Did you see Brook Andrew's Travelling Colony at Festival First Night, or in the Carriageworks foyer?

The good news is, it's not to late - it's on display until March 4.

The even better news is, you can now own one of the caravans from the exhibition! There's more information about purchasing one of the seven caravans in the PDF below.

Click here to download:

BrookAndrew_PurchaseOp_FINAL.pdf (906 KB)

Did you catch J Mascis in The Famous Spiegeltent this Festival?

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Have you been working your way through all the challenges in the Festival App?

At midnight Saturday the ultimate challenge will be revealed for everyone who's completed five or more challenges so far. We can't tell you too much, but it's fair to say you should plan to have some free time in the city tomorrow evening.

If you haven't downloaded the App yet, there's still time to jump on it! Available on Android and iPhone - just search Sydney Festival in the Apple Store or Android Market and look for the yellow balloon.

In the meantime, here are a couple of snaps from all the uploads so far. Check out more here.

Sydney Festival kicked off with a bang with Festival First Night. Relive the memories or check it out from a different angle with these snaps.

But there's more to the Festival than just First Night. Here's just a couple of venues for starters.

Don't forget to download our App and get amongst it. Who knows you could make a new friend at the Domain in Challenge 5 like these lovely people.

8.11pm And that's a wrap! Thanks to all our panellists, our audience and our prolific tweeters. I'm going to ride my BMX home now, dink a fellow attendee on my pegs and then shower with my housemate. #CollaborativeConsumption everybody!

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8.05pm Jon Dee - We need to inspire people about the future. Electric cars and trucks are going to transform our cities. We need political leadership. We need a JFK who is going to make the call that we're going to fly to the moon!!! What a great note to end on.

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8.04pm Final remarks... Ingrid Just - use hankies instead of tissues!

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8.01pm Retailers need to choose sustainable suppliers. They need to be educated as well as the consumers. Everyone is accountable here. Let's stop enviro-niche. Everything needs to be enviro friendly and affordable.

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7.56pm Ingrid Just from CHOICE is passionate about the "triple bottom line" - People, planet and profit need to be given equal weight as a measure of success. Only then will organisations shift their practices.

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7.53pm Adam has been a vego for 9 days. Maybe because he found out it takes 15,000 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of beef? Yep, for realz. FYI Australians spend $190 billion a year on food. Wowser.

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7.51pm We need to be thinking far more about how industry can work at the bottom of the pyramid. What the poorest people need.

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7.47pm Australia is not keeping abreast on China's use of solar power. In 2020 China will be using the same amount of solar power as they do coal. We're not looking to the future enough. Coal exports will not save our economy.

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7.43pm Apparently only 32% of men and 64% of women wash their hands with soap. And doctors only wash their hands AFTER they've treated a patient. You're all filthy!

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7.42pm @SustainableEvnt tweets: #consus anyone that has been to India will know that one of the main pieces of litter are 1" square washing powder packets...

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7.40pm @benfrombondi tweets: #consus surely 100% renewable energy and 100% recyclable everything is the only goal that will get us thru

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7.37pm Nations that don't have our first world lifestyle want to increase their quality of life. How do we do this in a world that has finite resources? We need sustainable solutions.

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7.35pm Here's what I'm looking at. P.S. Remember to refresh your browser to view the latest posts.

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7.30pm A business has to take responsibility for all its activities. Things need to be sourced, processed and designed sustainably. It shouldn't just come down to the consumer. Retailers should edit what products they sell.

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7.28pm If green products were cheaper and we could use them hassle free (i.e. they worked the same as non-green products) more people would use them. True dat. But why aren't all products green? Let's green up everything that's out there, rather than making "green" niche.

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7.22pm Apparently a woman didn't wash for 40 days for a TV program. At the end of it nobody wanted to talk to her. Oh. How about this then - showering together?! #CollaborativeConsumption

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7.21pm Adam just let us in on a good tip. If you don't wash your hair for 6 weeks. You never have to wash your hair again. IS THIS TRUE? #Hippie.

