Green Room: Butler bound for Adelaide Guitar Festival, Chihuly shatters attendance records
South Australian arts and culture news in brief.
Adelaide Guitar Festival brings Zan and Zeppelin
Sliding like into our inbox like a stage-worn lapsteel this week is the news John Butler will return to Adelaide in September to headline the newly-announced 2025 Adelaide Guitar Festival program. Touring on the back of his latest studio album Prism, Butler will perform at Her Majesty’s Theatre with a line-up that includes drummer Michael Barker, a former member of the John Butler Trio during its breakthrough Sunrise Over Sea era. InReview feels duty-bound to warn audiences that they too may find themselves with ‘Zebra’ stuck in their head for the next decade after attending the September 10 concert.
Beloved broadcaster Zan Rowe has spoken to plenty of guitarists in her time, and on September 11 the festival will premiere her new show dubbed Riffing with Zan Rowe, featuring guest including Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung country star Troy Cassar-Daly, Guitar Festival artistic director Slava Grigoryan, and New York via Catalonia guitarist Lau Noah, who makes her Australian debut at the festival.
Noah and Cassar-Daly will also appear in their own concerts, with Lau Noah co-headlining with Israeli Australian folk singer Lior on September 14, and Cassar-Daly teaming up with Barkindji singer songwriter Nancy Bates for a night of music and storytelling on September 12.
Lior will also make a guest appearance alongside Dr Paul Svoboda and the Adelaide Guitar Festival Orchestra for Consonance: Instrumental Conversations with Guitar. A Sunday afternoon show at Elder Hall, Consonance promises to explore the relationship between guitar and other stringed instruments, with Adelaide-via-Ukraine guitarist Aleksandr Tsiboulski performing a new suite by South Australia’s own Anne Cawrse, and a performance from Slava Grigoryan and his partner and collaborator, former Australian String Quartet cellist Sharon Grigoryan.
Elder Hall will also host Duo Siqueira Lima — Uruguay’s Cecilia Siqueira and Brazil’s Fernando de Lima — along with Young Taek Jo, the South Korea-born winner of last year’s Adelaide International Classical Guitar Competition, on September 13.
It’s not all catgut and roots music; rock fans can prepare to get the Led out when a crew of local stars celebrate the 50th anniversary of Led Zeppelin’s sixth album Physical Graffiti. With the Southern Cross Symphony on hand to give some orchestral grunt to seminal tracks like ‘Kashmir’.
Explore the full program here.
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New CEOs for Nexus
West end multicultural art hub Nexus Arts is undergoing renewal with CEO and artistic director Emily Tulloch handing over to two new leaders. Newly announced Co-CEO Zhao Liang is a Singapore-born composer and producer who would be familiar to Adelaide audiences for her mastery of the guzheng harp, founding the School of Chinese Music & Arts, and collaborating with major orgs like the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra for last year’s Adelaide Festival community project Floods of Fire.
Joining Liang is Kim Roberts, a rock musician and arts industry veteran who has previously served as general manager of Music SA and the Arts Industry Council of South Australia. Roberts can also be seen adding crunchy low-end to post-punk groups like Placement.
“Zhao and Kim bring a unique blend of creative vision, strategic leadership, and deep community connection to the organisation,” Nexus Arts chair Terri Dichiera said of the appointments. “Their combined experience will strengthen our mission to celebrate cultural diversity and expand Nexus Arts’ impact locally and nationally.”
“I’m delighted to see the appointment of these two brilliant women to lead Nexus Arts into its next chapter,” outgoing CEO Tulloch said. “Kim and Zhao, as Co-CEOs, bring a rich and complementary mix of skills and perspectives that will serve the organisation beautifully.”
“It was a true honour to offer my service in leadership for a time, and I’m excited to witness the momentum, ideas, and creativity that this new leadership team will cultivate.”
ACE names new studio crew
Adelaide Contemporary Experimental has revealed the latest wave of artists for its long-running Studio Program. Bryce Cawte, Stephanie Doddridge and Lottie Emma will each receive a free, year-long residency in the studio space upstairs from ACE’s gallery in the Lion Arts precinct, while also receiving mentorship from ACE curators and other programming and networking opportunities.
