Sydney sites

On Monday the SFF senior management team visited all the major venues used for the festival, so it was a great opportunity for me to finally be able to visualise these places that had until then felt purely hypothetical. Especially useful as I’m currently devising strategies as to how to fill them in June! The main venue for the festival is called the State Theatre. This is a stunning art deco theatre in the heart of Sydney, one of the oldest buildings in the city, with jaw-dropping ornate decorative ceilings and all the original gold features – including busts embedded in the walls of all the major composers and theatrical auteurs through the years.



I was really blown away by this venue. It seats 2000 and although it’s packed for all our major screenings, it’s hard to fill on a weekday afternoon, so there have been murmurings of dissent amongst new staff about remaining in this costly and fairly impractical venue. It’s really popular with the hardcore SFF membership though, many of whom have had the exact same seat for the past twenty-odd years, and see it as an annual social occasion. (Seriously, we get people ringing up saying ‘my seat is C31’ and stuff – it’s like they own the festival!) And when I visited it, I could see why it holds such a special place in people’s hearts. Everything about the building is awe-inspiring. The ladies room is called ‘the butterfly room’ and the gents is ‘the lodge’ – and they were really spacious social rooms, harking back to a time when they would have been like segregated areas for the interval, where people smoked cigars or powdered their noses, depending on which room they were in. I think in a city where everything is relatively contemporary, it was magical to be in a building that felt so historical, and for an era so fashionable.



We also visited the other cinema venues, and a great nightclub venue that we’re considering for the Festival club lounge – we want somewhere a little more flexible than a standard cinema screen, so we can hold cabaret-style screening events, and be a bit more creative with the event programming, perhaps having bands perform live scores to films etc. This venue seemed perfect, so I’ve been getting excited about the possibilities there, but need to rein myself in a bit as it’s not confirmed that we’re using it yet!

The Sydney Festival has taken over the city at the moment – it’s the annual summer arts festival, and lasts the whole of January. Everything from gigs to theatre, video art to performing art, and all sorts in between, happens all over the city. On Monday I saw an American singer-songwriter called Matt Ward, in the world famous Spiegeltent. This is a wonderful ancient tent that they put up in Hyde Park (no not that one, the other one!) which has stained glass round the tops of the walls, and mirrors on the beams. (I’ll take a picture inside next time…) He was really good – kind of angsty, Leonard Coen/Rufus Wainwright vibe. Molasses voice and tortured face…



The Spiegel tent with the Sydney tower in the background.

This week was also my housemate Jaya’s birthday, so we had a dinner party on Wednesday evening. Jaya has a wheat intolerance, which made it particularly interesting for Rachel and I to devise a menu! We made some fantastic goats cheese and eggplant stacks, with a yummy sauce, and I baked a rhubarb, blueberry and polenta cake, which was absolutely divine, despite the fact that I totally made it up as I went along (albeit with a little help from a similar Nigella recipe I found on the internet! God love her.) Anyway, it all went down well, along with the wine and good company. They are a really lovely group of friends, I feel very privileged that they’ve been so welcoming to random little me! Maybe the deserts I make have something to do with it. ;-)



I have both Sydney and London weather forecasts on my google homepage – so I can compare… Tomorrow it’s 33 degrees in Sydney and 12 in London. What am I doing??

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