Sydney Is Making One Hell Of A Bid For “Arts Capital Of Australia” With This New Vivid Program

Never shy to talk about the city’s stellar cultural reputation, Melbourne has been holding White Night — an annual all-night event featuring music, installation art and street projections — over Sydney’s heads for a few years now. Cries of “Arts Capital of Australia!” and “HAHAH WHAT EVEN ARE LOCKOUT LAWS?” are probably wearing pretty thin on most Sydneysiders at this point. But as of today, they can really hit back hard.

The 2016 program for Vivid Sydney just dropped and… yep. Even as a fiercely loyal Melburninan, I have no comeback to headliners like Björk and the words “laser dragon water theatre”.

This #VividSydney – A world-first, @darlingharbour lights up with Laser-Dragon Water-Theatre feat. 56 fountains. pic.twitter.com/OJVByZfqCp

— Vivid Sydney (@VividSydney) March 17, 2016

Countering Melbourne’s one-night extravaganza (which was actually met with some ordinary reviews this year), Sydney’s larger festival of light is adding on an extra few dates this year to cover a whopping 23 nights from May 27-June 18. As always, the program is split into three sections of Light, Music and Ideas, and each one is packed with huge headliners.

New Order, Bon Iver, and Anohni (formerly Antony Hegarty from Anthony and the Johnsons) are leading the list of international acts with Vivid scoring an infuriating/great (depending on your perspective) 15 exclusive shows for Sydney. Björk will also be in the city for the world premiere of a new virtual reality project called BJORK DIGITAL and will casually be doing a DJ set at Carriageworks. As Creative Director Ignatius Jones noted at the program launch this morning, this is a huge new focus for the festival. After making a concerted effort to embrace contemporary music last year, ticket sales more than doubled.

Curated by Junket‘s Jess Scully, the Ideas program is also bringing some big names from overseas featuring conversations with filmmaker Spike Jonze (Her, Where The Wild Things Are, Being John Malkovich), Orange Is The New Black showrunner Jenji Kohan, and creator of House of Cards Beau Willimon.

Then there are the lights. I could talk about the giant neon platform on which people will be publicly declaring their love or the enormous ornate elephants and platypuses (platypi?) which will be lurking around Taronga Zoo, but instead I’m gonna give you this:

For the first time in the festival’s history, the sails of the Sydney Opera House will be lit up with works from exclusively Indigenous artists. The series, Songlines, is based on the stories which pass across and connect Indigenous people to the land and is co-ordinated by the Opera House’s Head of Indigenous Programming Rhoda Roberts.

“As the music pumps away inside the Sydney Opera House and creates such a hub of activity, our sails come alive with a story from the ancient to the new,” Roberts said this morning. “This is the Aboriginal cycle of how we travel on the wings of the songlines — this is just as relevant to us today as they were hundreds of years ago.”

The work will run from 6pm-11pm for the duration of the festival. It’s not all night, but y’know, it’s still pretty great.

*He did not say this at all.

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Vivid Sydney runs from May 27-June 18. Check out the full program here.