ACE artistic director Danni Zuvela says the program allows artists to dig deep into their artistic process, and “generate not just new artworks and methodologies but also new ideas”.
“We are very proud to support and celebrate Bryce, Lottie and Stephanie as they explore bold experimental thinking and are looking forward to witnessing how the Studio Artist opportunity transforms their practice across 2025–2026”.
An additional three-month residency in conjunction with Sydney-based artist-led gallery firstdraft has also been awarded to Jingwei Bu, whose interdisciplinary work encompasses performance and illustration — from tea ceremonies to her recent reprisal of Pam Gilbert’s 1976 work Ritual Integration Performance, performed at ACE earlier this month.
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“Jingwei Bu’s proposal stood out for its clarity of vision and potential for experimentation across both ACE and firstdraft,” says Zuvela. “Her work demonstrates a strong conceptual foundation, a fascination with sound art which spoke to the judges – and we’re excited to support her as she experiments further with her idea to develop a new body of work to be presented in Sydney in August.”
Big glass does big numbers
Last week the Adelaide Botanic Garden revealed the end-of-season figures for its landmark Chihuly in the Botanic Garden, which clocked 1.4 million visit across its seven month run. Most of the site-wide, career-spanning retrospective of glass visionary Dale Chihuly was free to the public, but it also shifted 201,000 tickets for the paid after-dark experience Chihuly Nights and the In Full Colour exhibition within the Bicentennial Conservatory.
That’s a new record for large-scale outdoor displays of Chihuly’s work, trumping his similar mass installations in London and Singapore. The program was such a success that the Garden will hold onto a second Chihuly piece, with the Sturt Desert Pea-inspired Jet and Crimson Fiori acquired by the Garden courtesy of several dozen Adelaide philanthropists and visitors.
Dale Chihuly himself is stoked with the news that Jet and Crimson Fiori would stay in Adelaide.
“I was making experimental forms with my team and was shown image of your state floral emblem,” he said in a statement. “I loved its bold color and wild shape. It inspired me to create something new. I was pleased with the results, and it was so exciting to have the opportunity to debut this work in Adelaide. It is a joy to know it will remain with the Garden.”
They’ll join the Garden’s other new permanent Chihuly attraction, Glacier and Ice Lapis Chandelier, which will continue to hang in the Palm House thanks to a donation by Dr Pamela Wall, AO.
Windmill powers indie artists
Recent Green Room columns have seen a number of major performing arts orgs from State Theatre to Australian Dance Theatre support independent and emerging creatives through a series of incubator programs, and now children’s theatre Windmill Theatre giants have revealed the four groups, together comprising 22 artists, that have been tipped for its new Indie-mill program.
“We were blown away by the calibre of talent and originality that came through the applications,” says Windmill’s artistic director, Clare Watson. “Indie-mill is about giving artists the time, support and space to follow their instincts, push boundaries and collaborate collectively, bringing a concept further along its path towards production.
Selected after an open call out, from July 2025 each team will be granted two weeks in the rehearsal studio at Adelaide College of Arts and receive assistance from Windmill’s team of production and marketing pros.
The four teams are:
- Ashton Malcolm, Elizabeth Hay, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Andreanna Massacci, Hen Vaughan, Renate Henschke and Emma Beech
- Matt Crook, James Smith, Chris Asimos, Kyron Weetra, Annabel Matheson and Olivia Zanchetta
- Kristen O’Dwyer, Alexis West, Samara Fernandes Brown, Chantal Henley, Jamie Goldsmith and Aunty Angelena Harradine
- Will Spartalis, Erin Fowler and Hew Parham
“The thought of having 22 South Australian artists across four projects, with us here at Windmill for two weeks is exhilarating and we can’t wait to get started,” Watson says.
Green Room is a regular column for InReview, providing quick news for people interested, or involved, in South Australian arts and culture. Get in touch by emailing us at [email protected]