The 2025 Darwin Festival – its 46th edition – features eight world premieres, five of which are Indigenous cultural performances, as well as a strong line-up of live music programming and a carefully curated range of critically acclaimed productions from interstate.
Darwin Festival Artistic Director Kate Fell says this year’s program is designed to inspire and entertain, with the record number of venues taking part – 50 in all – reflecting the vibrancy, beauty and spirit of Darwin.
“This year, the extraordinary city of Darwin really takes centre stage. From breathtaking sunsets over the harbour to lush parks and iconic venues, Darwin Festival 2025 will shine across 50 locations. We’re thrilled to deliver one of our most diverse and exciting programs yet – spanning art, film, music, comedy, cabaret, dance, food and family fun, across our biggest-ever footprint,” Fell said in a media statement.
Jump to:
Tracks Dance Company’s ‘Antidote’
One of the works having its world premiere at Darwin Festival this year is Antidote, the latest production – or productions, more accurately – from Darwin’s Tracks Dance Company, a community-oriented company this writer once described as “a national treasure“.
At the beginning of 2025, Tracks Dance formed an Artistic Leadership team to drive the company’s future direction. The team consists of Rachael Wallis, James Mangohig, Alyson Evans, Jenelle Saunders and Tracks’ Artistic Director, David McMicken AM. This collective, comprising award-winning artists, brings a multidisciplinary approach to creating work that, in the Tracks tradition, is deeply connected to community.
In developing Antidote, Tracks’ Artistic Leadership engaged a team of ‘Hope Collectors’ to gather stories, sounds and moves from the broader Darwin community, thereafter distilling the collected materials into artistic shape.
Antidote, the resulting work, comprises three separate elements: Dance It (Sunday 17 August at 6pm), a free outdoor community celebration on Darwin’s The Esplanade, featuring movements shaped by the gathering of collective stories; Listen Deep (Tracks Dance Studio, Tuesday 19 August at 6pm and 7.30pm), a soundscape and immersive listening experience drawing on the rich sounds, voices and instruments from the Tracks community; and Tell Stories (Tracks Dance Studio, Thursday 21 August at 6pm and 7.30pm), an evening of storytelling celebrating hope, resilience and joy across cultures and generations.
Sean Pardy, Company Director, Tracks Dance, tells ArtsHub: “In a world that has so much sadness, destruction and division, I am so proud that the Tracks Artistic Leadership team has chosen to respond with a suite of offerings reflecting hope, connection, resilience and fun.”
McMicken adds: “Darwin is in such a unique position, with its geography and proximity to exciting cultures, its beautiful dry season weather and its amazingly diverse artists. Antidote brings this all together to find multiple remedies, much needed in our current times. This is why we live here.”
Producer and composer James Mangohig says: “In an arts scene where the norm is to have burnout and exhaustion, it is really encouraging to work in an organisation where artist and community care is at the forefront of what they do. That is an Antidote.”
From new First Nations works to experimental performance
Festival-goers can also expect a dynamic array of musical premieres at the 2025 Darwin Festival. A Night of Rock and Roll with Bogan Villea offers a guest-rich tribute to Australian anthems with a Blak and bogan twist, while Darwin Symphony Orchestra (DSO) presents Heaven and Earth, featuring Mahler’s Symphony No 4 and the world premiere of a new work, Wuyal’s Journey – the result of a creative collaboration between Rirratjingu songman Banula Marika and DSO Composer in Residence Netanela Mizrahi. Based on the story of ‘Wuyal’ (the sugarbag man), an important ancestral being in north-east Arnhem Land, this new orchestral piece follows Wuyal’s journey in search of wild honey.
Music also plays a crucial role in the Festival’s opening weekend, as previously reported by ArtsHub.
Read: Darwin Festival 2025 announces Guy Sebastian and L.A.B as opening acts
Fell and her team have also programmed a vibrant mix of circus, dance, opera and experimental performance for the 2025 Festival – given the cost of touring to the Territory, the Festival offers a rare opportunity for interstate performers to travel north.
Program highlights include Circa’s Duckpond, a circus reimagining of Swan Lake and “a visual feast that left viewers enthralled” according to ArtsHub reviewer Peter Hackney, Bangarra Dance Theatre’s 2025 production Illume (a collaboration between Mirning choreographer Frances Rings and Goolarrgon Bard visual artist Darrell Sibosado that explores the ways light has captivated and sustained Indigenous cultural existence for millennia), and Perth company The Last Great Hunt’s Night Night, a genre-defying blend of puppetry, animation, film and live performance (“profound theatre, perfectly simple and simply perfect”, according to our recent five-star review of the production).
Also programmed in Darwin Festival 2025 is Melbourne collective Pony Cam’s internationally in-demand Burnout Paradise, which comes to the Territory after performances in Edinburgh and New York in 2024 and Cork, Ireland in July this year. The production, which features four performers on treadmills in a high-stakes challenge, creates a physical and mental trial – including grant writing and balancing a creative practice with familiar daily tasks – in which the audience play a key role.
Read: Reuben Kaye and Bernadette Peters will Melt Brisbane audiences in 2025
Pony Cam’s Hugo Williams says, “We haven’t worked in Darwin before, but have been chatting about it for a few years now, so it’s really exciting to head up north. What we know is that during Festival time local people are enthusiastic about getting out there and seeing a lot of stuff, and very much want to get involved in things that otherwise would not be their usual MO. Whenever this happens in a place, it is usually a special time.”
He adds: “As for Burnout Paradise and audiences, we don’t say that people need to get involved, and by no means do audiences need to participate in the show. What we say at the start is we’re not very good at what we do. We’re running, we’ve got to cook, we’ve got to do these things. So we might ask for help. And if you want to help, we’d love it.”
A slew of popular Australian and international artists and comedians will also be coming to Darwin Festival 2025, including Sarah Blasko, Rhys Nicholson, Dave Hughes, Jude Perl, Rhonda Burchmore, Melanie Bracewell, Anthony Callea, Merrick Watts, Tricksy Collins, Tim Campbell, Suhani Shah, Troy Cassar-Daley and more.
Darwin Festival 2025 runs from 7-24 August. Visit the Festival website for full program details.
Disclaimer: Richard Watts has been approached by Darwin Festival to work (in a paid, professional capacity) with NT writers to help them hone their critical writing skills. He has not yet signed a contract with the Festival.
