKINGS (on sale from 9am ACST / 9:30am AEDT, Monday 4th November): adelaidefestival.com.au or 1300 393 404.

Image. Live Music crowd during Adelaide Festival Credit: Frankie The Creative

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