A Taste of Country Arts SA in 2022

Feeling restless for 2022 to get started? Here’s a taster of what’s to come around regional South Australia next year. There will be dance, theatre, livestreams, visual arts, children’s theatre, exhibitions and more to get you out of the house and experiencing different worlds.

Country Arts SA has joined with the Adelaide Festival to bring Macro by Gravity and Other Myths, a fun-filled display of human strength and creativity direct to you from the opening night of the 2022 Adelaide Festival, livestreamed from the Adelaide Oval to select cinemas across the state.

Port Pirie and Whyalla will be the place to be to get your front row ticket to Sunshine Super Girl. Evonne Goolagong’s heart-warming story is a celebration of spirit and passion over adversity, and a tribute to a woman whose sporting prowess continues to inspire a nation, giving hope to thousands of young girls across the country.

South Australia’s celebrated dance company Restless performs three moving works in A Date With Restless. Experience the unique Restless dancers live on stage with an intimate evening of their award-winning works, Ecoute Pour Voir and Seeing Through Darkness. With a special screening of Meryl Tankards inspirational portrait of Artistic Director Michelle Ryan’s life, Michelle’s Story.

Home-grown, internationally renowned choreographer Lewis Major and his company bring to the stage two contemporary dance works, Double Bill: Satori & Unfolding. Unfolding melds fluid dance with shifting 3D projection animation and an epic score. Four dancers move through this beautiful work to reveal the poetic possibilities of universal rhythms and cycles in relation to the human form.

Satori is loosely translatable from Japanese as the term for awakening. This hypnotic work is a meditation created by patterns made by bodies, sound and light on the state of impermanence that is our reality.

Playwright Caleb Lewis’ life-affirming piece of storytelling, Cathedral asks the question: do we turn away from our pain, or dive right in? Starring beloved Adelaide actor Nathan O’Keefe returns to State Theatre Company South Australia to become the man at the centre of this riveting and suspenseful one-person performance.

Hiccup! by the delightful Windmill Theatre Company is a hilarious, rocking musical extravaganza about working together, finding friendship and how to, once and for all, stop the hiccups.

Children will also love Home, which delves into questions around difference whilst celebrating diversity in a unique Patch Theatre and Restless Dance Theatre collaboration.  At first, a child’s home is their world, but as they venture out into the wider world they discover that not all homes are alike, and neither are the people. Home will enlighten and delight.

The seven colours of the rainbow and the seven notes of the musical scale are used to explore the power of art and creation in the immersive performance Seven Little Wonders by The PaperBoats where children from the audience are complicit in determining the story’s outcome.

Currently on tour is Naomi Hobson: Adolescent Wonderland a series of photographs that tell the real-life stories of young Aboriginal people in remote Australia from artist Naomi Hobson. The exhibition will travel to 11 regional galleries in 2022.

More visual arts exhibitions, theatre productions and engagement opportunities will be revealed next year.