Here’s What To See At Sydney Festival 2025

First Nations

Sydney Festival's Blak Out programming is dedicated to sharing First Nations voices, with must-see works like the hilarious and touching Tina – A Tropical Love Story—Ben Gaetz's musical blending drag, cabaret and storytelling sharing the story of a First Nations boy in Darwin in the '90s finding himself enchanted by Tina Turner.

Image credit: Jamie James

Vigil: Gunyah at Barangaroo Reserve is a woven canopy hosting conversations curated by radio broadcaster Rudi Bremer and a soundscape by composer and sound designer Brendon Boney. On Saturday 25 January, Vigil: Truths (curated by award-winning hip-hop group 3%) asks that we listen with open hearts and minds as visions for a First Nations-led future are shared. 

Musical programming includes Malyangapa Barkindji rapper BARKAA with Cash Savage and The Last Drinks on 11 January, and Murrawarri-Filipino rapper, drummer and composer DOBBY on Saturday 25 January. On the stage, Arrernte playwright Declan Furber Gillick's Jacky shares the struggle of balancing identity, personality and culture. Plant a Promise is a world premiere of a four-part work by Kuku Yalanji choreographer and playwright Henrietta Baird including projection, a fire installation, and weaving.

Go Big

Large-scale installations and events are always a highlight of Sydney Festival, and 2025 packs a promising lineup like The Whale: a massive illuminated whale puppet that visitors help to bring to life, accompanied by storytelling and original score.

A huge, free outdoor concert performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra will share soaring renditions of works by Tchaikovsky, Egyptian-Australian virtuoso Joseph Tawadros and Leonard Bernstein under the stars (complete with a fireworks finale) on Saturday 18 January, and you can catch free performances by Sydney Trapeze School on their massive swings twice daily at Swing! in Darling Harbour—or even join a trapeze and circus skills workshop ($49pp).

Image credit: Sydney Festival | Supplied

In addition to Colour Maze, a large-scale immersive artwork to experience is What We Leave Behind, where you can contribute to messages of hope for the environment's future, with your contribution woven into an ever-growing bamboo installation on the waterfront Tallawoladah Lawn at The Rocks.

Wild West

Everyone went a little bit country in 2024—and Sydney Festival is keeping the yee very much hawing with a bunch of Wild West-themed works. Dark Noon progresses in real time like the cinematic classic High Noon and is just as politically loaded, challenging the spit-polished American history presented by Hollywood Westerns and reimagining it through a global lens.

Image credit: Teddy Wolff

Before you stow your Stetson, head to Riverside Theatres in Parramatta for Cowboy: a solo dance work set to an original score by Regurgitator bassist Ben Ely that draws the audience in to the action and examines our hidden vulnerabilities and shared humanity.

Classics Reimagined

In 2025 we have an English-language staging of Cendrillon (Cinderella) by Opera Australia, a dance performance based on the myth of Eurydice in AFTERWORLD, and singer, songwriter and keys player Allysha Joy performing a tribute to the legendary Roberta Flack. 

Swiss theatre-maker Milo Rau’s adaptation of Antigone presents an urgent tale of environmental destruction featuring Indigenous people, activists from Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) and actors from Europe in Antigone in the Amazon.

Image credit: Sydney Festival | Supplied

The classic circus experience is spun into a wondrous new format in Animal by Quebec-based company Cirque Alfonse, with a surreal agricultural setting and funky live soundtrack (at Riverside Theatres in Parramatta 3–12 January, and The Pavilion Arts Centre in Sutherland 16–19 January).