Death opera and a Female Pope: OzAsia Festival 2025 program unveiled
A Grammy-winning Japanese pianist, an 80-year-old icon, and a futuristic twist on Chinese mourning rituals feature in this year’s OzAsia Festival.
“One of the big themes or visions for me, is about bringing people together,” OzAsia Festival director Joon-Yee Kwok tells InReview. “What brings people together? How do we come together? Who do we like to come together with?”
When Kwok was assembling her second OzAsia Festival program, revealed today, that vision comes with an additional caveat; with its usual heartland of the Adelaide Festival Centre out of action for a $35 million dollar upgrade, it’s also a question of ‘where?’
For some shows, like Opera for the Dead 祭歌 , that means inviting audiences in the middle of the action.
“From an audience perspective, I think what’s really different about this work is that you don’t sit and watch a concert as such — you are immersed in it,” she says of the show, conceived by composers Monica Lim and Mindy Meng Wang as a futuristic response to traditional mourning rituals combining live performance with moving stages and 3D animation.
“Audiences are invited to come in and wander through the work, so it will take place around you.”
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Over at the Elder Wing of the Art Gallery of South Australia, this year’s visual arts program will invite members of the public for a sit-down audience with The Female Pope — a durational three-hour performance by artist Rakini Devi, inspired by the mythic 10th century pontiff Pope Joan and the Hindu goddess Kali.
“You can come and offer a personal petition, you can sit and meditate with her for about 10 minutes,” Kwok says. “It’s a very beautiful, sacred and also very thought-provoking work.”
Headlining this year’s festival is celebrated artist, photographer and activist William Yang, who appeared in the very first OzAsia program back in 2007. While Yang’s 2007 show China saw the third-generation Chinese Australian present a slideshow-inclusive account of his travels back to the ‘Motherland’, this time he’ll cast the net even wider with his 80th birthday retrospective Milestone.
“He is one of these Asian Australian icons whose shoulders on which we stand,” Kwok says. “He has been such a pioneer for the Asian Australian arts community, and in this work he looks back on his 80 years of life, telling stories about growing up in Queensland all the way through to coming out, documenting the Sydney queer and gay scene, and the legacy that he’s leaving behind as a photographer and as a documentarian.”
The festival will also premiere Two Blood, a new work from Australian Dance Theatre and co-creators S. Shakthidharan — writer of the 2019 Adelaide Festival hit Counting & Cracking — and Bangarra Dance Theatre dancer and choreographer Jasmin Sheppard.
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“It’s a love story about a Tagalaka woman and a Cantonese man found in a ‘forever embrace’ on Jasmine’s family property,” she says. “So it tells a really beautiful love story, and brings together these two people, and this mystery of who they are.”
Two Blood’s story has taken a long and winding path to get here; the work resurrects an earlier production by Shakthidharan and Sheppard that was originally commissioned by OzAsia before the global pandemic. Originally titled 宿 (stay), it eventually premiered at Sydney Festival in January 2022, but its planned Adelaide season became one of many Covid-era productions that slipped through the cracks — until Australian Dance Theatre artistic director Daniel Riley floated this new adaptation.
“When Dan Riley approached me about this and said, ‘it’s an adaption of 宿 (stay)’, I went, ‘Get out!’ I was so excited.”
Another coup for Kwok is Grammy-winning Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi — an artist that OzAsia has been working to lure to Adelaide for years. Appearing as part of a national tour, Hiromi will play alongside American string ensemble PUBLIQuartet in a one-night-only show at Adelaide Town Hall on October 28.
Music fans can also tune into the sounds of the Greater Khorasan region via Spanish-Iranian duo Badieh; a hip-hop reflection on ecological collapse in The Offering (A Plastic Ocean Oratorio) from husband-and-wife duo Omar Musa and Mariel Roberts Musa; and the sunny indie pop stylings of viral star Grentperez.
This year’s festival — which will run over four weeks instead of the usual three — won’t entirely abandon the riverbank, with the return of the family-friendly Moon Lantern trail and the miniature literary festival Weekend of Words, set to be held at the Adelaide Convention Centre. The Lucky Dumpling Market will also be back in Elder Park, along with its ‘Sunset Sounds’ series of twilight concerts opened by Filipinx / Wiradyuri singer songwriter Mo’Ju, before two and a half weeks of performances from local, interstate and international acts and a park-load of food vendors.
Just up the hill, Kwok has programmed another roving Australian premiere by 2023 program highlights The Human Expression Dance (T.H.E.) Company.
“Searching Blue is a work that [Artistic Director Kuik Swee Boon] adapts to many public spaces — and this is why I was very interested in it in a year when I don’t necessarily have the same kind of sit-down theatre venues,” Kwok explains.
Searching Blue will see the Singapore company perform outside among the construction site that is the Festival Plaza precinct — though exactly where, Kwok isn’t sure just yet.
“We did a Zoom site walk with him, so he knows where the spaces are,” she says. “In my heart, I love working with public space, and I thought this is a perfect chance.”
OzAsia Festival runs from October 17 – November 2025. Explore the full program here.