New two-day festival Antidote will focus on finding solutions to some of the world’s most intractable problems

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The Sydney Opera House has announced a new “ideas, art and action” festival will debut this September, replacing the annual Festival of Dangerous Ideas (Fodi) with a program centred on progressive global politics and activism.

Titled Antidote, the two-day festival departs from Fodi in its inclusion of participatory arts programming and in its curatorial independence, with The Ethics Centre no longer returning as a presenting partner.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, founding editor of Muslim Girl. Photograph: Jenna Masoud

Antidote also has a clearer programming focus on progressive action. The 2017 festival will feature talks from the national co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington, Tamika D. Mallory; the team behind satirical news originators the Onion, who will discuss the evolution of satire in a post-fact world; bestselling author and transgender rights activist Janet Mock; Martin Goodman and James Thornton, who wrote about environmental law as a solution to the climate crisis, in Client Earth; political performance artist and poet Inua Ellams; Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, founding editor of Muslim Girl, a website for young Muslim women and girls; North Korea defector Yeonmi Park; and Eve Ensler, the writer of seminal feminist work The Vagina Monologues.

A local lineup will include Indigenous Australian leaders Uncle Jack Charles and Archie Roach; Indigenous commentator Celeste Liddle; and Julie McCrossin, who marched at the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 1978 and who will be reflecting on what has changed since then.



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The festival is curated by Danielle Harvey, curator of the Opera House’s feminism and ideas conference All About Women, and co-curator of Festival of Dangerous Ideas from 2010-2016. She sees Antidote as a “natural evolution” to Fodi which reflects “the mood of the time”.

“To me, fear and anger is driving so much of what we’re seeing around us right now – in the media, on social media, and in discussions with our audiences. I wanted to provide something as an antidote, as the title suggests,” Harvey told Guardian Australia.

“This festival is almost a response to the ideas that eight years of Fodi brought forward. We heard from a lot of commentators, a lot about what is going on in the world, and this festival is almost a response to that, to start to hear some of the solutions.”

In her work Cherophobia, Noëmi Lakmaier will be lifted into the air by 20,000 helium balloons. Photograph: Unlimited

The Festival of Dangerous Ideas was subject to various controversies in recent years. Co-presented by The Ethics Centre, it came under fire in 2014 for a programmed talk titled Honour Killings Are Morally Justified, to be delivered by Muslim activist and speaker Uthman Badar. The event was cancelled following public outrage.

Later that year, a group of female artists called for a boycott of the festival over its ties to Ethics Centre board members Jim Molan and Douglas Sneddon, who were connected to the Abbott government’s offshore detention policy.

In 2016, Indigenous writer and actor Nakkiah Lui spearheaded another protest against the festival, which had programmed conservative commentator Andrew Bolt. “By giving platform to Bolt, you are legitimising his hate speech and closing your doors to those he vilifies,” Lui said.

The centrepiece of Antidote’s arts program will be Cherophobia: a free durational performance from disabled artist Noëmi Lakmaier, who will, over nine hours in the concert hall, have 20,000 helium balloons tied to her bound and immobilised body.



“To me it’s a metaphor for the festival: one balloon isn’t going to do much, but 20,000 might do something quite extraordinary,” Harvey says.

Other participatory arts events will include The Money by UK group Kaleider, a rumination on collective decision making and democracy; and choreographer Anne Collod’s recreation of Anna Halprin’s 1967 Blank Placard Dance, in which 20 dancers marched silently through the streets of San Francisco holding blank placards inviting the public to decide on what they wanted to protest.

• Antidote will take place on 2-3 September, with tickets on sale on Thursday 6 July.