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Sun&Sea will set up a beach inside Sydney Town Hall. — Sun& Sea will set up a beach inside Sydney Town Hall.Credit:Andrej Vasilenko

While they are bringing a team of 28 including 12 soloists from Lithuania,one of the first things that director Rugile Barzdziukaite,librettist Vaiva Grainyte and composer Lina Lapelyte will do when they arrive for their first visit to the city is,you guessed it,go to the beach.

They want to study the Australian experience and,depending on what the festival has already organised,expect to invite some of the people they see to join their one-hour show,set on a lazy afternoon on the sand.

“We know that in your case,the lifeguards are very important,” Barzdziukaite says on Zoom from Europe. “The problem is that they have too bright costumes for our colour palette but we will definitely include some locals,surfers probably.”

While these locals won’t be expected to sing,Sydney choirs will also take part inSun&Sea.

After the trio collaborated on the contemporary operaHave A Good Day!,about the inner life of 10 supermarket cashiers,they decided the beach was the perfect setting for a show about climate change.

The audience will look down on the performers from what Barzdziukaite calls “a bird’s perspective”,moving around if they want to get different angles on what’s taking place.

“The idea was to look at the humans from a non-human perspective so that we have a distance from them and there’s a different scale and they remind us of a different species,as bugs,” she says.

Grainyte says the narrative works “as a mosaic” as the performers sing gentle pop elegies about their lives and the changes in the natural world.

After watching the show in Venice,aNew York Times critic called it “a masterpiece of culture in a changing climate” – a rare subject for art given its urgency.

Sydneysiders will be approached and asked to take part in Sun&Sea. — Sydneysiders will be approached and asked to take part in Sun& Sea.Credit:Sydney Festival

“Beneath us,children played with buckets and shovels;dogs dozed and yapped;and a cast of more than a dozen sang of delayed flights and exploding volcanoes to a spare,insistently catchy electronic score,” the critic raved. “Sun&Sea remains one of the greatest achievements in performance of the last 10 years:wry,seductive and cunning in ways that reveal themselves days or years later.”

The show,which originated in Lithuania in 2017,has now run in 25 cities in 18 countries. Venues have included a Bauhaus swimming pool outside Berlin,a warehouse in Piraeus,Greece,an 18th-century theatre in Rome,the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.

Running from January 6 to 8,Sun&Seacontinues the inventive use of the Town Hall after it was turned into a tennis court for the Evonne Goolagong Cawley showSunshine Super Girlat the festival last year.

While the score runs for an hour on a continuous loop,patrons enter at half-hour intervals and can stay as long as they want.

The more the trio learn about Australian culture,the more they think the show is perfect for Sydney.

Lapelyte says Lithuanians appreciate the beauty and wildness of the beach even though they have only a short summer.

“But in Australia it feels like the whole life is running around the beach,” she says.

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Email Garry Maddox atgmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at@gmaddox.

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