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7.16pm Apparently car owners only use cars 3% of the time - so why can't we share cars? "Collaborative consumption" is the way to go. E.g. Car share companies like GoGet. Personally, I prefer to ride my BMX.

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7.12pm Do you consume to show off? E.g. Flash cars, shoes, stuff that makes you look cool - even if you don't really need it? This idea is called "conspicuous consumption". Like, I have waaaay too many Casio watches and a fob watch necklace and my iPhone has the time on it too. So unnecessary! Think I'm a conspicuous consumer. Guilty.

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7.06pm Jon Dee, Founder and Managing Director, Do Something! and 2010 NSW Australian of the Year reckons sustainability makes business sense.

The World Wildlife Fund says that to keep eating at the rate we do right now in 2050, we will have to produce more food in the next 40 years than we've produced in the last 8000. Whoa.

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7.00pm Our panellists are on stage now so let's get into it. Tweeters, you can ask questions too using #consus. Folks in here are tweeting:

@bdvz: If we don't change the way we think, we don't change the way we do things @cityofsydney #consus

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Our ace panellists in the green room.

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6:34pm: So tonight we're asking the juicy question: Can Consumption Become Sustainable?

What does this mean exactly? Well we all like to consume stuff - we use shampoo, drink milk, buy cars, drive cars which guzzle petrol, etc. etc. and use stuff up. But can we consume all this without using up all the world's resources and basically stuffing up the planet? Is there a way of doing things sustainably while also enhancing our culture?

Today our panellists are going to explore just that.

The talkfest will be chaired by the super clever and funny broadcaster, author and comedian Adam Spencer, with these guys:

Dr Val Curtis, Director, Hygiene Centre, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Jon Dee, Founder and Managing Director, Do Something! and 2010 NSW Australian of the Year
Ingrid Just, Spokesperson/Head of Media, CHOICE
Gavin Neath, Senior Vice President, Global Communications and Sustainability, Unilever

It's about to start. Please excuse any typos I make along the way!

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6.14pm: Hi it's Mon your touch-typey live blogger gal here. Folks are just starting to roll into City Recital Hall. The action kicks off in 15 mins. Refresh your web page to see updates on the blog.

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Intro:

We are thrilled to welcome Monique Schafter as our live blogger for tonight's Can Consumption Become Sustainable panel discussion.

A Walkley Award winning journalist for her work on Hungry Beast and now a part of the 7:30 team, you can also follow Monique on Twitter @moniqueschafter.

Refresh this blog post from 6:30pm as Monique updates you on the discussion at the event and online.

If you're joining us at the event, or keen to join to put a question to the panel, use the hashtag #consus on Twitter.

If you missed Babel, are kicking yourself for not making it to Nick Zinner's 41 Strings and can't believe you slept on seeing 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, don't miss the last big international theatre event of the Festival - Beautiful Burnout.

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Curious about Thyestes? Director Simon Stone answers a couple of questions.

Why Thyestes, and why now?

This is the ur-myth of unstoppable revenge cycles. Tantalus kills his own son Pelops and feeds him to the gods as a test of their omniscience. Pelops gets regurgitated and put back together. When he grows up, he organises the death of a king to marry her daughter, then throws the assassin off a cliff so nobody finds out. He cheats on his hard-earnt wife, leaves her for a young nymph and has an illegitimate son with her. When his wife finds out that he’s planning to grant the bastard child the throne in favour of his sons to her, Atreus and Thyestes, she organises for them to kill their half-brother. They do. They’re exiled. Their mother kills herself. They become kings somewhere else.

Thyestes steals the kingdom from Atreus and sleeps with his wife. Atreus fights a war to win his wife back. Thyestes loses. Atreus invites him for dinner, kills Thyestes’ kids, and in honour of his grandfather feeds them to his brother at a reconciliation feast. Thyestes vomits. He goes mad. He thinks raping his own daughter will solve the problem, so he does. His daughter, Pelopia, doesn’t know she’s been raped by her own father because it’s dark. A few years later she meets Atreus and marries him. Their son, Aegisthus, is raised as Atreus’ son. When he comes of age, his mother gives him the sword she stole from her rapist that dark night and tells him if he finds the owner he’ll find out who his real father is. Aegisthus finds Thyestes. He finds out how evil Atreus has been. He goes back and kills his adoptive father.

