Enoch said the three-week festival would also focus on helping the beleaguered arts industry,making a virtue from the fact bringing overseas artists to Sydney is now all but impossible.
“The Australian arts industry needs us to support them at the moment,” he said. “Sure,we could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more on bringing in internationals and quarantining them for two weeks but I believe the Australian arts industry needs us more. In fact,some of our best artists are here at the moment and they are not touring,so let’s connect up with them.”
The full program for the 2021 festival will be revealed in early November. Enoch is in discussions with Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra,and Sydney Town Hall will be the venue for a “brand new,big work” based on the life of tennis legend Evonne Goolagong Cawley. Meanwhile,an 8m-wide interactive “percussion instrument” will be installed in Parramatta.
There are also plans to build a temporary outdoor performance space at Barangaroo to stage COVID-19-safe events. Enoch said he was taking some of his cues from football codes that had managed to restart safely.
"The language is interesting,” he said. “Not to call it a theatre but to call it a stadium. People understand stadiums because sport has been doing it forever.”