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| SYDNEY'S FESTIVAL VILLAGE BIGGER THAN EVER |
Sydney Festival Village turns Hyde Park into a stage, with live acts into the night and a Stonehenge bouncy castle for kids.
It takes a village to raise a child, and at the Sydney Festival's village in Hyde Park that proverb has been taken quite literally.
Hundreds of children and quite a few adults wasted no time leaping on Sacrilege, the life-size bouncy castle replica of Stonehenge.
Festival director Lieven Bertels said artists Jeff Koons and Carsten Holler explored playfulness in their art but ''nobody took it to heart as much as Jeremy Deller with this one''.
A Turner Prize-winning artist, Deller invites people to jump, run and cartwheel on his artwork, and his depiction of one of Britain's ancient monuments is far from the reverential treatment it usually suffers.
''We still don't know what it was,'' Bertels said. ''It's a place of worship most likely but he does this and gives it the title of Sacrilege.''
Bertels said the squishy Stonehenge was an ideal symbol of the festival: ''We do very serious stuff and we are also perhaps the most playful of the Australian festivals.''
Sacrilege is part of the greatly expanded Festival Village, which has tripled in size with two circus tents - the Spiegeltent and Circus Ronaldo tent - providing the stage for contemporary music acts such as Amanda Palmer and the circus and cabaret shows Limbo and Scotch & Soda.
The latter are strictly adults only, especially if contortionist Philipp Tigris's jaw-dropping feats of flexibility are any guide as demonstrated to passers-by in Hyde Park on Wednesday.
''That's what I can do with an easy warm-up,'' said Tigris, who performs in Limbo. ''I only had a couple of minutes to warm up so this is the basic stuff.''
Tigris said he took up contortionism aged seven, much to his parent's displeasure. ''My family are doctors. My mum is a physiotherapist but maybe that's why I did it,'' he said.
''When mum and dad say don't do that, of course you do it.''
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