A few years later Agamemnon, Atreus’ son and Aegisthus’ adoptive brother/cousin, has come back from a war Menelaus, the other adoptive brother/cousin, has waged on Troy. Agamemnon’s killed his and his wife Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphegenia on an island where the wind stopped blowing, as a sacrifice to get the wind to start blowing again and the battle-ships moving in pursuit of Menelaus’ wife Helen (yes, another stolen wife). Anyway, Agamemnon has got back home to discover Aegisthus has been sleeping with his wife Clytemnestra just before he gets killed by the two of them in a bath in revenge for killing his daughter without consulting his wife first.

A few years pass. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s son Orestes comes back from overseas. He gets together with his sister Electra to organise their mother’s death. Orestes kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. He gets chased around the world by some Furies. He’s hunted to Athens, where Athena puts together a jury of Athenians to try him. Apollo is the defence attorney. Orestes’ gets off, because killing a husband is worse than killing a mother. The curse of the House of Atreus, set in motion by Tantalus, has been lifted and the myth ends there.

Who wouldn’t want to do a play about that? Seneca’s play Thyestes deals just with the events surrounding the reconciliation feast. Our play deals with the myth from Atreus’ and Thyestes’ murder of their illegitimate brother until Aegisthus’ murder of Atreus. There’s already a famous play by Aeschylus about the next bit. It was the first play with dialogue in it. We might do a version of that one day.

How did audiences respond to the work in Melbourne, and what do you expect Sydney-siders will think?

Most of them enjoyed it. I have no idea whether Sydney audiences will be the same. I’ve learnt not to try to predict such things. But I really hope everyone has a great time.

This production is staged in the modern world. Can you tell us what an original production of the show may have looked like?

An original production of Seneca’s play? A few of people facing the audiences in robes and masks speaking long soliloquies. Some swords. Some spit roast. That kind of thing. The original production of our play looked very similar to what the one at Carriageworks will look like, except a few square metres smaller.

You co-wrote the work with Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan and Mark Winter. Tell us about the development and rehearsal process.

We ate a lot of grapefruit and pistachios and drank a lot of mineral water. We wrote all over several walls until we had a synopsis for our version. We read a lot of wiki articles about psychopathic tyrants. We improvised versions of scenarios, built texts based on those improvisations, improvised on those etc. until we had a reliable blueprint for the show. The actors still improvise every night.

The most important thing in the performance style is that the conversations seem natural, so writing the text with the people who are going to perform it was indispensible. Currency are publishing the text, so we created a kind of aggregate script that represented a typical show. But, given the usual level of divergence from the script by the actors in any given show, it would be peculiar to see someone else put on the show… I’m not sure it would work. Maybe it would.

We’re told you choreographed the dance? Who’s your inspiration?

Mark and I workshopped it. The dance that we rehearsed was to Say My Name by Destiny’s Child but then the rights were difficult to get and it ended up being Mary J Blige. But Beyonce is a massive inspiration for Mark and me. She’s an unbelievable mover. We wanted Mark to have a sexiness like hers. The other inspiration for me was Mark himself. He’s hot. He has a great body. I made it do things that made him hotter. And funny too. Funny is sexy.

You can catch Thyestes at Carriageworks from January 18 - February 19. Presented by Sydney Festival and Belvoir in association with Carriageworks.

 The photos are in, check it out, it's Festival First Night in pictures! 

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We are so excited to share with you a brand new project we've been working on with the University of Sydney - the Festival Dashboard. We've teamed up with some of their best and brightest coders, developers, designers, statisticians and marketeers to look at all the data that comes out of putting on a Festival and finding the fun bits. So what's it do? Here's a guided tour....

At the very top of the page, see which Festival shows are the most talked about online. It's all about who's got the Twitter love and the Facebook likes. Manu Chao and Norman Jay were neck and neck after Festival First Night, but Manu's overtaken since his Enmore show and now Babel's creeping up on both of them! Who'll be next?

Scroll down a bit and you've got the Festival through your eyes - as uploaded via our app. There's submissions for our challenges and plenty of photos from out and about. Upload yours to see it here.

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Here's the map and schedule in PDF and JPEG for easy access on the go! See you out there.

Click here to download:

ffn_map_2012_FA.pdf (3.4 MB)

Click here to download:

FFN_SCHEDULE_2012_LOGOS_FA.pdf (1.97 MB)

Have you been playing along to the treasure hunt in the Festival App? You all did brilliantly with your secret Sydney tip, with hundreds of amazing picnic recommendations that you can read here and here.

Challenge #3 has just been released, asking you to don your Masterchef hat and design your ideal Fast Festival Feast if you opened a restaurant. There's some great responses so far that we've listed below (they're making us hungry!), but first, our friends at El Capo and Green Room Lounge have joined the party, with a Festival inspired recipe and cocktail. Enjoy!

Ingredients:
1 fillet of kingfish, bones removed
6 dried habanero chilies
250ml cold water
1/2 bunch coriander finely chopped
1 red onion thinly sliced
3 tablespoons hot water
sugar
salt
juice of 5 limes
½ cup black quinoa

Recipe:

Dice the fillet of Kingfish into neat small cubes. Set aside and keep covered in fridge.

In a saucepan, bring the habanero chilies to the boil in 250ml cold water. Once boiled, set aside and let them infuse for 30 minutes. Strain the habanero and reserve the infusion (the tea).

Thinly slice the red onion, add 3 tablespoons of hot water, a pinch of sugar salt and the juice of 2 limes.  Let this sit for 1/2 an hour.

Boil the black quinoa for 15 minutes in a saucepan with salt until tender, let it completely cool then lightly fry in vegetable oil until crunchy.

In a bowl combine the fish, the juice of 3 limes, the pickled onion, coriander and let sit for 1 minute.

To serve, put 3 tablespoons of habanero tea in a small bowl and rest the ceviche on top. Add the crunchy quinoa and serve immediately.

And from The Green Room Lounge, we present, El Clandestino! A Manu Chao inspired cocktail!

30ml cachaca
20ml Pama Pomegranate liqueur
15ml lemon juice
Barspoon of sugar syrup
30ml pink grapefruit juice
2 dashes orange bitters

Serve in a wine glass with a salted rim.

Now the Ultimate Sydney Dish - brought to you by the wonderful treasure hunters of the Sydney Festival App:

Oysters with a Thai twist and prawn sandwiches on fancy bread with homemade mayo - all portable ... Don't want to miss anything! - Katie 

Butterflied Chilli Prawn wonton for entree, lemongrass pork for entree and mango pancakes for dessert.

Herb crumbed chicken served on a salad of spinach and semi-dried tomatoes with feta and ranch dressing

I would serve Spanish specialities, Tapas and of course plenty of Sangria 

Burgers, rissoles, BBQ chicken kebabs, satay chicken kebabs, mixed fish kebabs, BBQ Moroccan sole, steak, lamb chop, coleslaw, potato salad

Thai fish cakes, Angus steak served with Pom noisettes, Naan bread, fried ice cream, followed by a shot of sambucca - Lilia

Mushrooms stuffed with feta, pine nuts, breadcrumbs & parsley. Atlantic salmon, mini potato bake & salsa verde and choc brownies!

It's gotta be a Spag Bol! Just like your mother makes it!

Chopped herring with lavash bread, Crispy skin Atlantic Salmon, steamed snow peas and mashed sweet potato, Green apple sorbet.

Summer Prawns! Super easy! A bunch of de-shelled prawns on a bed of iceberg lettuce smothered in thousand island dressing. Yum - Sam.